Is surprise box-office hit Iron Lung the future of'video game films'? The YouTube gaming star's weird and divisive adaptation of his obscure horror film is a game within a film about a game - and hints at new directions for storytelling Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? S omething weird struck me early on while watching the movie Iron Lung, which has so far taken $32m at the box office, despite being a grungy low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an independent video game few people outside of the horror gaming community have even heard of. Set after a galactic apocalypse, it follows a convict who must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he's looking for relics that may prove vital for scientific research, but what he finds is much more ghastly.

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons. In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align. Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr.

What will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI's potential impact on the film industry, it made the following points: Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting. Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding. Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. "Citizen Kane" has lost its edge. The 1941 movie directed by Orson Welles is known as one of the best films in history, and until very recently, held a 100% Fresh score on popular movie review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. However, the website recently added an 80-year-old review of the movie to its already-compiled collection that dropped the score to 99%.

I don't think the future of VR looks like video games; I don't think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives. It's the most amazing afternoon you've ever had. For one person, it might be what we call a rom-com, for another it might be an action movie. For another, it might be something we don't have a movie genre preexisting for. It might be just exploring.