I missed you, ‘Andor’

Happy Friday. Popculturology is back and refreshed after a week off, and there’s a ton of pop culture news to cover. Thanks, Disney, for both holding Star Wars Celebration and releasing trailers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts* while I was gone.

(If you were wondering, we visited Rochester for the long Easter weekend. I did not get tossed really, really high into the air and pretend I went to space.)

Before we get into this week’s pop culture news, I wanted to talk about Brain Slop. Yes, there’s a new newsletter at The Omnicosm, joining Popculturology and Snackology. Brain Slop is a weekly newsletter, hitting your inbox on Sunday, that’s full of stories about tech, space, dinosaurs, sports and more. If you were wondering whether dire wolves have really been brought back from extinction, this is the newsletter for you.

Brain Slop: It turns out dire wolves were real. And a company now claims to have de-extincted them.

When it comes to bringing animals back from extinction, is close enough good enough?

The OmnicosmBill Kuchman

Sinners scores

Oh man, I need to see Sinners, don’t I? The Ryan Coogler/Michael B. Jordan film crushed it at the box office last weekend, grossing $48 million in North America. That’s a fantastic number for an R-rated, original horror movie — no matter how the weirdos over at Variety are trying to spin it.

It’s a shame that Marvel Studios didn’t give the keys to Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars to Coogler instead of Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, directors who can’t seem to land a creative hit outside of the MCU.

• 📖 Sinners, Coogler and Questions of Ownership (Richard Newby, The Hollywood Reporter): “There’s a larger meta-narrative happening within the context of Sinners as well. Ryan Coogler’s deal with Warner Bros., in which he retains the rights to the film in 25 years, has been the source of much conversation opening weekend, with some insiders calling it dangerous or a potential death knell for studios.”
• 📖 Sinners Proves Audiences Crave Music, Sex, Vampires — and Fresh Ideas (Jason Parham, Wired): “‘It’s already extremely hard to have a successful original horror movie or just any original movie,’ Brett, a former Netflix lawyer who works as a creative executive at Blumhouse, the production company behind M3GAN, Get Out and the Insidious franchise, tells WIRED. ‘If that shit had bombed, original film would have truly gone away.’”
  

The Last of Us did the thing

We were out of town last weekend, so we weren’t able to watch the second episode of The Last of Us’ new season when it aired — but, oh boy, am I aware of what went down. As someone who lives on the Internet, I was never going to avoid the episode’s big spoiler. I also knew that the thing that happened was always going to happen from previously reading up on The Last of Us before it became a TV show.

We’ll catch up with The Last of Us (and The Righteous Gemstones) this weekend. Sometimes that show is just too heavy to decompress with at the end of a weekday — especially when we know what’s in store for us.

Book nook

It’s been a few weeks since I discussed what’s been on my reading list. I’ve been all over the place, from nonfiction like Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space to classic science fiction like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and newer science fiction like Edward Ashton’s The Fourth Consort (I liked his Mickey7 books better) and Martha Wells’ All Systems Red (the basis for Apple TV+’s upcoming Murderbot series).

The book from the past month (year?) that stuck with me the most, though, was Where the Axe Is Buried. If you’ve read Popculturology long enough, you’ve seen me recommend Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction. Where the Axe Is Buried is frightfully prescient of our current moment — while also keeping the flame of hope for the future alive.

STAR WARS

“Why can’t they just leave us in peace?”

Through the first three episodes of its second season, Andor continues to exist on a different level than pretty much every other Star Wars project. It has something to say. It’s timely. And it’s brilliantly crafted.

(If Star Wars news isn’t your thing, scroll down to hit the usual News, Notes & Trailers.)

The third episode of the first batch that dropped this week is something else. While Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor has played a relatively light role over these first three episodes, Genevieve O’Reilly stole the show as we witnessed the world crumble around Mon Mothma as she went through the paces of her daughter’s wedding.

When Popculturology launched way back in November 2022, I asked if Andor was the best live-action Star Wars show. More than two years later, there’s no point in even asking that question. There’s Andor. And then there’s everything else. My only complaint is that Disney is dropping these episodes three at a time instead of letting the season breathe over the course of twelve weeks.