Over the long weekend, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos got a bit of a roasting for telling the New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Barbie and Oppenheimer, whose combined global box office was 2.4 billion, "would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix." It's easy to chuckle at Sarandos' comments, as it was when Zack Snyder told Joe Rogan that his movie Rebel Moon--Part One: A Child of Fire pulled in more viewers than Greta Gerwig's theatrical smash. But as Sarandos' interview was being mocked around the internet, movie theaters were experiencing their worst Memorial Day weekend in decades, led, just barely, by an underwhelming start for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Little more than a week after the prequel to the beloved Mad Max: Fury Road debuted to awestruck reviews at Cannes, the film edged out Garfield to win the weekend with a four-day haul of 32 million at the domestic box office, which was a far less robust showing than industry experts had predicted, and well short of its predecessor's 45 million opening. Meanwhile, according to Netflix's figures, more than 28 million viewers worldwide celebrated the holiday by firing up Atlas, in which Jennifer Lopez is a scientist who defends Earth from annihilation by a terrorist artificial intelligence played by Simu Liu. Common sense, and possibly even Ted Sarandos, will tell you that people don't watch Netflix's content the way they watch a movie like Barbie in a theater--or even the way they'll watch Barbie when it turns up on Netflix.

"The language I've invented is pronounced with the same phonetics as Latin," explained Justin Harlan, my 21-year-old student. He was doing a presentation on his video game Ordenai, which was so outstanding that it left my boisterous class speechless. This was in the fall of 2019, my first semester teaching Creative Writing for Video Gamers at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) in Southfield, Michigan. This was a class I created, with the help of other faculty, and a prerequisite for those majoring in video game design. Awestruck at the scope of Harlan's game, I noticed several elements readily found in classic literature that were intimately woven into his story.

If you get an invite to Stanley Kubrick's house, never refuse. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the University of Arts and the Kubrick family to an intimate evening in Harpenden to celebrate the launch of Thames & Hudson's book Artificial Intelligence: The Vision Behind The Film. I went to take a picture but was swiftly reprimanded. Oh, the irony of being in the house of one of cinema's greatest directors but unable to take a photo -- Kubrick may be dead, but the air of secrecy still lingers thick. I made my way down a grand, glass-floored corridor and entered his red walled library, packed full of medical tomes, history books, sci fi novels and a smattering of awards.