When he got his first glimpse of a movie studio, Orson Welles excitedly proclaimed it "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had." But with a reported budget of more than 300 million, Joe and Anthony Russo's The Electric State makes Welles' train set look like a busted caboose. The most expensive movie in Netflix's history, it's also among the costliest of all time, joining a list that includes the brothers' own Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If the Russos are the most profligate creators in history--their Amazon series Citadel is also one of the most expensive TV shows ever made--they're among the most successful too. And yet for all the money they're making, and all that they're allowed to spend, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much.

If--like Wanda Maximoff--you've been living in your own reality, distant from all things in 2021, you may not have heard about "WandaVision," whose first and only season ended on March 5th. The immensely popular show, from Disney and Marvel Studios, follows Wanda, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, an Eastern European refugee with "chaos magic" powers, and her husband Vision, a synthezoid (android) who died in the events of the Marvel movie "Avengers: Infinity War." Nearly all nine episodes of "WandaVision" depict the pair in what appears to be domestic suburban bliss. Nearly all take plots and visual style from one of the sitcoms that Wanda watched for solace during her bleak wartime youth, from the black and white of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to the faux-reality vibe of "The Office." These anachronistic, self-contained sitcom scenarios fall apart as people from the outside world break in.

Then again, even after 19 films in Disney's superhero universe, it's not as if he's had much strong competition. Aside from the puckish Loki and tragic Killmonger, most Marvel villains have been pretty forgettable. Now, after years of build up (we first caught a glimpse of Thanos in 2012's The Avengers) he finally took center stage in this summer's Avengers: Infinity War. But what's most intriguing about Thanos isn't that he wants to wipe out half of life across the universe -- instead, it's that he's a big purple alien who feels genuine emotion. He cries when he's forced to sacrifice Gamora, his adopted daughter.

We're wrapping up our Google I/O coverage today, but we've also taken a behind-the-scenes look at how the Guardians of the Galaxy got a redesigned ship, a possible due date on the end of Net Neutrality and a robot frolicking in a field. I didn't sign up to take a Turing Test today. While the Duplex AI demo Google showed during I/O was impressive, it creeped many of us out by pretending to be human. On a phone call with apparently unaware restaurant and salon workers, the system peppered its conversation with "umms" and "ahhs" while setting up appointments. That tech might make it more comfortable to talk to, but now Google has confirmed that when it starts testing the feature in Google Assistant this summer, it will let people know they're talking to an automated system. How long does the battery last at full sprint?

If you thought Avengers: Infinity War was the ultimate pop-culture mashup, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has another cameo up its sleeve. Franchise villain Thanos will make a limited appearance in Fortnite: Battle Royale starting May 8th, according to Entertainment Weekly. From the sounds of it, matches will play out like normal. And because average game length is around 20 minutes, it should take considerably less time to see Thanos in-game than it did catching up on the MCU ahead of your first Infinity War viewing. A hundred heroes each with their own movie series players battle it out to be the last one standing, but the difference during this event is that the Infinity Gauntlet resides somewhere on the map.

This week's IRL heads to the theater, where the latest Marvel flick is setting box-office records. Find out how several of our editors felt about it (spoiler-free, although we can't guarantee anything about the comments section below), as well as our thoughts on a few new series from Netflix, Hulu and HBO. It's been quite a while since I watched the original Lost in Space, but something tells me its weird mashup of sixties-style drama and campy sci-fi doesn't hold up too well. When I was a kid devouring as many reruns of the show as possible, I identified with Robbie the Robot, because, well, we had the same name. In the current reboot of the show, currently streaming on Netflix, I connect more with the parents.

Some movies are obvious hits. Like, for example, Avengers: Infinity War, which made a record-breaking $258 million at the domestic box office last weekend, filling seats and the pockets of Marvel Studios parent company Disney. But not every summer--or spring, or fall--blockbuster has the benefit of 10 years and 18 movies of built-up audience goodwill. So while the Mouse House knew they had a potentially earth-shattering hit on their hands well before opening night, other studios trying to catch up have no way of predicting whether their latest attempts to hit big will do so. Machine learning is everywhere, and artificial intelligence is no longer just a Spielberg-Kubrick collaboration.