A new weekend has arrived, and today, you can save on an RTX 5070 graphics card, Apple AirPods 4, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, the Criterion Collection Blu-ray Sale, and more. Check out our top picks for Saturday, July 18, below.

RTX 5070 In Stock at Amazon for $579.99

Steam Machine engineers at Valve have warned the ongoing memory crisis in tech is "still getting worse" as buyers face already exorbitant prices.

Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, two individuals who helped bring the new gaming hardware to life, offered their perspective on how the AI industry has influenced the high cost of RAM during an interview with Bloomberg. In case you thought things were already bad enough, they've got an update: the months ahead aren't looking too good.

"Honestly, it’s still getting worse," Aldehayyat said. "Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."

The Steam Machine launched with a price tag of $1,049 for its base 512GB model alone. Its most expensive option, a 2TB version bundled with a Steam Controller, is a whopping $1428.

Aldehayyat said Valve had expected to run into some trouble when it formally announced the device in November 2025, but not like this. Griffais went as far as to say that Valve has been "building everything we can get our hands on," adding the company has been "limited by memory capacity, for sure."

"We knew there was going to be an issue with sourcing," Aldehayyat said. "But the extent was beyond anything we actually expected."

Part of Valve's time during what has rapidly become a tumultuous period for tech has seen it struggling to keep up with demand for the Steam Deck, too. The Half-Life company also said it 'would love' to make the Steam Machine 'more affordable' but warned that a price drop wouldn't arrive 'any time soon.'

Valve is far from the only company to ring the alarm bells when it comes to the memory crisis from the last few months. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said he expected the RAM shortage to last through 2027. Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney warned in late 2025 that high-end PC gamers will struggle with prices "for several years." As Sony and Microsoft charge ever closer to the release of new next-gen gaming consoles, the former has said it's still deciding when and how to launch the PS6.

For more, you can read about what Griffais had to say about Valve's approach to the RAM shortage during an interview with IGN earlier this year. You can also see what Valve had to say about its relationship with RAM companies.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Paramount Pictures and Activision have confirmed the upcoming Call of Duty movie will take place in its long-running Modern Warfare universe.

The crew behind the upcoming video game-to-movie adaptation revealed the update as part of a Call of Duty in Culture Panel at Fanatics Fest in New York City today (via Variety). Call of Duty movie director and co-writer Peter Berg made an appearance at the event to share the news.

Berg and co-writer Taylor Sheridan's choice to set their Call of Duty movie in the Modern Warfare universe may come as much of a surprise for some fans, but it might finally give us some clues about its yet-to-be-detailed plot. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the first in Activision's first-person shooter series to introduce players to a, well, more modern take on the franchise when it launched in 2007. As it left behind the mid-1900s battlefields established by previous games, it also brought along new characters, such as Soap, Ghost, Captain Price, and series villain Vladimir Makarov.

Director Peter Berg revealed today at @FanaticsFest the @CallOfDutyMovie is set in the Modern Warfare universe.

In theaters June 30, 2028. pic.twitter.com/CpdFX7kI9z

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) July 18, 2026

On the gaming side of things, Modern Warfare has spent the last two decades attempting to reinvent itself across six mainline entries, and even a few remasters. The first three games, which arrived throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, primarily followed Task Force 141 as they embarked on globe-trotting missions, while gaining (and losing) teammates along the way.

Activision and developer Infinity Ward took a break from the somewhat more grounded settings of Modern Warfare through the mid-2010s before delivering a full-fledged reboot with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in 2019. It's expanded on this chapter with returning characters and new stories, with its next entry, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, set to launch for PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X | S October 23, 2026.

Why Paramount and Activision opted to kick off its Call of Duty film ambitions with Modern Warfare instead of something like the Black Ops series, which recently celebrated the release of PlayStation ports for Black Ops 1 and 2, is unclear. Berg also neglected to mention whether his adaptation will retread events players may remember from the games or carve out its own corner of the universe.

The Call of Duty movie has a release date of June 30, 2028. Its plot and cast remain a mystery, for now. While we wait for udpates, you can see what Berg once said about people who play video games.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Spoilers for The Odyssey follow.

The end is the beginning in The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s powerful, claustrophobic take on Homer’s epic, which harkens back to ideas woven throughout his career. It opens with the kind of voiceover-laden montage we’ve come to expect from his conclusions — dating back to The Dark Knight in 2008, and continuing through Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer — where images skip through time, and themes about half-truths, self-deceptions, and the world at large are stated plainly against musical crescendos. Here, it takes the form of Travis Scott’s nameless bard banging his staff against a tabletop while recounting the tale we’re about to see, as spliced scenes of a lonely Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his deception via the Trojan Horse come to the fore.

The Odyssey’s 172-minute runtime feels cut from this cloth as a cinematic epic made largely of impressions and clashing points of view en route to its own nestled climax. It’s both unlike anything Nolan has ever made, and yet the exact film he seemed destined to direct after decades of telling stories in its vein. Homer’s Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, and has had considerable influence on western canon, so it’s no surprise to look back and notice how many of Nolan’s stories are about men making their way home. However, this adaptation is just as much about Nolan imposing his artistic viewpoint on the text; whether or not it’s the best Nolan movie ever made, it’s arguably the most Nolan movie imaginable.

Who Killed the World?

Nolan isn’t a political filmmaker in the bipartisan sense, but his biggest, most visible works are injected with political anxieties. Where The Dark Knight wrestled with the modern U.S. surveillance state, its sloppier sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, housed some ultimately self-defeating economic themes within its grandiose opera. However, his space-faring follow-up, Interstellar, marked a considerable shift in how he expressed his worldview with more abstract and egalitarian concerns about the general state of things (rather than, well, the state).

The tale of one man’s journey home to his daughter, Interstellar’s backdrop is a world ravaged by scarcity and climate catastrophe. The same throughline can be found in Tenet, as both films feature a tension between present and future generations over what becomes of Mother Earth. Nolan isn’t quite the flower child that James Cameron would become with The Abyss and his Avatar trilogy — his form is ultimately one of rickety masculine restraint, as is his dramatic focus — but of late, his subdued sentimentality has been leaking out with more pressure and urgency.

Just as Interstellar and Tenet are twin sci-fi vehicles steeped in fears of being judged by the future, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer are more concrete historical versions of those concerns, as World War II movies struggling with the perception of heroic figures and events. On the one hand, you have Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech — rousing words which Nolan contrasts with death, lost innocence, and looming uncertainty. On the other hand, you have the original sin of the modern world: the atomic bomb, whose maker becomes a haunting canvas for questions of what it means to live with the weight of one’s own actions.

This is the same world, cinematically speaking, into which The Odyssey is birthed. The bomb this time, however, is the hull of a wooden horse, shot with the same curiosity and gradual caution as the Trinity device in Nolan’s biopic. The nuclear chain reaction is the ethical fracture caused by corrupting “Zeus’ law” — smuggling war within a peace offering. It’s a broken contract that forces Odysseus to consider what his actions have wrought for the rest of the world and for generations to come.

The Odyssey may be set three millennia in the past, but it’s among Nolan’s most contemporary works as a tale whose focus may as well be the destruction by, and blowback towards, modern imperialism (that his actors all speak with American accents is a pretty pointed clue). Zeus’ law is charitable kindness, but it’s also divine permission to ransack villages and extract spoils, not unlike the Evangelical fanaticism that has come to define modern U.S. politics and foreign policy.

Nolan seems to view America now much like Ithaca then — as an empire in decline — so his version of Homer’s epic leans into the real historical context of its 12th century BCE setting: the Bronze Age Collapse and the alleged “Sea People” who some speculate may have caused it through their conquests. As a moral darkness spreads through the Mediterranean, characters like Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Telemachus (Tom Holland) speculate about these seafaring plunderers only to later learn that these legends may have been told about their beloved Odysseus and his men.

Although the classic hero has a more upstanding stature in the poem (not to mention the favor of Zeus), Nolan’s more conflicted version is born of a more trepidatious reading that hesitates to glorify a man of twists and turns and military conquests. In fact, this particular interpretation of Odysseus subsequently defines the film’s approach to Greek gods and the supernatural at large, resulting in a magical, mythical film with distinctly human grounding.

A Guilty Homecoming

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, the siege of Troy takes thundering, harrowing form, but its moral underpinnings are distilled to a single admission: “What if he knew exactly what he had done?” Odysseus, in disguise as a beggar, admits this to his wife Penelope upon his return, in a speech whose corresponding flashbacks reveal a surprising layer to Nolan’s adaptation, even though it ought to be the most predictable outcome as yet another movie driven by remorse.

From regret urging Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) to rewrite his own history in Memento, to the slow unraveling of accidental killer Will Dormer (Al Pacino) in Insomnia, to the survivor’s remorse driving Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins, guilt has been a central undercurrent in most of Nolan’s work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Inception, where the dead wife of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) forms an unscratchable itch in his subconscious and manifests as a destructive femme fatale while constructs like freight trains pummel through his subconscious, preventing him from getting home.

Dom, in this sense, forms a prototype for Nolan’s incarnation of Odysseus. Where the poem frames the Greek hero as a man lashed between the whims of several gods — chief among them Athena, who sets both his and Telemachus’ journeys into motion — the movie hints at a wrinkle early on, when Athena (Zendaya) appears as a vision only Odysseus can see. Like Dom’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), she’s a specter — a splinter in his mind driving his actions and inactions alike.

Athena’s true nature eventually comes to light, but first, a divine song from the mythical Sirens forces Odysseus to finally put words to this version of his journey: the idea that, deep down, he may not actually want to go home. As departures from the source material go, this one is particularly fundamental, but the pieces all fall into place. Where Homer tied his hero’s fate to the clashing desires of Zeus and Poseidon, Nolan backgrounds these primary deities in favor of psychological impetus. The gods of Olympus, whether or not they exist here, have their will transposed onto Odysseus’s psyche — one defined not by a single regret, but a multitude of them accumulated across decades.

Zeus is the ego rationalizing his journey and driving him homeward out of a guilt of leaving his family behind. Returning to them is his duty as a father, husband, and king. Poseidon, god of the sprawling ocean, is his cavernous id — his deep-seated fears forcing him to turn elsewhere, if only to avoid losing (or betraying) even more men. He has enough blood on his hands, and enough spirits who bear witness to his journey. And Athena, goddess of wisdom, is the superego, ever negotiating between the two, as Odysseus battles both external and internal forces. Like Mal, Athena is a manifestation of Odysseus’ remorse; she takes her specific form, as it’s revealed, because of an innocent Trojan woman (also Zendaya) who fell victim to Ithacan blades. Her face is practically burned into his mind (alongside the tumbling head of Athena’s defaced statue) as a pair of eyes bearing witness to his worst possible self.

Tying all this guilt together is the movie’s inevitable final image of the Trojan horse keeling over in flame like a once-grand symbol of trust now corrupted and brought to its knees. However, all these ideas wouldn’t be half as impactful if they weren’t also wrapped in some of the most chilling and debonair filmmaking of Nolan’s career.

The Big and the Bold

As the first Hollywood feature shot entirely on 70mm IMAX, The Odyssey takes advantage of its scale through lingering landscape shots that highlight above all else isolation via moments of characters alone on beaches or lost at sea (à la Inception, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and so on). This use of empty, expansive space is almost counterintuitive to such an enormous canvas one can fill in all directions, especially in a film with the scope of a David Lean historical epic, but Nolan’s more recent works are far from obvious in their framing and finish.

Up until The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan’s work with cinematographer Wally Pfister was one of careful blocking and framing, and photochemical washes in primary colors. But ever since collaborating with Hoyte van Hoytema on Interstellar, his films have taken on more visceral hues. His images and surfaces have been rougher and grainier, which suits The Odyssey’s lived-in world and withered spaces. But just as important as the images themselves is how they’re assembled, in this case by Tenet and Oppenheimer editor Jennifer Lame.

Early in Nolan’s career, cutters like Dody Dorn (Memento, Insomnia) and Lee Smith (Batman Begins, Inception) helped him carve out intuitive connective tissue in the form of bursts of memory and sensory input. These sudden audiovisual flickers were jolting interruptions to the flow of their respective films, highlighting the overpowering nature of the characters’ flashbacks and all that troubled them. However, a film like The Odyssey is made largely of these impressionistic pieces, which cut through the edit like knives.

Nolan’s screenplay turns the poem’s many oral retellings into a matryoshka doll narrative, wherein Telemachus hears of a virtuous man, but an amnesiac Odysseus gradually remembers a more complicated, more troubling past, filled with stormy seas as tumultuous as his own inner workings. The film is aesthetically chaotic, cutting between haunting close-ups and physical pandemonium on an enormous scale. Nolan, although he’s been known for non-linear storytelling, has still largely stuck to linear moment-to-moment continuity until now. But upon watching The Odyssey, it’s hard not to recall the lush poetry of filmmakers like Terrence Malick (The New World, A Hidden Life), whose elliptical cutting emphasizes mood and environment above chronology.

The film, by and large, still comes together in the style of a classic Hollywood epic, but it’s peppered with more moments, anecdotes, and disasters that take the form of sensory fragments not unlike the isolated reminiscences from early in Nolan’s career. Here, they’re a more defining tapestry, and they work in tandem with the rougher texture van Hoytema helps create. The result is a film that, although it follows a prototypical adventure, plays out as a series of visceral, piercing memories. This is nothing if not fitting for a tale Nolan frames as a song passed down through rose-tinted recollections concealing a repentant truth, as though he were returning to the source code of western storytelling to see what form it might take today in order to capture the world not as it once was, but as it is and ought to be.

Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM has announced layoffs affecting up to 32 staff just two months after launching Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

The UK-based studio published a statement regarding the changes on its X/Twitter account. It says that, despite releasing its latest game in May to "critical acclaim, its commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size."

"We have served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio," the message said. "Their work has made a lasting difference and left its mark on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and the studio as a whole."

pic.twitter.com/h1JqIYywR5

— ZA/UM Studio (@studiozaum) July 17, 2026

ZA/UM said it will continue to "consult and work with" members of its Workers' Alliance union throughout the "difficult process." The message added that the layoffs will change "the shape of ZA/UM, but not its purpose."

"Our artistic standards remain unchanged: we will persist," it continued. "To anyone currently hiring, please consider the colleagues leaving ZA/UM.

The 2020s have been rough for ZA/UM. Trouble truly began in early October 2022, when multiple key developers – including writer and designer Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art and design lead Aleksander Rostov – were said to have left the studio involuntarily. Just weeks later, it was revealed that Kurvitz had launched a lawsuit against the company, with both he and Rostov alleging Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel of Tütreke OÜ had obtained control of ZA/UM "by fraud." ZA/UM denied these claims while launching their own accusations in a statement sent to Gamesindustry.biz.

As things unwound behind the scenes, a series of spinoff studios made up of former ZA/UM developers have emerged. Dark Math Games and Longdue Games announced their projects, XXX Nightshift and Hopetown, in October 2024, with Summer Eternal revealing itself shortly after.

With years of controversy under its belt, today's layoffs aren't ZA/UM's first. In 2024, it was reported that around 24 employees had been impacted by layoffs. The same update brought word that a standalone Disco Elysium expansion had been canceled.

Disco Elysium won ZA/UM multiple categories at The Game Awards 2019 and earned a 9.6/10 review from IGN at the time of its launch. While Zero Parades: For Dead Spies didn't seem to live up to the high bar set by its predecessor, it still boasts an 83 from critics on Metacritic following its May 21, 2026, launch for PC and PS5. For more on ZA/UM, you can read IGN's breakdown for the full wild story behind what's happened at the studio.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Spoilers for The Odyssey follow.

Zeus’ Law is broken. But who is to punish the guilty for it, who do they owe restitution to, if there is no Zeus?

Before its release, Christopher Nolan revealed to TIME magazine that he’d be taking a more "grounded" approach to the gods and mythical elements of The Odyssey, prompting some debate among purists who argued that this modern lens stripped Homer’s epic of elements essential to the narrative. In fact, Nolan did not cast Zeus, Poseidon, or many major Olympian gods as classic “humanized” deities intervening from Olympus.

“The wonderful thing about cinema…,” Nolan said in the TIME interview, “is that you can take an audience to a place of immersion, feeling close to events like storms, turbulent seas, high winds. You want the audience to be on the boat with them fearing the ocean, fearing the wrath of Poseidon, the way the characters do. That to me is so much more powerful than any individual image you can have [of a god].”

Nolan seems to be saying he was striving to convey an ancient people’s attempt to understand natural phenomena via their construction of the gods. In fact, Zendaya’s Athena overtly says something to the effect of, “What are the gods if not the waves crashing in?” And while the film does place the viewer directly in the perspective of the men and women living in this world (look no further than the interior POV sequence of The Trojan Horse), Nolan’s choice to depict the gods with ambiguity isn’t just cinematically engaging or reflective of a time past; it is essential to his movie working at all.

Put simply: There is no Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without that final Athena reveal.

Inarguably, there are stunning, fantastical elements in the film: giants, monsters, and transformational magic. However, in Nolan’s interpretation, the gods are not gods in the literal sense. Samantha Morton’s Circe rides a delicate line. Certainly, she has the abilities of a sorceress, grotesquely turning men into pigs. But it’s not clear that she is a goddess. And it’s her motivations — the rage she feels towards the soldiers she is sure have, and would, rape and pillage, in addition to her intent to punish and “reveal them for what they are” — that are thematically central to this story. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is doing the same thing to himself throughout the epic — punishing, hiding, and, ultimately, exposing his true nature.

Charlize Theron's Calypso appears less like a true goddess and more like an extraordinarily gorgeous, lonely beach dweller who “helps” Odysseus forget his past sins. Whether this is an act of selfishness or compassion is debatable. It’s likely both. With so much isolation, anyone would be tempted to keep a companion (such as Matt Damon) who’d washed up on their shores. That said, Odysseus is and has been running from what he can’t yet face, and in that sense, Calypso is also a bit of a dealer or, at the very least, an addict’s enabler. He just can’t get enough of those lotus flowers.

Circe says the soldiers deserve a harsh sentence, and Calypso offers a reprieve from guilt in the form of denial. Both of these impulses play out in Odysseus' own psyche through the creation of his “Athena,” which is why the “Not Athena” reveal is a stroke of true genius on the filmmaker's part.

In one of the film’s best sequences, as the film nears its climax, Odysseus confesses his crimes to his faithful wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). While doing so, “Athena” holds his hand. Only we, the audience, discover in a flashback that she was, in fact, not Athena, but a young Trojan woman beheaded alongside Athena’s statue. Unable to face the horror of what he himself had unleashed, Odysseus had mapped the image of the murdered woman onto the vision of the goddess Athena. But it is the human his conscience wants him to acknowledge.

This is because "Zeus' Law" isn't really about affording safe passage and hospitality to strangers because a visitor to your home may be a god in disguise (though that's what the fearful tell themselves). It's about integrity, compassion, and recognizing the absolute dignity and honor of a fellow human being, any human being. If offending a potential god is the only motivation for kindness, then kindness has no value. Nolan knows this. And as much as Odysseus believes in the gods, on some level, he knows this as well. And when he broke that law with the deception of the Trojan Horse, he shattered the very core of what made his civilization one worth living, fighting, and dying for. So his fractured and shamed psyche merged a human girl slaughtered as a result of his actions with the image of Athena's defaced statue.

This was an act of psychological self-protection; he was more comfortable with having defiled the sanctity of a goddess — or at the very least her statue — than he was with having broken such a covenant with his fellow man. And he understood that it wasn't Zeus he was betraying, but himself. When he sets off on that fateful course at the end of the war, going against the advice and the trajectory of the other sailors, knowing it’ll at the very least lengthen the journey, he is running from facing his actions in a physical sense. But it was also his first subconscious act of self-punishment. A judgment he also rendered to the men who followed him.

They’d gone along with Odysseus when he elected to act without thought for consequence — for self and others — driven by the desire to win at all costs and satisfy the greed and revenge of unworthy leaders. This was their collective penance. When Calypso advises Odysseus to “take his punishment” from Poseidon, it’s really a request for him to abandon his forgetting, as Athena also urged, and face himself and what he’d done. To acknowledge that he was the mysterious, barbaric threat from the sea. (Throughout the film, various characters reference the threat of these warriors, who have no honor and threaten to unravel the social compacts that are foundational to Ithaca's way of life.)

When Odysseus is able to see his imagined “Athena” for what she really was, not a goddess steering him, but a girl butchered as a result of his actions (one of far too many), he is, in turn, willing to own who he is, and what he’d done — befouled, perhaps forever, the very values he built his kingdom upon. He was the human who, in desperation to do anything to get home, reduced his home to ruins. Only when he’d full-throatedly confessed and made amends was he able to finally, truly return home. Only then did he emerge as a mature man willing to take his exile, understanding that even decades of punishment could not undo what he did: destroy the world he loved in one brilliant but unthinking choice.

The tragedy is that in becoming a leader worthy of Ithaca, Odysseus also had to leave it. (This self-exile is notably distinct from Homer’s original.)

If the young Trojan woman Zendaya plays had actually been the goddess Athena, directing his path, that would have robbed Odysseus of his full autonomy, humanity, and the depth of his understanding and willingness to be accountable. It would have denied a powerful moment of grace, in which Odysseus can imagine the soul of a human so compassionate that she holds his hand as he tells the story of his part in her murder. And as such, it would undercut everything that makes this movie, Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, resonant, urgent, dramatically satisfying, and the culmination of his life’s work.

Christopher Nolan has said fans won’t see his next movie for “at least” three years, after directing The Odyssey pushed him to his limits.

Nolan has established a pretty reliable cadence of releasing a movie every three years since Interstellar came out in 2014. The Odyssey arrives three years after his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, which itself released three years after Tenet came out in 2020. Tenet arrived three years after Dunkirk, which came out three years after Interstellar.

Before Intersteller, Nolan was releasing movies on a more or less two-year cadence, with The Prestige, Inception, and the Dark Knight Trilogy all coming out within a prolific seven-year period.

Christopher Nolan filmography

• 1998 Following
• 2000 Memento
• 2002 Insomnia
• 2005 Batman Begins
• 2006 The Prestige
• 2008 The Dark Knight
• 2010 Inception
• 2012 The Dark Knight Rises
• 2014 Interstellar
• 2017 Dunkirk
• 2020 Tenet
• 2023 Oppenheimer
• 2026 The Odyssey

TODAY asked Nolan if it would be another three years before his next release, and the director replied, “Oh, at least.”

That answer, delivered with a knowing chuckle, perhaps signals that Nolan plans a longer gap between The Odyssey and his next film than we've seen in recent years, maybe with a break in mind. And who could blame him? “I definitely hit the limits of my own stamina and everybody’s stamina, I think,” he said of making The Odyssey. “I mean, it’s The Odyssey, of course it should be difficult. We’re not doing the job right making a film of The Odyssey if it doesn’t seem difficult.”

Clearly, The Odyssey was a huge effort for everyone involved. It is the first movie ever shot on Imax 70mm film, which involved using heavy and loud cameras. It was shot almost entirely with practical effects (Matt Damon’s Odysseus and his soldiers really are in that horse), and in some instances in remote locations the cast and crew would have to hike to.

Damon himself has discussed how tough it was filming The Odyssey, which he said had a “profound” effect on him. “If I look objectively at what was required to do that job, I think it came at just the right time in my life,” he revealed. “I think I would've been miserable 20 years ago trying to do that job. Because you were uncomfortable every day, but I really enjoyed… like, deeply enjoyed every minute of it.”

Even though The Odyssey has just hit theaters, it’s natural to wonder what Nolan’s next film might be. 20 years ago he was attached to a feature version of 1960s TV series classic The Prisoner, which starred Patrick McGoohan in the title role. As a fan of the original show, I’d love to see Nolan’s take on it. The Prisoner revolves around Number Six, a British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village after resigning from his position. It’s a show packed with misdirection and obfuscation, and you're never really sure what's really going on or who to trust. I imagine The Prisoner would be right up Nolan’s street.

On the other hand, IGN's Simon Cardy has argued that The Odyssey’s Scariest Scene Proves It’s Time for a Christopher Nolan Horror Movie, and having seen The Odyssey myself, I can understand why he'd think that.

If Nolan takes a bit of time off before plotting his next move, perhaps we will see his next film in 2030. Or maybe he’ll find himself restless even after the exertion of The Odyssey, and aim for yet another three year gap and a 2029 release date.

For now, we have The Odyssey to enjoy, and enjoy it we have. IGN’s The Odyssey review returned an 8/10. We said: “The Odyssey adapts Homer through a new eye that brings a sense of horror and existential angst to the story — and some humor too. It may not be a perfect movie, but it’s a pretty great moviegoing experience all the same.” And if you've seen the movie yourself and have questions, check out our The Odyssey ending explained article.

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

UPDATE July 18, 2026, 1:36 p.m. PT: Jennifer English has issued a statement following the news that she is stepping away from her role as Gwendolyn in Eclipse Glow Games' Tides of Annihilation.

The actress shared her thoughts on the matter with a statement published on her personal Instagram story (and shared on X/Twitter by Genki). As previously announced by the developer, English says she stepped away from the game due to health concerns, calling the move a "difficult – yet personally necessary – decision."

ORIGINAL STORY: English actress Jennifer English is stepping away from her role as the protagonist in Eclipse Glow Games’ Tides of Annihilation due to health issues.

The developer announced the news on July 17, 2026, just over a year after the title was first revealed at Sony’s February 2025 State of Play.

As told in a statement on the game’s official X account, English will no longer voice its main character, Gwendolyn, due to “personal health reasons.” She will, however, continue to support the title in an advisory role.

English informed Eclipse Glow Games that she would not be able to continue in the role in early June.

“While we were, of course, saddened by her decision, we completely understood and respected Jennfier in prioritizing her well-being. We are also deeply grateful for the care and responsibility she showed throughout this process,” the studio wrote.

“During this transition, Jennifer remained incredibly supportive and, together with other members of our voice cast, helped us identify and connect with talented performers who could carry Gwendolyn forward while staying true to the character.”

Luckily, a new voice for Gwendolyn has been found, with English and other members of the game’s cast recommending this as-yet unannounced actor. Eclipse Glow Games says her recent work in the industry “left a strong impression on both Jennifer and our team—not only for the performance itself, but for the remarkable care and dedication she showed in understanding the character.”

We have some sad news to share, that Jennifer English will be stepping away from her role as the English voice of Gwendolyn, the main protagonist in Tides of Annihilation due to personal health reasons. She will continue to support the project in an advisory role.

Earlier in…

— Tides of Annihilation (@play_toa) July 18, 2026

Fans will get to hear the new actor for the first time in Tides of Annihilation’s playable demo this August at Gamescom 2026, a performance that she is now recording. Her voice will also be lent to “select official updates” shared on the game’s official channels around that same time.

“We'd also like to thank Jennifer for everything she brought to the character and to the project. Her performance brought depth, strength, vulnerability, and heart to the role. We have truly enjoyed this journey together, and wish Jennifer all the very best, and most importantly, good health and happiness in whatever comes next,” the studio wrote.

Tides of Annihilation is a narrative-driven, single-player action adventure game that combines “intense, breakneck combat, an immersive narrative, and an unforgettable setting.” That setting is a modern-day London plunged into chaos by magical forces inspired by Arthurian legends, which Gwendolyn must defeat with help from "spectral" versions of the Knights of the Round Table.

Eclipse Glow Games, based out of Chengdu, China, has pushed out several trailers for the game ahead of its playable demo at Gamescom 2026, showing off cinematics, boss fights, and even technical behind-the-scenes development footage. Its release date has yet to be revealed, but in the meantime, you can check out our guide for all the games you can expect to see at Gamescom 2026.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

Deadline reports that Colman Domingo is in talks to co-write a live-action movie focused on Princess and the Frog protagonist Tiana alongside playwright and director Robert O’Hara.

Thus far, not much else is known about the project, which marks the latest in Disney’s string of live-action adaptations — a trend that’s not been exactly profitable for the House of Mouse.

2026’s Moana notoriously bombed at the box office, earning an approximate global total of $95 million from its opening weekend in July. This follows the similarly snoozy start to 2025’s Snow White remake, which earned $87.3 million globally on its opening weekend last March.

Despite these underwhelming numbers and middling reviews, Disney seems to be moving full-speed ahead toward even more live-action remakes. A new Tangled is in the works, with Teagan Croft and Milo Manheim to play Rapunzel and Flynn Rider. Andor’s Diego Luna has also been cast in an as-yet unspecified role specific to the movie, while Scarlett Johansson, who was reportedly in talks to play Mother Gothel, is no longer involved in the project.

Other live-action flicks in Disney’s schedule include Bambi, Hercules, and even a Gaston spinoff movie.

The forthcoming Hercules film, with Joe and Anthony Russo producing, is set to put a “modern spin” on the beloved Disney classic with the goal of telling a “different story,” similar to what appears to be happening with Domingo and O’Hara’s Tiana-focused adventure.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

LEGO's epic Dungeon & Dragons: Red Dragon's Tale set may not officially retire until July 31, but you'd be hard pressed to find in stock anywhere. All major retailers that carry LEGO sets, like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy, are out of stock. Even If you wanted to buy directly through LEGO's site, you'd be met with the dreaded "sold out" text. Still, if stock does miraculously become available at any of these retailers (sticker price is $359.99) or you're lucky enough to find one secondhand, you're in for a real treat.

LEGO Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon's Tale Stock Update

Christopher Nolan is easily on the shortlist for the best directors of the 21st century, constantly delivering unparalleled cerebral thrills and often taking risks with bold sci-fi ideas. His latest film, an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, is a hit, and we're already wondering what his next project will be.

While we wait for Nolan's next blockbuster, we've looked back at all his movies to date – and ranked them from our least to most favorite. With 13 films under his belt, Christopher Nolan has searched the far reaches of space, explored the forbidden depths of the mind, and brought Batman to the big screen in a way like no one else. Nolan's toying with time and perception are his calling card, as are lofty ideas and applied physics used for storyline purposes.

So, from his first film, Following, to his most recent release, The Odyssey, we've ranked all director Christopher Nolan's movies below.

13. Following (1999)

For a movie shot on weekends and without a steady supply of quality film stock, Nolan's first feature is an effective character study hiding out in the trappings of a whodunit. Following tracks a young writer who stalks people on the streets of London for inspiration. When he is found out by a thief who takes him under his wing, the writer ends up on a path that doesn't bode well by the time the film ends.

Following establishes Nolan's fascination with the themes of identity and crime as a tool of manipulation; and yes, we even see the director flirt with a mostly successful attempt at the twist ending.

12. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Tom Hardy debuted as Bane and Anne Hathaway donned the Catwoman suit for this ridiculously anticipated finale to Christopher Nolan’s massively popular Dark Knight Trilogy. The Dark Knight Rises shot for the stars, with a larger scope than any Batman movie before it. While reactions were mixed to some of the choices in the movie, on a psychological level, The Dark Knight Rises shows the resolve of the Bruce Wayne character on screen like never before. We get to see him do what his father had always told him he could – learn to pick himself up – and save the city he loves.

11. Tenet (2020)

Tenet — which was first delayed by the pandemic and then released to theaters before the world was ready to head back outside — never quite got the presentation it needed (or that Nolan himself desired). On top of that, despite being a technical marvel, it was one of the director's most emotionally cold efforts to date. That being said, this sci-fi spy thriller movie — starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki — is an exciting globe-trotting treat for the senses, telling the story of a secret team trying to stop an attack on Earth's present...from Earth's future. You might not fully understand how reverse entropy works, or how it's able to interact with regular entropy, but it's a beautifully batsh*t thing to watch unfold on screen.

10. Insomnia (2002)

Based on a Norwegian thriller of the same name, Insomnia is firmly within noir territory -- a troubled detective unravelling the murder of a young girl -- but it purposefully inverts many of the inherited stylistic conventions. Since the action unfolds in a small fishing town in Alaska, where the sun never sets, Nolan's 'sunshine' noir eschews shadows for blinding light.

The beauty of Insomnia, which stars Al Pacino, is that it never cheats or dumbs down its story, and it always keeps us on Pacino's level, as his character tries to both do a good cop's job and cover up his own misconduct and while fighting off the worst case of insomnia ever. Robin Williams delivers an unnerving performance as the murderer Pacino's gunning for, and Hilary Swank adds more than what's on the page with her turn as the local cop.

9. Interstellar (2014)

McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain star in Nolan's space epic, Interstellar -- an imperfect film, sure, but like its central characters it aims about as high as one can. The ambition, execution, and craftsmanship are all to be admired. Interstellar is a slightly divisive film though ultimately the viewers takeaway will likely come down to their emotional response.

This story, about a last ditch effort to save humanity by using a wormhole to search for a new home planet, boasts superb world creation as well as some heady notions about time, which are mostly based on scientific theory, and to date it stands and one Nolan's most heartfelt projects (for a director who admits that love and warmth aren't his strong suits).

Check out our favorite movies like Interstellar.

8. Batman Begins (2005)

After the Batman and Robin debacle of 1997, Warner Brothers struggled to get the Batman franchise in motion again and suffered lots of stops and starts with various scripts and filmmakers. Finally, Christopher Nolan came along and everything fell into place. Telling the Batman origin in depth for the first time on screen, Nolan approached the Dark Knight with a hyper-realism that made audiences forget the buffoonery of the Schumacher era and embrace Gotham City once again.

With a grand cast, endearing performances, and just enough comic book geek out moments (that Joker card!) to make the die-hard fans swoon, Batman Begins was a modest success that would reinvigorate Batman’s cinematic standing and lead to what would become the then top-grossing superhero movie of that time.

7. Memento (2000)

Nolan's first major success went from being a Sundance event to a movie on every film lover's DVD shelf - and for good reason. Leonard (Guy Pearce) is a man unable to make new memories outside of the event that changed his life: Witnessing the rape and murder of his wife at the hands of one "John G." Armed with a gun and a Polaroid camera, Leonard sets out in a very film noir-inspired hunt for the man who killed his wife, tattooing himself with mission statements the way people write Post-It notes.

One part of Leonard's quest unfolds in reverse, and another unfolds in normal time. Both timelines bleed together in the middle, creating an experience that put Nolan on everyone's short-list, and turned Memento into one of the privileged few movies that become lexicon. It's one of the best mystery movies you'll ever see.

6. Dunkirk (2017)

In what Nolan himself called his "most challenging film," Dunkirk was the director's first war film, depicting the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II through the perspectives of the land (taking place over a week of action), sea (one day of action), and air (one hour of action).

As Nolan's most lauded film to date, which also included eight Oscar nominations, Dunkirk didn't dwell on the horror of war but instead successfully conveyed the sheer terror of it all through both small, human acts and deafening scenes of conflict. This wasn’t a war story that lead to victory — that’s not what the story of Dunkirk is about — it was a retreat, an inglorious defeat. The war would continue for five more years. But through its miraculous events, Nolan and an outstanding cast of both young unknowns and veterans were able to depict not only the overwhelming, inhuman forces in play but the power of small acts of decency and bravery.

Take a look at our list of the best World War 2 movies of all time.

5. Inception (2010)

Nolan won the hearts and minds of fanboys with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but he truly solidified his status as a filmmaker at the top of his game with 2010's Inception -- one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. A mind-bending sci-fi stunner that proved Hollywood blockbusters could still be smart while also dazzling us on a visual and visceral level, Inception is certainly one of the best films to hit, sci-fi or not, in this still young 21st century.

Inception doesn't just simply fit into the sci-fi genre. It's a caper film as well, a Bond film, and an occasionally avant-garde delving into the dreamscape. At the heart of the picture is Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb, a stricken widower who specializes in a form of corporate espionage that involves stealing information from a mark's mind while they sleep. Of course, as good as Cobb is at his job, it's his own dreams -- including appearances by his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) — that are his biggest challenge.

Buoyed by a great cast (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine), stunning visual effects and those rarest of Hollywood commodities — an original and intelligent script — Inception is a no-brainer for this list. Unless we're just dreaming all of this…

Check out more movies like Inception.

4. The Odyssey (2026)

Surprising many fans, Nolan decided to travel back to Ancient Greece for his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. But in doing so, he still managed to stick to many of the themes that have been key to his work from the start - the concepts of guilt, regret, and memory, for starters. The result is a rethinking of Homer's iconic tale that manages to be faithful to the story of Odysseus in many ways, but also puts a unique Nolan twist on the proceedings.

Matt Damon stars as the hero, though he's more of a fallen hero in this iteration as he struggles to get back to his beloved wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) in the decade after winning the Trojan War. Along the way, Odysseus of course encounters many obstacles - monsters, witches, giants, and maybe worst of all, his own past deeds.

Perhaps not the masterpiece that it has been hailed as upon release, Nolan's The Odyssey is nonetheless a remarkable cinematic achievement... and one that demands to be seen in a cinema. Don't miss it.

3. The Prestige (2006)

Adapted Christopher Priest's novel, this tale of two 19th Century magicians locked in a bitter rivalry only gets better with repeat viewings as its secrets reveal themselves. Hugh Jackman played the showy, flashy Robert Angier, while Christian Bale starred opposite as the less successful but more technically skilled Alfred Borden. Jackman excelled at playing a man who lost everything and sank to impossibly dark depths to claim revenge. Compared to Jackman's flashy, suave Angier, Bale played Borden as more a working class magician, boasting unbeatable technical skill but lacking his rival's practiced charm and stage presence.

The crazed cat and mouse aspects of the movie build and bottleneck into a very memorable twist, a sleight-of-hand worthy of these talented magicians. The Prestige is arguably Nolan's most watchable movie thanks to these great performances and cinematic wizardry worthy of the magicians themselves.

2. Oppenheimer (2023)

Adapted from the biography American Prometheus, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s incredible biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Starring Cillian Murphy as the man himself, it’s a film that managed to meet the hype around it (especially in cinemas, where double-features with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie earned the name Barbenheimer).

We gave Oppenheimer a 10/10, stating that this masterpiece is “Christopher Nolan’s most abstract yet most exacting work, with themes of guilt writ large through apocalyptic IMAX nightmares that grow both more enormous and more intimate as time ticks on.” It’s a film that is “as stunning as it is terrifying.”

1. The Dark Knight (2008)

After the success of Batman Begins – not to mention the epic Joker card teaser at its end – The Dark Knight quickly became one of the most hyped movies of the decade. Helped by its amazing viral marketing campaign and, sadly, the death of Heath Ledger, the sequel quickly took on legendary status as the summer’s most anticipated movie. Remarkably, it delivered beyond expectations as one of the best Batman movies.

Nolan’s middle chapter introduced the ultimate foil to Batman – Ledger’s Joker – and depicted how the arrival of a masked vigilante affected Gotham City and its citizens. The Dark Knight is essentially Gordon’s speech about “escalation” at the end of Begins coming to fruition. Meanwhile, Bruce himself has to deal with what being Batman has forced him to sacrifice personally. It’s a well-rounded movie that takes multiple plot threads and seamlessly weaves them toward an intensely thrilling climax.

And that's our ranking of all of Christopher Nolan's films. What do you think of our number one pick? Let us know in the comments, and rank the films in the tier list below!

Christopher Nolan Movie Tier List

Rank all the movies you've seen according to these tier list categories -- and see how your ranking compares to the community's.

Amazon is offering a pretty good deal on a prebuilt desktop PC that's perfect for playing games at 1080p or 1440p. You can pick up a Skytech Shadow 5 gaming PC with RTX 5060 Ti 16GB graphics card for just $1,499.99 with free shipping. The RTX 5060 Ti graphics card is the superior 16GB VRAM variant that will be able most games at 60fps+ in 1080p.

Skytech Shadow RTX 5060 Ti (16GB) Gaming PC for $1,500

Path of Titans players are going viral for their touching in-game tribute to Sam Neill after news of the actor’s death wracked the Jurassic Park community.

Sam Neill died on July 13, 2026 in Sydney, Australia. The prolific actor was 78, leaving behind a legacy that included a swath of beloved roles in films and series like Peaky Blinders, The Piano, and of course, Steven Spielberg's original Jurassic Park.

Neill famously portrayed Dr. Alan Grant in three Jurassic Park movies, including Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World Dominion. It was perhaps his most famous role, and one that left a glaring hole in the franchise’s fanbase.

A large group of these fans gathered together on Jurassic Park MMO Path of Titans to pay their respects to Neill, choosing to avoid battling other players in favor of a peaceful parade in his honor.

As spotted by Dexerto, TikTok user ‘DizzyBlues’ uploaded footage of the memorial on July 14, showing player-controlled dinos migrating across the landscape while a piano version of the Jurassic Park theme played in the background. The short clip has gone viral, racking up over 155,000 likes and over 744,000 views in just three days.

“Yesterday was a very sad day indeed for millions of us around the world in learning that Sam Neill had passed away,” DizzyBlues wrote in the video’s caption. “And so, the EchoedArk community came together for a peaceful migration in honor of The Dinosaur Man.”

Fans were quick to praise the players on the EchoedArk server for their sweet tribute to Neill, with one remarking: “Gaming communities can suck sometimes, but moments like this, Sam Neill and Lance Reddick, really prove how truly great they can be.”

As the commenter mentioned, this is far from the first time players have gathered together to pay their respects to entertainment legends; in March 2023, Destiny 2 players flocked to the Tower to see Commander Zavala following Reddick’s death a day prior.

And in August 2021, Final Fantasy 14 players honored Berserk creator Kentaro Miura by dressing in the MMO’s Dark Knight gear to better resemble Guts and his Dragon Slayer sword.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

If you're a LEGO fan, it can sometimes be hard to keep track of what sets are retiring soon, which ones are out of stock, and so on, so we've done the research for you. Every month, LEGO sunsets a selection of different sets that have been on the market awhile, meaning they often can't be purchased directly through their site or at most major retailers after the offcial retire date. This month is no different, but almost 30 of these sets are already out of stock on LEGO's website. Luckily, Amazon still has a handful of them in stock if you're looking to pick one up before they get the boot.

One of the most popular LEGO sets in recent years has been The Legend of Zelda Great Deku tree set. That's also set to be retired at the end of July, but it's been sold out everywhere since its sunsetting was announced. Once a popular set goes out of stock completely you'll only be able to buy it at a marked up price from 3rd-party sellers.

The eight sets you can find in stock at Amazon cover an eclectic range of themes from LEGO's vast catalogue, from Star Wars and One Piece to the super-popular Botanicals line. It may be your last chance to pick some of these up at their sticker prices, and a couple of them are even on sale for a few bucks off. They're all shipped by Amazon, but some of them are sold by third party vendors.

Star Wars Home One Starcruiser

Insomniac Games attempted to drum up excitement when it published a new cinematic trailer for Marvel's Wolverine yesterday, but it soon became flooded with negative comments from fans who haven't forgiven Sony after it announced plans to cease production of physical discs for PlayStation games.

The "Ain't No Hero" trailer has amassed more than 1 million views on YouTube and nearly 5,000 comments since its debut. Despite coming with a first look at Lady Deathstrike and a tease for a team-up between Logan and Sabretooth, viewers are mostly using the opportunity to take their frustrations out on just about anything the Sony gaming branch publishes.

As spotted by Eurogamer, many of the comments on its YouTube page both directly and indirectly reference the company's decision to do away with physical discs for games starting in 2028. The comment section of the video site has long served as a reliable place for fans to voice their frustrations, but in this case, it's been especially noticeable.

"At least I get to have a physical copy of this game," one popular comment said in reference to confirmation of a physical version for Marvel's Wolverine.

"Play has limits," another player responded, referencing the "Play Has No Limits" tagline for PS5.

"People are mad about our physical disc decision, quick, release the new Wolverine trailer!" someone else joked.

For comparison, revisiting the "Be Greater. Together." cinematic trailer for Marvel's Spider-Man 2 – as well as the cinematic trailer for the first Spider-Man game – shows that fans had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the video. Wolverine hasn't been so lucky. Some fans have also started to give the game a hard time over on X/Twitter.

Cool trailer. But don't forget Sony pic.twitter.com/q85dkHrJNy

— Pigeon (@PigeonGoGaming) July 16, 2026

You aint no hero either. Unless you can convince your overlords to reverse decision on physical media. We know Wolverine is on disc but its gonna be one of the last of its kind. And your last game that will have any success if you stick with Sony if there is no change. pic.twitter.com/AYKEVjQMV5

— Krishius💿 (@Krishius87) July 16, 2026

Hopefully this won't be the last game I buy that you've made. I personally won't be supported an all digital PlayStation, not with the current state of things, lack of consumer rights / ownership and horrible PlayStation Store refund policies and security!

💿 NO DISC? NO MONEY! pic.twitter.com/rmnUNIsJIt

— 💿 Tech In Stock UK 🇬🇧 Restock + Deal Updates (@TechInStockUK) July 16, 2026

Marvel's Wolverine is slated to launch as a PS5 exclusive September 15, 2026. With disc production set to come to an end in January 2028, its release date means Insomniac's latest superhero game will be one of the last first-party titles to get a physical release.

At least some of the hype surrounding its release has been dampened in recent weeks as players look to any outlet where they can let Sony know they don't approve of its decision to leave physical game collectors behind. The trend has seen fans even waiting to go after the company when it took a brief social media break a few weeks ago.

For more, you can read about some of the other games that have wound up caught in the backlash. You can also learn why one retailer chose to speak out, even if Sony is unlikely to budge.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

A Red Bull athlete has broken a world record while recreating the iconic "Leap of Faith" from Assassin’s Creed.

Professional freerunner, stuntwoman, and Red Bull athlete Lilou Ruel jumped a feet-tingling 18.2 meters into a huge stack of hay, breaking the world record for highest haystack jump.

For reference, that’s about as tall as a six-story building, so we can understand why Ruel started screaming as she got close to the ground in Red Bull’s viral video capturing the moment.

Luckily, she landed in the hay unharmed, warranting an excited celebration from her friends for successfully completing the heart-stopping stunt.

"Thank you, Red Bull, for giving me wings for a few seconds," she joked on Instagram. "I do think we can go way higher, should we try?"

This isn’t the first time a Red Bull athlete has broken the world record for the highest Leap of Faith; in May 2026, Dominic Tommasso fell 18.1 meters into a haystack while dressed as Edward Kenway from Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resycned in celebration of the title’s release.

Black Flag Resynced has enjoyed a stellar launch, selling a jaw-dropping 2 million copies in just 24 hours. A week later, it has now surpassed 3 million copies sold, with Ubisoft announcing new game plus is on the way.

In fact, Black Flag managed to rake in $1 million from its day-one DLC on Steam alone, earning the series’ biggest playerstreak on the PC gaming platform in Assassin’s Creed history.

Despite this success, Black Flag’s release hasn’t come without controversy, as Ubisoft notably announced plans to lay off 380 staff members in June. This included 51 employees who contributed to the game’s diving sections at Ubisoft’s Barcelona office, who are now campaigning for fair severance pay, arguing that what they were given was "below any reasonable standard.”

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

Sony's best noise canceling headphones are on sale today. eBay (via Secondipity) is offering a pair of Refurbished Sony WH-1000XM6 wireless noise canceling headphones for just $286 with free shipping. According to the reviews from people who have ordered from Secondipity, which is a huge Sony liquidator, the headphones they've received are pretty much indistinguishable from brand new. eBay also provides an extended 2 year AllState warranty with your purchase. The Sony WH-1000XM6 is one of the best - if not the best - noise canceling headphones available and it retails for $460 new.

38% Off the Sony WH-1000XM6 Noise Canceling Headphones

Ubisoft has confirmed plans to bring New Game Plus to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced as its remake crosses 3 million copies sold.

The update puts the sales up 1 million copies one week after announcing it had managed to reach 2 million copies sold in just 24 hours. It's yet another sign that Ubisoft is happy with its July 9 launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X | S, even after laying off some members of the development team just days later.

As mentioned in IGN's previous coverage, Ubisoft has typically only shares player numbers – not sales – when new Assassin's Creed games arrive. That's suddenly changed for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, suggesting the publisher is pleased as punch by how things have gone thus far. Whether it will continue to be so forthcoming about these figures remains to be seen.

Yo Ho Ho! More than 3 million copies sold across the seas... 🏴‍☠️

Special thanks to all of you for playing and sharing tall tales about your Caribbean adventures.
Guess we'll have to keep the adventures going with New Game+ later on, mates. 👀#AssassinsCreed pic.twitter.com/xhlAhBojxP

— Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) July 17, 2026

Meanwhile, Ubisoft celebrated the 3 million milestone by confirming a New Game Plus mode is on the way. It said the team's work on post-launch support, including things like quality-of-life updates and bug fixes, has helped it maintain a "Very Positive" rating from English reviews on Steam (note: reviews in all languages are currently "Mostly Positive"). Details about New Game Plus were not shared, but the mode is promised to "further enhance replayability."

Game director Richard Knight had also teased the mode was in development during a conversation with YouTuber JorRaptor earlier this week (via GamesRadar). Although he was unable to share specifically how Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced New Game Plus would operate, he explained that its existence in 2025's Assassin's Creed Shadows helped set the stage.

"Well, this is the one thing I can say: Yes, we're working on that right now," Knight said. "For sure. It's one of the first things. Partly because Shadows has already built their version, so it's considered a low-risk feature for us. We're still doing the work, so I can't promise exactly a day or anything, but we're definitely working on this one. It's just such a natural thing."

Regarding a potential release date, he said, "I really can't promise anything. It's at the top of the list of things. There's a lot of things – some are harder than others – but it's something we definitely want to get done."

IGN gave Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced a 9/10. In our review, we said, "More than just a shinier version of the same game you remember, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced brings what was already one of the best games in the series up to today’s standards."

For more, you can read about the backlash to its microtransactions, which still reportedly earned $1 million on Steam after a few days. You can also check out what Knight had to say regarding the lack of blade combat in the remake.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

A24 has issued a statement clarifying the numerous takedown notices filed on behalf of its brand after Backrooms director Kane Parsons promised he’d investigate.

A24 published their statement via Instagram on July 17, just two days after Parsons responded to a Reddit post from a user claiming their wallpaper pattern had been pulled from Redbubble over copyright infringement.

“As Kane Parsons has made clear, Backrooms is one part of an infinitely bigger ecosystem, rife with creatives who have every right to tell their own version of the story,” they wrote.

“Yesterday we were made aware of an automated claim submitted to Redbubble on behalf of A24 and Backrooms movie. We immediately began the process to reverse it and reinstate the listings. A24 makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it. We will continue to support the artists who, like Kane, were inspired by it.”

This marks the end of a frustrating saga for affected Backrooms fans, who saw all manner of works restricted due to these automated copyright claims. One indie developer stated their Backrooms-inspired game had been pulled from the Google Play store due to the issue, while others had artwork of liminal office spaces taken down by Redbubble on behalf of “A24 LLC.”

Parsons had previously promised to look into these issues, both on Reddit and his Discord server. Recent messages show Parsons surmising that the cause of these takedown notices was likely he result of “confusion and poor communication” internally and a “third-party system error” in regards to the Redbubble items.

The other notices on different platforms, he says, were “seemingly just coincidences and bad timing,” and stated that he does not believe the matter points to a “narrative that [A24] is going on a copyright spree.”

“They’re very much on the side of the community over here," he wrote. "They have been insistent since day one on keeping the community protected, as it always has been.”

Parson’s Backrooms film was a big hit at the box office, earning $375 million against a $10 million budget. IGN gave the flick an 8/10, with Lex Briscuso saying, “Kane Parsons blends superb visuals and excellent characterization with the lore of the Backrooms to create a terrifying and thrilling big-screen debut for the liminal horror classic.”

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

Ever since the Steam Deck debuted in 2022, it's been one of my favorite devices. It was relatively affordable for a handheld gaming PC, but still powerful enough to play pretty much anything I would realistically play on the go. And while I still love the thing, it's almost impossible to recommend to anyone right now, after the price increases a couple months ago.

Right now, if you want to buy a Steam Deck from Valve, it's going to cost you $789 for a new, 512GB OLED Steam Deck, or $949 if you want to bump the storage up to 1TB. You can, of course, save some cash by buying a refurbished Deck from Valve, which starts at around $279 for the 64GB LCD model, but at least in my region, every refurbished Steam Deck is out of stock.

Even on Ebay, getting a used Steam Deck will probably set you back about $450-$500 right now, and there's no real guarantee that you're going to get something that works properly.

This is all, of course, thanks to the RAM crisis that we're all dealing with, because seemingly every company is trying to build AI datacenters, driving up the costs of computer hardware. There aren't really many devices that have escaped going up in price this year, with everything from the PS5 to the Steam Machine being affected in one way or the other.

But somehow, Asus has insulated its Xbox Ally handhelds from price increases – so far at least. The basic Xbox Ally is still $599 at Best Buy, and the more powerful Xbox Ally X is $999, the latter of which is quite a bit more powerful than the Steam Deck. I honestly don't know how long Asus's prices are going to stay like this, but for now at least, the white Xbox Ally is the best budget handheld, especially if you don't want to deal with the used market.

Back when Asus launched its latest handhelds, I only got to review the Xbox Ally X. But, recently, Asus sent along the regular Xbox Ally, and while it's not nearly as powerful, it goes neck-and-neck with the Steam Deck. In Time Spy, for instance, the Xbox Ally gets 1834 points, compared to 1715 from Valve's handheld. That's basically the same level of performance, which was once an argument against the Xbox Ally. But now that prices have shifted in the way they have, Asus offers roughly the same level of performance as Valve, but for $200 less. That math isn't hard to figure out.

Quite simply, if you are on the market for a handheld, and you don't have a thousand bucks (or more) to spend on a high-end gaming handheld, the Xbox Ally is the way to go right now. But, again, if I've learned anything this year, it's that everything has the potential to go up in price. I just hope the Xbox Ally stays affordable for a little while longer.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra