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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was James Gunn’s latest and perhaps last work within the MCU, and it was an absolute blast. Warner Bros. Discovery subsequently hired James Gunn to help the company revive its DC cinematic universe, which left fans wondering whether the Guardians movies will continue and what exactly happened to the team following the ending of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Most specifically, the fans want to know what will happen to Star-Lord, now that he has left the guardians and returned to Earth.

Before we dive into what could happen in future narratives, let’s explore exactly why Peter has left the Guardians and went back to Earth to spend time with his grandfather. We promise it will make sense. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has its fair share of heartbreaking moments, and Peter Quill losing Gamora was one of them. Later on, he found Gamora again, but that was a whole different variant of Gamora, so he had his heart broken. Once again.

Despite all the humor and shenanigans surrounding Star-Lord, life wasn’t actually kind to Quill. He witnessed his mother dying right in front of him; he was kidnapped by Ravagers, who also behaved unkindly towards him, until Yondu, the leader of the Ravagers, decided to begrudgingly show Peter affection. He later left the Ravagers, and things started to look better for the Star-Lord, as he found friends in the most unlikely of places — a galactic prison — leading to the formation of the Guardians of the Galaxy team.

But then he got to meet his dad, Ego the Living Planet, who sought to use Quill as a battery to power his own expansion throughout the universe. If that alone wasn’t bad, Peter found out that Ego was the very source of the tumor that killed his mom, and upon defying his father, Ego tried to kill him as well. Fortunately, that didn’t work, and right when the Guardians saved the universe from one evil tyrant, another emerged. Of course we’re talking about Thanos, who deleted half of the population in the entire universe with a snap of his fingers, including Quill.

Upon coming back to life, courtesy of Iron Man (a scene we like to call “when grown people cried”), Peter learned that Gamora hasn’t returned, since she didn’t die in the Snap. He eventually found a version of her that’s now rolling with the Ravagers. However, that’s not the Gamora he fell in love with but a variant who doesn’t want him and doesn’t even want to know who he is. Then Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 happened, and both Rocket and Quill nearly died.

At the end of the movie, Peter realizes that he needs a break after experiencing the trauma of meeting and clashing with his father, failing to stop Thanos, losing Gamora, and almost losing Rocket. So, he decides to go back to Earth and try to make some new, better memories of his homeworld and spend time with whatever family he might still have left. As it turns out, his grandfather is still alive. This prompted fans to question what will happen to Quill now that he has returned to Earth. Is it time to meet the new Star-Lord?

Marvel’s strategy of introducing new characters to replace older ones, seen notably with the original Avengers, raises further questions about the original Star-Lord’s longevity in the MCU timeline. Well, as it turns out, the post-credits scene at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 offers some insight into the future of Star-Lord, as it hints (it actually outright announces) towards a possible “Legendary Star-Lord” movie, suggesting a future storyline in which Quill navigates Earth’s environment.

Chris Pratt, the actor portraying the iconic Star-Lord, has already confirmed that he would return to the role and the franchise even without Gunn being involved, considering that his character still hasn’t totally worked out his issues by the end of GotG Vol. 3, so that movie was hardly a definitive send-off. This, in combination with the post-credits announcement, raises the question of whether Pratt would return as Quill in a possible fourth Guardians movie or completely separate cinematic releases.

The only two major releases we have lined up right now are Avengers: Secret Wars and the movie that’s supposed to be Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. This film has slowed its development following the whole range of issues with the actor portraying the film’s Big Bad, Jonathan Majors. The former could be an interesting idea; with the appearance of Battleworld — a universe comprised of multiple universes — it’s not outside the realm of possibilities for us to meet several different Peter Quills, including the one who just returned to Earth and one who never left.

We might even meet a version of Peter Quill, who ended up marrying Gamora, or Kitty Pryde version of the character. Whatever the case may be, the multiversal nature of the upcoming Secret Wars, the whispered-about Nova project (in which Quill would fit perfectly) and the post-credits scene all point towards the fact that we haven’t seen the last of the Star Lord.

Gilbert Flores/Billboard via Getty Images; Prince Williams/WireImage By Elizabeth Ayoola ·

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The annual Season of the Force event has been taking place at the Disneyland since 2015. Nine years in, this celebration of all things Star Wars continues going strong. This year Season of the Force at Disneyland will run from April 5, 2024, through June 2, 2024. Nerdist and others were invited to preview this year’s Season of the Force offerings at the Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Among them is a return of Hyperspace Mountain, the Star Wars overlay of Space Mountain, plus tons of Star Wars-themed food, beverages, and merchandise. Read on for all the details, young Padawan.

Welcome Star Wars: Ahsoka’s Sabine to Galaxy’s Edge

New characters are wandering around Black Spire Outpost in Galaxy’s Edge starting with Season of the Force, including Star Wars Rebels and Ahsoka hero, Sabine Wren. The Mandalorian-turned-Jedi apprentice will be seen for a limited time wandering the Outer Rim planet, looking for fellow rebels to join the fight. Joining her are a pair of truly adorable BDX droids, straight from the game Jedi: Fallen Order.

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue

The two main highlights of Season of the Force this year are the debut of a new destination for the classic Star Tours attraction. During Season of the Force, park guests will travel to the planet Seatos from Ahsoka. C-3PO will pilot the Starspeeder 1000 through a pack of purrgil, the space whales seen in Ahsoka. Star Tours riders will also now receive transmissions from Din Djarin and Grogu, Cassian Andor, and Ahsoka Tano herself. If you look carefully, you may even see a familiar droid with her.

Fire of the Rising Moons Galaxy’s Edge Fireworks Show

The other highlight is Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge’s new fireworks show, Fire of the Rising Moons, on select nights. It’s a display that finally showcases John Williams’ iconic music along with spectacular fireworks. Fans have long wanted to hear the classic themes from the Star Wars films in Galaxy’s Edge. Now, they’ll be able to experience them as if they were at the Endor celebration in Return of the Jedi.

Season of the Force Food and Beverage Offerings

At Docking Bay 7 at Galaxy’s Edge, folks from Walt Disney Imagineering and Lucasfilm shared details on the Season of the Force limited-time merchandise and food and beverage offerings. New this year is the Celto Slush, a nod to the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. Also new are the Wookiee Parfait, the Watermelon Slush (with a Death Star glow cub), the Fried Chicken Baos, and the Bantha Burger. We can attest to the Wookiee Parfait being especially delicious.

At the Grand Californian Hotel, guests can see a showpiece called the Galactic Creation. It’s made with edible ingredients and shows the Millennium Falcon arriving in Black Spire Outpost. Created by the Disney culinary team, it’s made with 300 pounds of powdered sugar, 80 pounds of crisped rice cereal, 60 pounds of marshmallows, and 100 pounds of dark chocolate.

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Season of the Force Merchandise 2024

This Season of the Force sees the introduction of the all-new Jabba the Hutt popcorn bucket, featuring a Salacious Crumb keychain. Other items include the return of the Millennium Falcon bucket and an abandoned stormtrooper helmet. Additionally, the park has several new Star Wars pins and apparel. These include a new Star Tours hoodie sporting the ride operator’s classic color scheme. You can get a Darth Vader Stainless Steel Tumbler at the Galactic Grill in Tomorrowland. Then at Oga’s Cantina, you can find the Acid Spitter/Orb Sipper.

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As for the changes to Star Tours, we spoke to Tom Fitzgerald, Senior Creative Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering who was fielding questions about Star Tours – The Adventure Continues. Given that Ahsoka only premiered recently, we asked if bringing the purrgil from that series into Star Tours was planned from the start. Here’s what he had to say:

That’s the beauty of having a relationship with Lucasfilm that they can say, “Hey, we think there’s going to be something really exciting for you in this new series. Come have a look.” And so we have a look. We look at the scripts. We start to look at what’s in there. And from our perspective of what do we think would make a great star to our sequence, which might be different than what would be a great sequence in the film or a series. It’s like what would be good with [an] emotional base and our storyline put together. So that’s how we start.

We also asked Tom Fitzgerald about how Imagineering incorporated Cassian Andor as one of the holographic messages in Star Tours—especially given how much more serious his story is than the likes of baby Grogu.

We treated it as a darker moment. So when you do get to see it, you’ll see that he comes out of the shadows and you don’t see the face. And there’s a moment where with the music and everything together, you’re like, “Ooh, is this a friend or a foe?” And then when he takes it down, it’s like, oh, it’s Andor. The music shifts. And so we got to have fun with that. And then Ahsoka, because she knows Artoo, we treated that as friends reuniting. Each one is a slightly different tone just to mix it up and also to keep each one unique. So you feel like when you see each one, oh, they’re all different.

With so many offerings for fans, Season of the Force remains a can’t-miss event for the Star Wars aficionado. If you find yourself in California from April through early June, then be ready to ignite your lightsaber, because you can’t pass up a trip to Disneyland to celebrate the Season of the Force.

The post Season of the Force Brings New STAR WARS Magic to Disneyland appeared first on Nerdist.

In the opening moments of Monkey Man, our protagonists takes a beating and spits out a mouthful of blood before he speaks his first words on screen. It is a bold statement that the story is going to be told mostly through brutality and hallmark visuals than it will be through exposition. Sometimes, this is very effective and compelling. But sometimes, the action and style compensate for the thinness of the story or to bridge gaps in logic it would rather you skip past. However, Dev Patel’s vision is always on display, always slick with environment and care, no matter how bloody it gets.

Though we first truly meet Kid, Dev Patel’s character who I believe never gets a more personal name, in a ring being paid to take a beating, early flashbacks begin to spell out the events that led Kid here. The pacing is well constructed, giving us just enough pieces without the whole bag to show us Kid once had a mother who cared very deeply for him. As more story is revealed as to what happened to Kid when they were, yeah, a kid, his mother and their village, the absolute rage that grown up Kid operates with becomes more and more justified. And, there be rage here.

Fueled by the story told to him by his mother, Kid remembers Hanuman. The monkey who had ambitions to eat the sun but was punished by the gods for it. There isn’t a lot of standout acting, quite honestly, the camera doesn’t really linger on anyone else for too long outside of Kid to make an impact. But Patel is so dialed in as a man consumed with a singular goal, that whether he is hustling drinks to corrupted high rollers taking down legions of bodyguards trying to reach his target, you scarcely want the camera on someone else. Having said that, it does shine a light on how narrow the film can be, from the world it portrays to the characters to themselves. It is one of those films that often deploys character descriptions as names to articulate archetypes in the world.

The fight promoter is named Tiger. The warrior that takes Kid in late in the film is Alpha. The operator of the corrupt establishment that Kid infiltrates is named Queenie. Not all the characters in the film or named this way, but honestly there are probably less than ten characters with more than one line of dialogue in the film anyway, so the point of the archetypes is made. Even if it doesn’t always serve this film in beneficial ways. They are there to add either an obstacle or an aid Kid on their quest for vengeance, and that is often the extent of their usefulness to the film. There is some allusions to bigger things happening outside of Kid’s goal in the movie but the even these are less about the world and more about showing how evil the antagonists are or how righteous and wronged Kid’s community is. There is no real sense that the world is happening outside of this story and things flow in such a way, that you might be justified in thinking the world in the film comes to a complete stop when the credits roll, even though the story is driven by one individual fighting his way up a large singular building.

What cannot be denied is how great Monkey Man looks and flows visually. The city is very alive, articulated by a pickpocket sequence that happens early in the film, where the snatched purse changes hands no less than twelve times through various kids, businesses, and couriers before it reaches its target location. It’s a very immersive way for us to be introduced to the city, the people in it, what their lives look like, and how this particular community operates while getting a whirlwind tour of how the city looks. An immediate stark contrast to when Kid begins serving in the previously mentioned “den of luxury and corruption.” On the street, among the impoverished folks, the sun is shining. It is vibrant and bustling. In the tower, there are dark strobe light aided rooms, techno music blasting and a lot more stagnant people behaving badly. The difference between the two environments is not subtle and the lack of subtly works really well here. That framing doesn’t always show up with more depth as the story progresses, but visually it tells a great story where Kid must navigate both worlds.

This holds once the action kicks up and it is relentless. Patel has commented how difficult the filming of the action scenes was, especially after he suffered some serious injuries on set that altered how many scenes were shot. But he is absolutely up to the task as an action protagonist, which as a black belt in taekwondo, feels appropriate. The action is helped by some bold directorial choices. Most of the time the camera is fixed on Patel in the middle of the shot, but often we are given a first-person perspective, other times the camera zooms and arcs behind Patel. But it never becomes a Shonen anime where you can’t tell exactly what action is happening, even while maintaining how frenetic it is intended to be. The movie also holds one of my favorite training montages to date, that invokes a unique community and environmental involvement as Kid prepares for his third act showdown. It is satisfying, and I would argue one of the more rewatchable parts of the film, up there with some of the big action sequences.

Monkey Man isn’t all action though, and this flexes the strengths and weaknesses of the movie in tandem. As stated in so many mediums, revenge is never a straight line, and Kid’s best laid plans take a massive detour. We get some of the film’s best moments, where Kid is taken in by an outcast community (who somewhat tie into the larger world of the movie, but definitely into its politics). We eventually get the flashback that shows Kid’s full backstory and crystalizes his motivation. The problem is, none of this is surprising or original from the one-man army action movie tropes. There’s a grave wound to the hero. They’re saved by an unlikely community. There’s a big big wrong committed in the backstory where the hero centers themselves. And then the hero lays wasted to everything in the third act. It is a tried and true formula with a unique setting but nothing to improve upon the familiar path.

I would talk about the antagonists, but they are just villains in this movie. Their motivations are either 100% selfish with no nuance or non-existent. They are just bad, bad people that we want Kid to punch into submission. I did appreciate some of the progression of Kid themselves. While vengeance is his only care, he is not immediately a killer. The hesitancy and lack of outright brutality maintains the somewhat insight characterization of Kid. That vanishes…so quickly, however. And once he takes one life, then no lives will be spared.

You can see every bit of passion in the close shots, the fight scenes, and the contemplative moments that Patel puts together. And it is Patel, a passion project worthy of the long production time we’ve heard about. The storytelling is easy to follow without much complexity, and while I’m happy to have movies that aren’t always 150-minute plus epics, it does feel like the movie needed a little more time to flesh out characters with their own stories and not just accessories to Kid’s plight. It isn’t completely an action movie where its best if you turn your brain off, that would be unfair. But it is a movie better enjoyed without trying to put much stock in the non-action aspects because it does the action, so, so well.

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The post Dev Patel’s ‘Monkey Man’ Pulls No Punches and is All Vengeance, All the Time appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.