For more than a decade, blockbuster comic book adaptations reliably clobbered all competition at the box office. Disney and HBO Max built their streaming strategies around intellectual property from Marvel and DC Comics. The studios turned this pulpy source material into a profusion of interconnected films and series that consistently drove ticket sales and subscriptions--until they didn't. Lately, serious superhero fatigue seems to have set in. Comic book movies regularly tank these days, and not just the ones based on second-string characters like Blue Beetle and Madame Web.

The first rumblings came when Diana Prince's metallic boots crossed No Man's Land in 2017's Wonder Woman. The movement gathered steam when Carol Danvers fell through the roof of that Blockbuster two years later. Female-led superhero movies were finally here--and they were about to be huge. Among the many other trends that never really caught on in 2020, the Year of the Female Superhero never quite came to pass. On a different timeline, this year would have begun with Birds of Prey and ended with Angelina Jolie and team of immortal heroes saving the world in Eternals.

Over the past 10 years, thousands of movies have hit the world's multiplexes. It's nearly impossible to watch, let alone review, all of them. Yet, looking back over the past decade, it's easy to recall the ones that left indelible marks. The ones that caused audiences to leave the theater gobsmacked (or heartbroken, or mind-blown). For us at WIRED, this list (in chronological order) represents those movies. Not everything here is a genre film--our specialty--but there are probably more sci-fi, fantasy, and comic-book movies here than on any other best-of roundup.

Over the Top (OTT) content distribution has changed the way video or audio content is consumed and it seems to stay for a while. Consumption of home entertainment via Internet-connected devices has increasingly become the trend for most people. Even though linear TV today continues to offer traditional TV packages along with OTT, viewing habits have shifted towards OTT-only content over the years. Studies suggest that if your platform is easily discoverable, if you have great content, if you offer an intuitive user experience, and if it is reasonably priced, people will subscribe and get hooked onto your OTT service. OTT customer acquisition and retention is quite a challenge, especially in a market with many players that offer original content, that are attractively priced, and that offer consistent user experience.

Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

Baseball games have slowed down because, as players' salaries have increased, the value of each pitch and each swing has increased, as well. When a pitcher gets thirty starts in a season, a hundred pitches each, bucking for a twelve-million-dollar contract, each pitch is worth four thousand dollars. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" cost about two hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and Joss Whedon, its writer and director, appears to have taken his time, too--especially with the script. Whedon has done something similar to what he did in "The Avengers"--namely, to make a film that's in tune with the political zeitgeist as he perceives it. There, it was a post-9/11 revenge fantasy set against a backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.

Hollywood can take almost anything and adapt it into gold. It's common knowledge these days that a movie based on a Marvel comic book can grow into a billion-dollar franchise, and producers have found lucrative source material in everything from theme park rides to toys. But movies based on video games have yet to hit the same stride, despite the fact that the global gaming industry is expected to generate close to 100 billion this year, more than Hollywood itself. The history of failed movie adaptations serves as a cautionary backdrop for "Warcraft," based on the popular Activision Blizzard game series, which will be released in North America June 10. At a time when all things geek are considered mainstream, there's still much uncertainty about whether "Warcraft" will be the one to end the cycle of bad video game movies.