Movies
Spielberg's Alien Opus Is Eating Toy Story's Lunch
Disclosure Day held at #2 ten days after opening. An adult original sci-fi is quietly making the case that theatrical isn't just a sequel business.
The CrossBinge Desk · 3 min read
Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day opened June 12 at #1 with $44 million domestic and $93.9 million globally. That is his biggest opening weekend ever for an original, non-franchise film. It is also, at this point in the industry's history, a…
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New This Week
1
The Scandal
TV
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2
Grand Theft Auto VI
Game
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3
Resident Evil
Movie
▲ up 100%
4
Fable
Game
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5
The Mongoose
Movie
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Cover Story / The Long Read
Twenty Billion Dollars to Prove That Weird Games Don't Fit the Spreadsheet
The argument Microsoft made for five years was seductive: own everything, fund everything, let creative risk bloom inside a subscription model that spreads the cost across millions of subscribers. It was, in theory, the best deal weird games had ever…
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More this week
Television
House of the Dragon Is Back, and the Dragon War Is Finally Here
Season 3 opens on the Battle of the Gullet. The spectacle is real. The cultural stranglehold is another question.
Games
3 Million Copies Sold, Still in the Red: 007 First Light Is the AAA Crisis in One Number
IO Interactive's Bond game is Denmark's most expensive entertainment product ever, and it hasn't broken even yet. That should alarm everyone.
Books
A 73-Year-Old Debut Novelist Just Won the Women's Prize. The Letter Format Did It.
Virginia Evans took the Bessie with an epistolary novel narrated by a septuagenarian, beating Susan Choi and Lily King. That is not a fluke result.
Books
Andrew Sean Greer Returns With a Tuscan Comedy That Earns Its Expectations
Villa Coco pairs a young American archivist with a 92-year-old baronessa in a crumbling Tuscan villa. It is exactly the kind of premise Greer does best, which is either a promise or a trap.
Music
Taylor Swift Made Pixar History. The Song Helped, But the Machine Did Most of the Work.
I Knew It, I Knew You is Swift's 15th Hot 100 No. 1 and the first chart-topper ever to come out of a Pixar film. The record is real. So is the question of what it tells us about the song versus the ecosystem around her.
Music
Chloe Needed a Producer Who Wouldn't Flinch. She Found One.
Timbaland's fingerprints are all over Resurrection, and that is exactly the point. The question is whether borrowing his authority is the same as building her own.
Television
Sam Worthington Anchors Netflix's Latest Coben Thriller, and It's Exactly What You Expect
I Will Find You is competent, propulsive, and almost entirely forgettable. That might be enough.
Games
Before the Lights Go Out: The Best Games from the Studios Xbox Is Closing
Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games made some of the most distinctive games of the past two decades. Here is what to play while you still can.
Cross-media
The Coben Machine
Six series. A seventh just dropped. Harlan Coben has handed Netflix the most reliable binge-thriller pipeline on the platform, built on a single repeating formula. The question is whether that reliability is a comfort or a trap.
From the archive
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