Captain's Log: The Next Trek Movie Puts Starfleet Itself on Trial
While promoting their new film "Mayday" this month, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein finally described what their untitled Star Trek movie actually is: a near-real-time institutional thriller in the mold of "Training Day" and "Crimson Tide," built around the question of what happens when Starfleet itself isn't the good guy in the room. No release date, no returning cast — just a genuinely unsettling premise.
Star Wars' Biggest Box Office Flop Just Beat Avengers: Infinity War on Disney+
The Mandalorian and Grogu closed its theatrical run as the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever made. Eight days after landing on Disney+, it's the #1 movie on the platform worldwide, sitting ahead of Avengers: Infinity War on FlixPatrol's charts in 70 countries. Box office isn't the whole story anymore, and this is the cleanest proof of that this franchise has produced in years.
Captain's Log: Star Trek: Year One Is Still Waiting on Paramount Skydance
A new 60th-anniversary interview with Akiva Goldsman about Star Trek's future doesn't mention Star Trek: Year One once — and that omission is worth noticing. Six months after co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers confirmed the Paul Wesley Kirk prequel had reached Paramount Skydance for review, there's still no public update on where it stands. The pitch itself remains one of the most promising ideas Trek has had in years.
Star Wars Is Finally Coming to IMAX 70mm — 50 Years Late
Star Wars is heading to IMAX 70mm film for the first time in its history — twice, in the same window. A restored A New Hope returns to theaters February 19, 2027 for its 50th anniversary, and Star Wars: Starfighter debuts in the format three months later, shot on IMAX-certified cameras from the ground up.
Three Gates, One Chart: Atlantis, SG-1, and Universe Just Swept MGM+ at Once
Three months after Amazon shelved Martin Gero's Stargate revival for supposedly being too niche, FlixPatrol data shows Stargate Atlantis, SG-1, and Universe holding three of the top six spots on MGM+ worldwide — at the same time. Chevron seven may not be locked, but the fanbase clearly never left.
Captain's Log: Before He Ever Gave That Order, Kirk Refused It
This week's Strange New Worlds has a young Lt. Cmdr. Kirk get thrown off his own bridge for refusing to carry out General Order 24 — the same planet-killing command Kirk himself will threaten to use, successfully, fifty-nine years ago in the original series. That's not a coincidence. That's the whole character laid bare.
John Williams, 94, Made a Surprise Return to Conduct the Imperial March
John Williams wasn't on the bill. At 94, in a wheelchair, making his first public conducting appearance since February 2024, he walked out anyway at the Hollywood Bowl's tribute to his own career and picked up the baton one more time — for the Imperial March. Thousands of lightsabers lit up the amphitheater before he'd conducted a single note.
Twenty Years Late: Stargate Worlds, the MMO That Never Launched, Is Finally Playable
Stargate Worlds was supposed to launch in 2010. Then its studio collapsed, and the game vanished into the pile of great Stargate ideas that never made it to release. Sixteen years later, a volunteer team called The Fifth Race has done what MGM, Amazon, and every publisher in between couldn't be bothered to: they finished it.
Captain's Log: 934 Hands, One Salute — Star Trek Just Broke a World Record for Turning 60
On Star Trek Day, London's Science Museum gathered 934 fans to hold the Vulcan salute for a full minute and set a new Guinness World Record. It's a small, strange, perfect way to mark sixty years of a franchise that was never really about starships.
Star Wars Finally Wrote a Horror Novel, and Vader Is the Monster
Random House quietly published Star Wars' first dedicated horror novel on September 1 — Hiding from the Dark by Kiersten White, a middle-grade book that casts Darth Vader as the thing hunting a little girl through the dark. It's a small release with a genuinely bold premise: Star Wars finally admitting its scariest villain was always built for this genre.
Rey's Movie Might Not Be Dead After All — Here's the Actual Update
Two weeks after Rey's New Jedi Order movie quietly vanished from Disney's release calendar, a fresh Production Weekly listing has both that film and Dave Filoni's own untitled MandoVerse-culmination project showing up in active pre-production tracking. Take it as a genuine sign of life — but not, yet, as a greenlight.
The Petition Just Hit 120,000 — And a Very Unconfirmed Rumor Has the Fandom Holding Its Breath
The #SaveStargate petition crossed 120,000 signatures this week, with organizers taking the campaign straight into DragonCon's crowds in Atlanta. And now there's a rumor floating around — thin, unconfirmed, and worth exactly the grain of salt it comes with — that Amazon might not be as done with this as it's pretending to be.
Captain's Log: The Eve of Sixty Years Since "The Man Trap" First Aired
September 8, 1966 to September 8, 2026 — sixty years, arriving tomorrow — and the franchise is marking it with a detail almost too poetic to be planned: the Autry Museum in Los Angeles is screening the very first episode back-to-back with this season's Strange New Worlds, on the same screen, the same night. That's the whole thesis of this column in one double feature.
The Best-Reviewed Star Wars Game in Years Furloughed 80% of Its Studio Before Launch
Five days after I called Star Wars: Zero Company's critical reception a rare happy ending for this franchise's gaming track record, the actual story got darker. Up to 80% of developer Bit Reactor's staff were furloughed in the weeks before launch, and a co-founder's ownership lawsuit alleges most employees were furloughed while contractors were simply let go outright.
By the Numbers: Two of the Weekend's Top Eleven Were Reruns — Here's What Old Movies Actually Earn
Cars and Akira took $8.77 million out of theaters over the September 4-6 weekend, nearly 10% of the entire box office, while Lionsgate ran all five Hunger Games films in five nights and reported nothing at all. Let me show you what the re-release math actually looks like -- and why the ticket is really the trailer.
Your Weekend Binge Guide: Four Shows Drop in Four Days, and Only One Is Actually Bingeable
Collision, The Drop, The Paper season 2 and Crew Girl all land between Monday and Thursday — and every one of them uses a different release model. Thirty-nine episodes at telenovela pace, eight weekly, ten at once, and one clean 5h52m binge. Here is the episode math and where your actual free hours should go.
Onslaught Stumbled and Cars Came Roaring Back — And Friday Is About to Reset the Whole Board
Nothing new opens wide until Friday, which makes the week of September 7 a catch-up week: By Any Means, Onslaught and a 20th-anniversary Cars are all still playing from Friday's drop. Then streaming takes over midweek with the Snowfall spinoff, Netflix's Crew Girl and Prime's The Revolutionaries — before September 11 lands Practical Magic 2, Runner and Paul Greengrass's The Uprising on the same day.

Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass Benched Its Own Stars — And Critics Are Furious
The first fully CG Tom and Jerry feature landed in US theaters on September 4 with a Metacritic score of 24. The complaint from Empire, Variety, The Guardian and The Irish Times is not that it is bad — it is that Tom and Jerry are barely in it. Here is what actually happened, and why “legacy character as mascot” is now a business model.
Vader Just Teamed Up With Doctor Doom, and It Actually Makes Sense
Marvel and Lucasfilm just announced Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles, a five-issue crossover written by Kevin Smith that puts Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie alongside the Avengers — with Darth Vader and the Empire teaming up with Doctor Doom on the other side. It's the first true crossover between the two universes, arriving January 2027 for A New Hope's 50th anniversary.
Captain's Log: Strange New Worlds Just Fixed a 37-Year-Old Casting Fight
This week's Strange New Worlds episode let Ethan Peck play both Spock and a twisted double of his half-brother Sybok — quietly answering a casting argument from Star Trek V that Leonard Nimoy lost in 1989. Some ideas just need the right vehicle to finally work.
End of an Era: LEGO Is Finally Retiring the UCS Millennium Falcon
LEGO is retiring ten fan-favorite Star Wars sets by the end of 2026, and the headliner is the one every serious builder has been bracing for: the UCS Millennium Falcon, gone after a nine-year run. It's leaving alongside a Venator cruiser, a UCS TIE Interceptor, Jabba's Sail Barge — and an Andor-based U-Wing that barely made it a year on shelves.
"Really?? Do They?": Michael Shanks Isn't Letting Amazon Forget What It Cancelled
Three months after killing its Stargate revival for lacking "broad appeal," Amazon told the Edinburgh TV Festival it would "welcome any conversations" about picking up Doctor Who. Michael Shanks had exactly four words for that, and they're the most #SaveStargate thing anyone's said all summer.

Captain's Log: Twenty-Five Years Since Broken Bow — Why Enterprise Still Deserved Better
This month marks 25 years since Star Trek: Enterprise premiered on UPN, and the show still gets treated like the franchise's awkward younger sibling. It shouldn't. Revisit the Xindi arc with fresh eyes and you'll find one of Trek's most ambitious, most misunderstood runs.
The Hype Was Justified: Star Wars Zero Company Actually Delivered
Star Wars: Zero Company launched August 27 to the kind of reviews this franchise's games almost never get anymore — 88 on OpenCritic, 91% of critics recommending it, comparisons flying to Rogue One and KOTOR. Four months after I called the pitch 'exactly what we need,' Bit Reactor actually delivered it.
Aboard the Argo: We Finally Know What Amazon's Cancelled Stargate Actually Was
Three months of silence, and it took a hotel ballroom in Birmingham to break it. At Starfury: Ascension 2, Michael Shanks and David Read laid out what the dead Amazon series was actually going to be — a parallel-universe Daniel Jackson, a ship called the Argo, and a version of Stargate that finally sounds like it deserved the fight fans have been putting up for it.
Captain's Log: Sixty Years to the Day — How the Whole Planet Is Celebrating September 8
Star Trek Day lands on its actual 60th anniversary this year, and Paramount isn't treating it like a marketing bullet point — four restored films back in theaters, TOS episodes on the big screen for the first time ever, a Guinness World Record attempt for the Vulcan salute, and a new season for the franchise's youngest audience yet. Here's the full week, laid out.

Captain's Log: Kate Mulgrew on the Weight of Being First — Janeway at 60
In a new 60th-anniversary interview, Kate Mulgrew reflects on what it actually cost and meant to become Star Trek's first female captain — and on the young women in STEM who tell her, decades later, that Janeway is the reason they're in the room. It's worth sitting with what that first season really required of her.
The Man Who Made the AT-AT Walk Just Closed His Studio
Phil Tippett — the stop-motion legend who brought the AT-AT walkers to life in The Empire Strikes Back and animated the Holochess game aboard the Millennium Falcon — just closed the Berkeley studio that bore his name for 35 years. A three-day liquidation auction wrapped August 30, selling off decades of props and models to the highest bidder.

Captain's Log: Holly Hunter Says the Quiet Part Out Loud — "The Definition of Star Trek Is Woke"
In a new interview, Holly Hunter reflects on Starfleet Academy's cancellation, the backlash over its diverse cast, and William Shatner's blunt response to the critics. It's a fight Star Trek has been having with itself since 1968 — and it's worth remembering who won it then.