Giant Freakin Robot

It’s still too early to make a call on whether the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm will eventually prove to be a good or bad thing in the long run. Unfortunately, gamers felt a great disturbance in the Force last month when Disney closed the doors on LucasArts and cancelled all its current projects, including the intriguing Star Wars 1313. Now we’ve heard the first details that hint at what the future of Star Wars games will look like. Disney has signed a multi-year deal with Electronic Arts, allowing EA to “develop and publish new Star Wars titles for a core gaming audience, spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres.”

The press release notes that Disney will still be handling development of any games for the mobile/tablet market, which fits with what little they had said about the future of Star Wars gaming prior to the LucasArts dismantling. EA already had a toe in the Star Wars universe courtesy of  BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, which went free-to-play last November. The press release notes that BioWare will continue developing future Star Wars projects, but now DICE (the Battlefield series) and Visceral (Dead Space) will also be developing new Star Wars games.

It’s worth noting that the press release says these future Star Wars games “may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.” So it sounds like we won’t just be getting a string of crappy movie tie-ins, which is good news.

Gremlins is one of the most beloved movie franchises from the ’80s, along with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. A sequel to Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch has been in development since 1990, but we won’t be getting Gremlins 3 after all. Instead, Warner Bros. is working on a remake.

According to Bleeding Cool, Warner Bros. and producer David Katzenberg has hired screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith to pen the script for a Gremlins remake. Seth Grahame-Smith is guy behind the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter best-selling novels (he also wrote the screenplay for the latter’s big-screen adaptation). In the movie world, he also wrote the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows remake and the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot for Chronicle-director Josh Trank. Grahame-Smith has also been attached to a potential Bettlejuice remake with director Tim Burton.

A few months ago, Steven Spielberg was in the final negotiations with Warner Bros. to make a new Gremlins film. An Amblin Entertainment film cannot be remade, sequelized, or rebooted without Steven Spielberg’s participation and clearance. Although it’s unclear how much Spielberg will participate in the Gremlins remake, it seems he is on board with the project.

It’s hard to believe that Star Trek Into Darkness is finally almost here in the States. We’ve been writing about this movie for several years now, and I can’t even speculate how many words we’ve dedicated to dissecting the hints and rumors and rumors of hints. For those of us here at GFR, it seems almost doomed to be anti-climactic, but the early word from overseas has been largely positive, and at this point I’ll buy a ticket just to watch Benedict Cumberbatch chew the scenery. And for the Abrams haters out there, think of it this way: there’s a very good chance that Into Darkness is the last Star Trek movie you’ll ever see Abrams direct. See? Silver lining!

If you couldn’t care less about the latest big-screen Star Trek outing, fear not. There’s still plenty of other sci-fi goodness happening this week. We’ve got new episodes of Defiance, Revolution, Warehouse 13, Doctor Who, and Orphan Black. The Wachowskis and Tom Twyker’s divisive Cloud Atlas hits home video, and it’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it. You may love it, you may hate it, but it will likely provoke a strong reaction one way or another.

Here’s what’s new This Week in Science Fiction!

I don’t know if any of you guys caught the season finale of Community last week, where the writers capped off an awful season by nearly destroying the darkest timeline by bringing the darker characters into the normal world. It’s a good example of the perils of having actors play against themselves via technical wizardry. In Orphan Black, I have to actively remind myself that Tatiana Maslany is the only actress playing these completely different clone characters. And while it’s obvious from scene to scene as the focus switches over from Sarah’s story to Cosima’s story, whenever Maslany shares the screen with herself, it’s a treat to watch and consistently blows my mind.

The best example in “Parts Developed in an Unusual Manner” is the dive diner lunch date between Sarah and the clone-killer Helena, who marvels at the niceness of the restaurant as she pours sugar on top of her Jell-o. Sarah is hard-boiled and no nonsense, while Helena is childlike in her inability to appear normal around grown-ups. She grew up in a Ukranian convent that saved her from abandonment  She’s now under the rather harsh care of whoever Tomas ends up being. He continues trying to convince Helena she is the original, and I’m not sure if it’s just to give her a superiority complex or what.

Instead of going for the ramped-up situational drama that last week’s episode zigged and zagged through, this episode’s pacing is guided by the editing, which stitches together a bunch of smaller scenes that bring everything together in the end. And while there’s a lot of info-dumping and talking, much of it is important information.