Month: June 2020

Enlarge / We'll have to wait a little bit longer for Disney's hotly anticipated live action remake of Mulan (credit: YouTube/Disney)

The murmurs this past week were true: Deadline Hollywood reports that Disney has decided to bump the release date of its live action remake, Mulan, from July 25 to August 21, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to flare up around the world. It is not unexpected: theaters still haven't re-opened in China, with no concrete dates for re-openings in New York and Los Angeles, either. Without those major markets, the financials just don't work.

“While the pandemic has changed our release plans for Mulan and we will continue to be flexible as conditions require, it has not changed our belief in the power of this film and its message of hope and perseverance,” Alan Horn, co-chairman and chief creative officer, and Alan Bergman, co-chairman, The Walt Disney Studios, said in a statement. “Director Niki Caro and our cast and crew have created a beautiful, epic, and moving film that is everything the cinematic experience should be, and that’s where we believe it belongs – on the world stage and the big screen for audiences around the globe to enjoy together.”

As Deadline notes, "The good news here for exhibition is that Disney has a plan to open Mulan in the near future, close to Tenet and not during the holidays or 2021 (or even on Disney+, for that matter)."

The SyFy series Wynonna Earp has trod a rocky road on the way to its fourth season, much to the frustration of its loyal fanbase ("Earpers"). First, the start of S4 production was delayed until late 2019, due to financial troubles at IDW Entertainment. Shooting finally commenced this past January in Alberta, Canada, and was nearly complete when the coronavirus pandemic led to the shutdown of all  film and TV productions. Showrunner Emily Andres and her determined team have nonetheless managed to complete the season, and we now have the first trailer (uncensored, with colorful language fully intact), and an air date: July 26, 2020.

(Some spoilers for first three seasons below.)

The original comic book series created by Beau Smith in 1996 had Wynonna roaming the world hunting down revenants and other demons; the TV series mostly keeps her in her hometown of Purgatory (primarily for budgetary reasons). As I wrote when S3 wrapped way back in October 2018, Wynonna is the the Anti-Buffy: "She's a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, bar-brawling free spirit with a chip on her shoulder. She never even had a shot at being Homecoming Queen in high school."  

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence speaks after leading a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the Department of Health and Human Services on June 26, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Joshua Roberts)

The US logged nearly 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 nationwide Thursday—the highest daily total yet in the course of the pandemic—and many states continue to see an alarming rise in the spread of disease.

Cases have been increasing in 30 states, according to the New York Times’ COVID-19 tracking effort. On Friday, 11 states set their own records for the average number of new cases reported in the past seven days, according to the Washington Post.

Though the rising case counts can sometimes reflect a rise in overall testing, many states are also seeing high and increasing percentages of positive tests—that is, the fraction of test results that come back positive, which is considered a more useful metric for assessing if disease spread is actually increasing. If states increase testing while the spread of COVID-19 stays the same or declines, the fraction of tests coming back positive would gradually decline.

Enlarge / Beyond a Steel Sky, a sequel to a beloved game from the 90s, hit Apple Arcade today. (credit: Apple)

WWDC 2020 has concluded, and that means it's time to glean some insights from all the documentation, sessions, and other materials that Apple released. We're going to do this on a few topics in the coming weeks, but to start, we're looking at the new initiatives and features Apple has announced for game developers on the iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and macOS platforms.

We're starting here in part because this was a red-letter week for gaming on Apple platforms (and also because some of Apple's gaming centric-sessions were among the first scheduled during the week). Some enormous changes are coming, and playing games on Apple devices is going to look markedly different going forward.

The first change we'll go over is a doozy: the transition of the Mac from a PC-centric gaming platform to a mobile-centric one.