DC Universe has canceled the show after a single season, and the news comes after only one episode of the series has aired.
Based on the DC Comics characters created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, the one-hour drama series followed CDC researcher Abby Arcane (Crystal Reed), who returns to her childhood home of Houma, Louisiana, in order to investigate a deadly swamp-borne virus. She develops a surprising bond with scientist Alec Holland, only to have him tragically taken from her. But as powerful forces descend on Houma, intent on exploiting the swamp’s mysterious properties for their own purposes, Abby discovers that the swamp holds mystical secrets, and the potential love of her life may not be dead after all.
Virginia Madsen, Andy Bean, Derek Mears, Henderson Wade, Maria Sten, Jeryl Prescott and Will Patton all also starred.
Mark Verheiden and Gary Dauberman served as writers and executive producers on the series, with James Wan and Michael Clear executive producing via Wan’s Atomic Monster banner. Rob Hackett of Atomic Monster was a co-producer, and Atomic Monster produced the series in association with Warner Bros. Television.
This was not the first time Swamp Thing has come to the small screen. Aside from appearances on various animated DC shows, USA Network previously aired a live-action “Swamp Thing” series for three seasons from 1990-1993. Dick Durock starred in the series, reprising the role he had played in the films “Swamp Thing” and “The Return of Swamp Thing.”
DC Universe’s other shows include “Doom Patrol,” “Young Justice: Outsiders,” and “Titans,” all of which have aired one season to date.
Just before Team Magneto and Team Professor X duke it out in the streets of New York, both factions pursuing the Phoenix-empowered Jean Grey, Xavier begs his old friend to call off the hunt. Fighting won’t solve anything. Blood doesn’t need to be spilled. Mutants need to come together, for the future’s sake. It’s a classic X-Men movie reprise, to which Magneto delivers a frank response.
“There’s always a speech ... and nobody cares.”
He said it, not me.
Dark Phoenix is yet another speech. It’s less a disaster, as word of reshoots and calendar-hopping signaled to devotees, than a let down. Pegged in the post-Avengers: Endgame weeks as the “final battle” of 20th Century Fox’s X-men franchise, the film brings Xavier and his band of crime-fighting mutants to their bleakest moment, dealing with trauma inflicted on one of their own by one of their own. Secrets are unraveled, foes become allies in showdowns between friends, and a series known in the last decade for colorful, comic book camp takes a psychological turn that would shatter expectations if the characters contained even an ounce of depth beyond their genes. In the end, a story about treating “others” as people can’t find a human element for its core characters, 12 movies in.
[Ed. note: the following contains light plot spoilers for Dark Phoenix]
20th Century Fox
From writer-director Simon Kinberg (who takes another crack at the Phoenix saga after adapting it for 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand), Dark Phoenix barely acknowledges the existence of X-Men: Apocalypse as it jumps ahead to the year 1992, a time when mutants and the powerless are living in harmony and the X-Men are celebrated as heroes. So much so that when a nasty space cloud threatens NASA’s Endeavor mission, the president himself rings Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) on the Oval Office X-Phone to request the team’s assistance. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) questions the professor’s judgment: At what point is launching a bunch of twenty-somethings into space child endangerment? Xavier brushes off the condescension: Helping the un-mutated is the only way to find acceptance.
Dark Phoenix tugs at these existential questions in a way the movies haven’t since First Class, and, in the space-set rescue mission that kicks off the movie, mines true spectacle from the inquisition. Mystique knows this is wrong, but she caves, allowing Nightcrawler to jump aboard the ship, Quicksilver to gather the astronauts, Cyclops to patch up the hull of the shuttle (with an energy beam periscope!), and Jean Grey to eventually sacrifice herself to keep the crafts from rupturing under the bombardment of a nasty space cloud. The scene is dangerous, and makes Mystique’s case without endlessly pontificating on the X-Men’s core metaphor. But for most of the movie, we get just that.
There’s always a speech ... and nobody cares.
We experience most of Dark Phoenix through the eyes of a transformed Jean. Through Kinberg’s lens, the alien entity wrapped around the telepath’s genetic makeup becomes a form of empowerment. Phoenix Jean knows what she wants: alcohol, sex, and for Charles Xavier to get out of her goddamn head. The gender politics are messy, but intriguing. There’s enough innuendo in the movie that one could read Jean’s awakening as a carnal evolution that the men in her life aren’t comfortable with. Jean worries about hurting people she loves, then hurts people she loves. Charles doesn’t handle himself well when confronted by his overbearing relationship with his foster student. The movie morphs into chamber drama as the professor drinks his 18th whiskey in a two-hour movie. On-the-nose dialogue and clunky action plotting rip the promising, existential exoskeleton right out from under the movie’s skin. The end credits roll over a husk of what could have been.
20th Century Fox
The highs of Dark Phoenix, and pretty much every X-Men movie, come from the cast, who bend overwrought material to their will. Sophie Turner and Michael Fassbender, technically playing a 62-year-old Magneto, spend a large chunk of the movie hand-gesturing at CG objects. They’re masters at it, with Fassbender delivering a top-five metal-crunching moment in the movie’s climactic set piece. McAvoy clearly tastes the meat of the movie’s opening 30 minutes, delivering those notorious X-speeches in the face of Nicholas Hoult’s Beast, who finally gets to lock horns with his leader.
Lawrence is clearly the “nobody” of Magneto’s battle-ready diss. She sleepwalks through a fourquel that could use her female energy to complicate Jean’s arc, and flexes a contractual superpower over the logic of when we would and wouldn’t see Mystique in full makeup. It’s one of the highest-profile DGAF performances of all time.
On the opposite end of the investment spectrum is Jessica Chastain, as a villain who wants Jean’s nasty space cloud energy so that she can [literally every villain plot], who’s stunted not by personal energy — she nails the Terminator run — but by a patchwork script and a commitment to Hal 9000 monotone. Chastain deserves Fassbender-level wickedness, or at least the Power Rangers wackiness of Oscar Issac in Apocalypse. Instead, her character Vux feels as faceless as her army of CG goons that Storm uses for target practice.
Thanks to the reboot-inverting Days of Future Past, Dark Phoenix wraps up a single continuity that began with 2000’s X-Men. At least on paper. The major flaw in this grimdark tale of identity and sacrifice is that no character carries with them the baggage of the previous installment. The X-verse doesn’t need to be an interwoven narrative like the MCU, but to invest in the Professor X/Magneto/Jean narrative is to understand how each of them got here (see: Logan). Dark Phoenix, which contains multiple flashbacks to scenes earlier in the movie, builds only on itself, when implicitly promising to culminate a 20-year journey.
But Magneto is wrong: people still care about the X-Men, but the people running the show didn’t care about them enough to make this moment momentous.
Is the name "X-Men" outdated? Marvel Studios' Executive Vice President of Production Victoria Alonso thinks so. During an interview about Captain Marvel's home video release, Alonso is asked about the future of the X-Men at Disney and goes on an interesting tangent.
"I don't know where the future is going," Alonso told Nuke the Fridge. "Its funny that people call it the X-Men... there's a lot of female superheroes in that X-Men group; I think it's outdated."
Alonso has worked as a producer on all of Marvel Studios' films, originally handling visual effects but has now grown to oversee the complete production of each film.
"I don't know where it's going to go. They just now have joined," she continued. "They have a movie coming out soon under that banner, their last film. We'll see what time will tell."
"I was so not thinking anything was wrong because I didn't have any symptoms, and she gave me an exam and came around and said, 'Well, I just want you to know, whatever it is it's curable,'" Cross said. "It was like 'What? What are you talking about?'"
Cross is talking about her cancer battle to help destigmatize the disease.
"I know that there are people who are ashamed," she said. "You have cancer. Should you then also feel like ashamed like you did something bad because it took up residence in your anus?"
Her husband, actor Tom Mahoney, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2009.
Doctors now suspect that Cross' cancer and Mahoney's came from the same type of human papillomavirus, known as HPV.
HPV can be transferred through sexual intercourse or skin-to-skin contact and can also cause cancer of the cervix and genitals.
Early immunization can prevent the types of HPV that most commonly cause cancer and Cross said she plans to get their 12-year-old twin daughters vaccinated.
"My girls don't know it, but they're up for their first shot the end of the school year," Cross said.
Cross has completed radiation and chemotherapy and both she and her husband are in remission.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Marcia Cross' first name.
Striking Vipers is the name of one of the three new episodes from season five of Netflix's Black Mirror and, as usual, it is just as bleak as ever about how technology might impact our lives in the near-future.
With a stellar cast featuring Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta in Aquaman, providing some Marvel versus DC excitement), the episode tells quite an engaging story involving a Street Fighter-style video game called Striking Vipers, which just got upgraded with a VR mode if played with the fancy TCKR System, which you plop onto the side of your head.
What grabbed our attention, though, was the box Striking Vipers came in – it's not entirely unlike a Switch game case, and contains a similarly diminutive cartridge (which, it should be said, looks like a hybrid between a Switch game card and a Vita one):
Mackie doesn't lick the cart, so we can't confirm if it has the same bitter coating as Switch game cards, and there's no bulky Labo VR headset needed, either. Instead, the game card slots into the controller on this console, so it seems Google's Stadia didn't take off in this alternate reality. With Google announcing launch plans for its streaming enterprise later today, we wonder if it'll do better in our own timeline.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi's psychedelic Tetris Effect also features in the episode, a game which has unfortunately yet to arrive on Switch, although we've got our fingers crossed it'll appear at some point. We're all aboutTetris 99, of course, but that's hardly a game you can zone out to with a tasty beverage after a hard day at the office.
Let us know if you've seen the episode yet (and what you thought) with a comment below.
"I was so not thinking anything was wrong because I didn't have any symptoms, and she gave me an exam and came around and said, 'Well, I just want you to know, whatever it is it's curable,'" Cross said. "It was like 'What? What are you talking about?'"
Cross is talking about her cancer battle to help destigmatize the disease.
"I know that there are people who are ashamed," she said. "You have cancer. Should you then also feel like ashamed like you did something bad because it took up residence in your anus?"
Her husband, actor Tom Mahoney, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2009.
Doctors now suspect that Cross' cancer and Mahoney's came from the same type of human papillomavirus, known as HPV.
HPV can be transferred through sexual intercourse or skin-to-skin contact and can also cause cancer of the cervix and genitals.
Early immunization can prevent the types of HPV that most commonly cause cancer and Cross said she plans to get their 12-year-old twin daughters vaccinated.
"My girls don't know it, but they're up for their first shot the end of the school year," Cross said.
Cross has completed radiation and chemotherapy and both she and her husband are in remission.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Marcia Cross' first name.
Jenelle Evans' ExReached Out After His Spat with David... She Wasn't Having It!!!
6/6/2019 1:00 AM PDT
EXCLUSIVE
Jenelle Evans' 2nd baby daddy extended an olive branch to her 3rd baby daddy, David Eason, after the men got into a heated dispute outside court -- but they're nowhere near a peace treaty.
Sources connected to the exes tell TMZ ... Nathan Griffith actually reached out to Jenelle on Tuesday after she and David got pissed at him. You'll recall, they called him out for talking to our camera guy. David called Nathan a blabbermouth -- and flipped him off in the process.
We're told Nathan wasn't happy with how things were left as they drove away -- he does share 4-year-old Kaiser with Jenelle -- so he shot her a text to clarify he wasn't trying to do damage by talking to the media, he was just chit-chatting.
Our sources say Jenelle didn't buy it, and thinks Nathan was looking for dirt on her and David's child custody case. BTW, Jenelle got into it with her own mom after Tuesday's court hearing too. Tough family day, for sure.
Back to Nathan though ... we're told he thinks Jenelle and David need to drop their us versus the world attitude, and he told them so.
Seems like his advice is falling on deaf ears -- the Easons are still fighting to regain custody of their 3 children.
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