Movies & TV Masters of the Universe Masters of the Universe Needs to Commit WHERE IS ORKO By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 8, 2026 Image: Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Amazon MGM Studios If you’re going to adapt something like Masters of the Universe, you have some choices to make. Are you going to treat the material seriously in a high fantasy way? Create an earnest sword-and-sorcery epic, full of noble heroes and cackling villains, and mean it? Are you going to take the material seriously in that other way, and try to find real-world explanations for sorceresses who turn into birds, and green-striped talking tigers? Or are you going to wink at that audience of 40-and-50-somethings, and comment on the fact that there’s a character named “Fisto” in this thing? The problem with the new Masters of the Universe is that it tries all three of these tactics, and as a result, never finds its tone. I’m going to give you a very brief paragraph summing my thoughts up, but after that I’m digging into the whole movie and there will be spoilers galore. First things first: Nicholas Galitzine continues to be a freaking delight. Between this and The Sheep Detectives, he’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite boys, and I loved every second of his performance. I just wish the script gave him more to work with. Idris Elba imbues Duncan with an enormous depth and pathos. Camila Mendes is great as Teela, but Teela, as ever, is extremely one note. Alison Brie has fun with an erratically written Evil-Lyn. All the voice work is good; Jared Leto does surprisingly great work as Skeletor, but imagine how much better it would have been if they’d hired a real voice actor and we didn’t have to deal with any Leto-ness. The action sequences aren’t purely CGI mush, but they do also get a bit repetitive. The Eternia sections needed to pop even more, and feel even more fantastical, to create a better contrast with the sections set on Earth. We get a few decent jokes, but many more gestures toward emotion rather than fully explored emotion. I am still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the director, Travis Knight, also made Kubo and the Two Strings. This movie is trying to do a lot of different things, but never commits to anything. Adam’s parents feel like cardboard cutouts that have “Disapproving Dad” and “Supportive Mom” written on them—like if you put the MCU’s versions of Odin and Frigga through the Backrooms a couple times. There’s a scene where an Amazon delivery truck takes out a villain. (Maybe he was thinking about unionizing?) There’s a scene where the Heroes of Eternia stand in a circle leaning back to laugh uproariously at a joke that isn’t remotely funny, which is excellent, until the movie points at the reference to the cartoon, twice, to make sure that you know that they know they’re making fun of the cartoon. And finally: where the FUCK is Orko. (The movie’s Orko decisions made me really angry, but I’ll get that below.) We open with narrations from “Adam,” who tells us about his glorious childhood on his lost home of Eternia. We stay in his life there for at least ten minutes of the movie, and this is our introduction. We meet Adam, who is fully a foot shorter than the other children in his fighting class but still expected to spar with them, and who is also the son of the king, Randor (James Purefoy), but gets bullied by the other kids anyway. From here the film works through its exposition: Mom (Charlotte Riley) loves him but wants him to toughen up; Duncan, King Randor’s Man-At-Arms, seems harsh in training sessions, but cares for the kid and wants him to succeed; Duncan’s badass daughter Teela is his only friend; Dad is glowering and disappointed. The peaceful royal city is attacked by the bad guys, Duncan fails to protect them and has to be rescued by Teela, Mom and Dad are captured, Adam and his magic sword are sent through a portal to Earth for safekeeping, he drops the sword in the portal and crash lands in a lake. And then it’s revealed that all this exposition has been dumped on the ears of grown-up Adam’s date as she picks at a nice plate of food in a nice restaurant in Oklahoma City, 15 years later. And see, here’s where it wobbles for me. Adam is an adult. He’s earnest and wholesome and put together enough to be on this date, and pay for it. And yet he’s still willing to blurt all of this out, and insist that it’s true, as a twenty-something. If you’re going to give us this scene, I would have rather spent half of the flashback on what happened to him after he crashed on Earth. Someone found him, clearly, and he was put into some sort of child protective services system. He never mentions adoptive parents of any kind, but was there a series of fosters? A group home? He was sent to school—we see him bringing a carefully drawn picture of the person he calls “Ram-Man” (Jon Xue Zhang) to class to try to explain his heritage, where he’s laughed at by the kids and berated by the teacher. Somehow he made it through his youth on Earth, and got a white collar job working at an HR training facility, so presumably there was college in there, too. We’re even told that he’s good at his job. But… how??? How is he still at all functional, if he hasn’t learned not to tell the story about Skeletor attacking his hometown on another planet over a casual date? How did he make it through his childhood? Who paid for college? And most importantly: How is he not locked in a room in a facility somewhere, full to the brim with extremely powerful drugs???   If you’re going to bring us slightly into reality on our Earth, you have to actually engage with it. The way Eternia finally fully breaks into Earth is with a cavalcade of cliches: Adam finally reunites with his sword, and is then arrested by a pair of cops who I think are supposed to be a sort of Melissa McCarthy/Bill Hader double act, but were never given any real jokes or personality. They can’t actually arrest him, though, because they get stuck in a massive traffic jam, which is, of course, being caused by Beast Man (Gary Martin), one of Skeletor’s henchmen. People run away from Beast Man, but nowhere near as many people as should be in all the cars we see. The cops just… disappear. Beast Man chases Adam around, suddenly Teela’s there, they remember each other in between a pair of cars and then keep running. Adam seems to be able to withstand a level of violence that would kill a human; this is never remarked upon. The film continues in this vein. When Adam gets back to Eternia, everyone talks about how different it is, but Adam’s flashbacks weren’t bright and idyllic enough to show how much damage Skeletor has done. Adam refers to all the “heroes of Eternia” by the ridiculous names he gave them as a child, so we get multiple scenes calling attention to the ridiculousness of “Fisto” and “Ram-Man”—but these men never tell him their actual names. (And also, not to be too pedantic, but I knew my parents’ friends’ names by the time I was ten—FFS, I wasn’t walking around calling them Mr. Restaurant Owner and Bank Teller Lady.) Skeletor himself actually gets some good lines, and is clearly trying to be a cackling villain surrounded by incompetent henchpeople. But their incompetence is too clumsy to make a good running gag. His relationship with Evil-Lyn is the usual stew of flirtation and abuse, but the film can’t commit: Does she like the abuse, or fear it? Maybe don’t bring somewhat sexualized physical abuse into your all ages movie if you’re not going to deal with it well? The movie’s relationship to pop culture is similarly muddled. The action on Earth seems to be set in the 2020s, but most of the pop culture references are from the ‘80s and the ‘00s. Aside from obsessively drawing his memories of the past, we don’t know what the state of Sword & Sorcery is as a genre, or if Adam uses it to soothe himself. Queen guitarist Brian May wrote a theme just for the Sword (which is, in the parlance of the ’80s, RAD), and Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” plays at a key moment, and there’s a reference to Highlander—but does Adam himself think of the movie and song during his adventure? A car drives past blasting SNAP’s “The Power” before Adam remembers the words he need to activate his mighty Sword—a solid joke! The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” is used as kind of a light theme song—but again, are we in Adam’s point of view for this stuff? Why would his frame of reference be ‘80s pop culture if he crashed onto Earth in roughly 2010? But also Dolph Lundgren shows up to dispense wisdom that later comes in handy, which is just a nice touch. Honestly, Cringer (Tom Wilton) is the best example I can use for this movie’s tonal greyness. When we meet Cringer as a kitten (Fletcher Glenn), he both wants Adam to skip sparring class to play with him, but also doesn’t want him to, because he’d rather loll around in a sunbeam than play with his human friend. We only see them together for half a scene; we don’t see the tiger escape when Skeletor attacks the city; Adam mentions him a few times in the “Earth” sections but mostly so people can comment on the idea of a green-striped talking tiger. When Teela suddenly reunites the two of them in Skeletor’s dungeon, it’s slightly emotional, but doesn’t ever feel like: “My long-lost pet is still alive and in front of me fifteen years later! But also I’m locked in my greatest enemy’s dungeon and he might torture me to death!” For the rest of the film, Cringer says he doesn’t want to help Adam fight Skeletor, but after two seconds of pestering him, he agrees and does fine. (He full on fights another henchperson AS CRINGER.) When we finally see him as Battle Cat, he’s just… running along, in Battle Cat armor, with He-Man in his saddle. Cringer’s supposed to be terrified of conflict. Even slight arguments freak him out. It’s why he’s called “Cringer”! It’s the whole point! And then when he’s transformed into Battle Cat (which happens as he’s literally running away from the transformation scene) he becomes a mighty warrior with a gruff, roaring voice. The whole point is that he is brave, underneath everything, and the Power of Greyskull brings that bravery up to the top of his personality. Here, Cringer is somewhat reluctant to help, not a coward who hates himself for being a coward, and he’s also able to fight when the movie needs him to. And yeah, yeah, animation budgets, I know—but some of this is just basic screenwriting! The cheap part of the process! Just delete some scenes and do a fucking rewrite to bring everyone’s personality out! The one really good throughline, and the thing I wish the film had leaned into more, is the ongoing conversation about masculinity. From that opening scene, we see that Adam is small and physically weak compared to the other kids, and that he falls back on silliness and jokes to try to get the other kids to like him. Now, he’s a cute kid, and the Prince of Eternia, so presumably he could have leaned into his looks or his status instead, but he chooses humor. It doesn’t work—but also the film doesn’t explore it enough in his childhood flashbacks, and then there’s a bunch of Plot to deal with and all the human stuff gets lost in fight sequences anyway. On Earth, he chooses to work in an HR training department. The movie kind of teases this whole idea. Everyone’s name placards have their pronouns listed (see He/Him as Adam’s pronouns, knowing he’s going to be come He-Man, is genuinely pretty funny), everyone talks about listening in an active way, Adam’s obsession with his lost sword is problematic, not in a Freudian sense, but because swords are weapons and make his coworkers uncomfortable. We see that Adam’s roommate (Christian Vunipola) sits at home alone most nights, watching classic ‘00s rom-coms, but then fumbles to turn them off when Adam gets home, lest he get caught being emotional. (They don’t take the next logical step of having him switch to porn; I assume because they wanted a PG-13 rating.) Adam is obsessed with the idea that he was a disappointment to his father—and, indeed, in that one scene Randor humiliates his son in front of all the other kids, presumably to toughen him up. Once Adam and Duncan are reunited, Duncan rattles on and on about men’s duty to protect their home and family. He’s obsessed with the idea that he failed everyone, fifteen years ago, and stays drunk to dull the pain. For the first half of the movie, it almost feels like the movie is a straightforward critique of things that would be considered “progressive” right now; half of Adam’s colleagues even have multi-colored hair, and are, literally training people to work in HR. It’s not even just that he works in an HR department. (Here again, I desperately wish we’d spent more time on this, and that the script mined more of the inherent humor.) The fun thing is that the second half of the movie essentially debunks the first half, but not in the obvious ways. Teela doesn’t need her dad to be a “man” and protect her—she needs him to quit drinking so much, and to work through his shame and respect himself again. Adam doesn’t have to be a different person to gain his father’s respect, but he does have to recognize when a situation calls for action rather than communication. And communication is often the solution! The movie stops in its tracks to let Adam essentially do a team building exercise with all of his fellow prisoners, which is the only way they’re able to break out of prison and embark on the third act of the movie. I wish I could say that this all works perfectly, and the film gets us in the second half, but again it’s simply too vague. Half of the scenes feel like rough drafts with margin notes like “punch this up later” and “add more jokes here” and “specificity TK!!!” There are two really, really good sequences in this film, though, and I’m going to try to dig into why they work, because if the movie had just run with what it accomplishes here we’d be talking about a new fantasy classic. Masters of the Universe follows what is now a standard skeleton arc. The protagonist is either way too unsure of themself or way too cocky. The villain delivers an ultimatum/threatens someone close to the protagonist, the protagonist confronts the villain and loses the fight, all hope seems lost, the protagonist builds themself back up with the help of the supporting cast, faces the villain again, and succeeds—thus becoming a hero. Cue sequel. In this case, Adam finds the Sword of Power, but can’t remember the magic words that he thinks he needs to use it. This isn’t Mjolnir—anyone can pick the Sword of Power up and stab people with it. But Adam thinks that it’s only the magical formula that will awaken its true powers and turn him into a hero. When he finally says the words, it’s seemingly not him remembering them, but the Sorceress speaking them into his mind. He’s finally transformed into He-Man. He promptly rips a villain’s machine arm off—this would be the person he calls “Trap-Jaw” (Sam C. Wilson)—and then uses the gun to shoot down an army of henchpeople. It’s a massacre. A whole lot of real, breathing people are dead at his feet. He’s upset about this, but Duncan insists he did great, and the movie rolls along. A scene later, Skeletor directly threatens Adam’s parents. Naturally, he goes off to save them without any real plan beyond “my mighty sword shall prevail,” loses terribly, kind of causes his dad’s death, transforms back into Adam, is thrown into the dungeon, and all hope seems lost. But what’s good about this is that the story already seeded the fact that he feels like an imposter. The thing that should have been his first moment of triumph—saying the magical formula and becoming He-Man—was already complicated by how he used his He-Man powers, and the typical mid-point failure flows right from that. He’s spent his whole youth thinking that getting back home and being strong will fix everything, but it’s still him under the muscles, and he still thinks machine-gunning people is wrong. This leads into the other good bit, which is a second failure. All the great and the good of Eternia have united to defeat Skeletor, but naturally the whole film comes down to whether Adam can defeat Skeletor. What happens instead is that Adam seems to get the upper hand, but Skeletor grabs him, and suddenly Adam is awakening in scenes from his life on Earth, but now with Skeletor there berating him and mocking everything he’s ever done. (I didn’t know I needed to see Skeletor doing bicep curls or walking into an HR meeting in a purple hoodie, but I guess I did?) Adam is literally chased through his entire life by this cackling voice telling him that everything he ever believed was a pathetic joke, and that’s failed again. Back at Greyskull, Skeletor shatters the Sword of Power and stabs Adam with the hilt. And Adam dies. This? This right here? This is great. The Sorceress comes to him and explains that, first of all, HE has the power, not the Sword, and the reason she gave the power to him was because he was a sweet kid who wanted to make people laugh during sparring class. She knew he wouldn’t misuse the power he’d been given. When he comes back to life, on Eternia, he draws the sword from his own glowing chest and turns back into He-Man. This? A lot of this is even better. Except! The problem is that “death” in this instance is him waking up back in his apartment. The movie doesn’t waste our time playing the “maybe it was all in his miiiiind” card—but it also doesn’t let him sit with the idea that maybe it was all in his mind. The Sorceress shows up right away and tells him his worth. He decides he believes her within a minute and wakes back up on Eternia. We only see Adam’s corpse for a split second before he’s back and triumphant. Which again, again, I know, the movie also wants to cater to young kids, it doesn’t want to get too scary—but I watched Atreyu stab a cosmic doom wolf to death with a piece of driftwood, and he had his hand in that sucker’s guts up to his wrist. When he pulled his hand back his whole arm was dripping with gore. If you’re going to show us the hero drawing his own sword from his chest, becoming both Excalibur AND Stone in one, fucking show it to us. But then it does itself one better and now, as He-Man, he tries to reason with Skeletor, who still chooses violence, and He-Man literally kills him. He pulverizes him with the power of Greyskull until there’s just a heap of bones and a cloak. That’s it. No reprieve, no prison, no further attempt at redemption: He-Man finally accepts that Skeletor is, as he keeps saying, “the villain,” and Eternia will only know peace if he’s dead. That’s fantastic! Sometimes you can’t reason with the villain. Sometimes the villain, as Skeletor himself explicitly says in He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, “likes being evil.” Sometimes the cruelty is the point. The over-arching idea of an HR administrator learning that the only possible conflict resolution here is murder? That’s a fantastic dark joke. But… then we get not one but three mid-and-end-credits scenes that undo all of it. First: ORKO. Goddammit. The credits have barely begun to roll when Orko shows up to talk to us about how masculinity isn’t all about having muscles. Which, yes, great! This would have been hilarious if the film had just landed its main theme better! But also, if they could animate Orko anyway, why the hell wasn’t he in the rest of the movie! Yes, yes, I suppose I should just be grateful Travis Knight didn’t try to reboot Gwildor, but come on. You make me sit through an entirely Orko-free movie, then wave the fact that you had the capacity to animate Orko the whole time right in my face??? Two: Yes, they teased a She-Ra appearance! Of course they did! And if they use the sequel to give us a live-action version of the He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special, complete with Ryan Gosling as Bow singing his terrible, terrible holiday song, I’ll retroactively give this movie a glowing review. Three: Of course Evil-Lyn scuttles back into Castle Greyskull somehow, finds Skeletor’s skull, and implies she’s going to bring him back to life. You’d think the Sorceress would lock the fucking castle door after all this. But since the mid-credits scene of five minutes earlier also promised HORDAK, that’s going to mean Skeletor is at best a second-level villain in the sequel, when this movie already coasted heavily on the fact that everyone knows who Skeletor is. That’s, you know, if they get a sequel, given that Masters of the Universe doesn’t seem to be lighting the box office on fire. Personally I’ll be over here rooting for the smaller indie films to continue their ascent, or, if there must be a sequel, for another Sheep Detectives movie to actually give Nicholas Galitzine a finished script. Or actually, why can’t we have a sequel to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a movie that did everything this one tries to do, but succeeded beautifully and was rewarded with terrible box office numbers and general apathy. Alright, I’ll stop. I wanted this to be good, but it never quite pulled off any of what it tried. Failing good, I wanted it to at least be fun, but it was such a paint-by-number fantasy movie that even that didn’t land. And before I go, I’ll tell you: At one point, during a battle, “Fisto” and “Ram-Man” are fighting back-to-back. We still don’t know these characters actual names, but Fisto yells “Give ‘em head, Ram-Man!”—and the two men stop, look at each other, acknowledge the awkwardness of what was just said, and then keep fighting. Tell the joke or don’t, movie. Pick a goddamn side.[end-mark] The post <em>Masters of the Universe</em> Needs to Commit appeared first on Reactor.

News Treasure Island Ridley Scott to Adapt Treasure Island, With Hugh Jackman as Long John Silver Ahoy! By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 8, 2026 Screenshot: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Fox Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is set to sail onto the big screen. Today, Deadline reported that none other than Ridley Scott (The Martian, Prometheus, Gladiator II, and also the upcoming film, The Dog Stars) will direct an adaptation of Stevenson’s iconic tale, with Hugh Jackman (pictured above as a grizzled Wolverine in Logan) on board to play the pirate, Long John Silver. According to Deadline, the Scott and Jackman package, which is currently being shopped to studios, will be a “new take” on Stevenson’s story. What that new take is, however, is unclear. The original story was first published in 1883 and centers on a young man named Jim Hawkins who finds himself on a ship searching for buried treasure, with some former-pirates-turned-crew (including Long John Silver) looking to mutiny and claim the treasure as their own. Scott’s version will see Jack Thorne (HBO’s His Dark Materials, Enola Holmes, Adolescence) penning the script. This is also not the only Treasure Island adaptation in the works. Back in March, MGM+ announced it was making a series based on the novel, with Hayley Atwell and David Oyelowo starring. As for the film, we’ll have to wait and see when the production will land to get further news on if/when it will premiere in a theater near you. [end-mark] The post Ridley Scott to Adapt <i>Treasure Island</i>, With Hugh Jackman as Long John Silver appeared first on Reactor.

News The Dog Stars It’s the End of the World Again in the Trailer for Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars Nobody feels fine, though By Molly Templeton | Published on June 8, 2026 Screenshot: 20th Century Studios   Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Studios   Peter Heller’s 2012 novel The Dog Stars was a bestseller, which might explain why Ridley Scott (Gladiator) wanted to make it into a movie. But in 2026—after more post-apocalyptic movies and series than I can count on both hands—the story of folks trying not to be desperately miserable after the end of the world feels awfully familiar. It doesn’t help that this first trailer went for the painfully-on-the-nose song choice with Nine Inch Nails’ “The Day the World Went Away.” If you can watch this trailer without snorting a little bit at the lyrics, you are made of stronger stuff than I. But we are clearly meant to take this all very seriously. Jacob Elordi plays a pilot who thought himself very lucky before the end of the world. He had—but does not seem to still have—a wife. He hangs out with a haggard Josh Brolin and a very clean-faced Margaret Qualley. It seems like almost everyone else left in the world … really sucks. As the synopsis says: The film tells the story of Hig (Jacob Elordi), a young pilot who, together with a military survivalist, Bangley (Josh Brolin), has carved out an efficient but isolated homestead in a brutal post-apocalyptic world. But when Hig receives a mysterious radio transmission, he ventures into the unknown in search of the hope and humanity he still believes exist. There is also a dog, and I can only assume nothing good happens to them. Unlike a lot of other end-of-the-world scenarios, this trailer does have a handful of gorgeous shots of the world without humans, lush and green. But there are also empty cities shot in a chilly blue-brown light that recalls The Walking Dead. I don’t think there are actual zombies here—just desperate people resorting to violence and destruction, like they always do in the movies, no matter what the facts tell us. The Dog Stars has a great cast that also includes Allison Janney, Benedict Wong, and Guy Pearce. The world ends in theaters on August 28th.[end-mark] The post It’s the End of the World Again in the Trailer for Ridley Scott’s <i>The Dog Stars</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat The Rewrite Begins: The Vampire Lestat, “Detroit” “The fourth best thing a vampire can do to avoid thinking about the past is to have sex.” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 8, 2026 Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC Every single time I think about this show, I think about one image: the photo someone posted of the first page of The Tale of the Body Thief, but with “Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel” written over the first line (which is “The vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It’s about something that happened to me.”). The vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) does not yet use YouTube. The vampire Lestat does not write a cheugy little book. He would never do anything so obvious as responding to Louis’ story—as told by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian)—with another book. “No one reads anymore!” according to Louis (Jacob Anderson), and while that may not actually be the case, it is the case that Daniel’s book came out, everyone learned that vampires were real, and then they went, “Huh,” and opened TikTok again. Modern life, as a very different band once said, is rubbish. People are out there swiping left on gods. What’s a lovelorn drama queen who wants to set the record straight to do? Welcome to the show formerly known as Interview with the Vampire, in which the immortal Lestat is going to spend a good deal of time never giving a simple answer to the question “Why rock music?” In the season premiere, he is for much of the time incapable of giving a coherent answer to anything, having once again made very poor choices about which people on which to snack. The episode title/location of this week’s vampire concert, “Detroit,” summons up recollections of Tom Hiddleston’s modernity-avoiding vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive, but there’s none of his reticence here. No: We are here for flamboyance, tight pants, unsubtle lyrical double entendres, drug-trip fight sequences, and a story so out of order Lestat himself keeps getting mixed up. There are also about a million hints about a vampire queen and assorted suggestions that shit is going to go epically, globally sideways before long, but, like Lestat, I’m getting ahead of myself. This episode will make your brain do that. It was remarkably challenging, after one viewing, to line up the scenes in my head, make them sit still and solidify. Narrative, as has been shown over and over again on this show, is slippery. Stories are told; the teller makes all the difference.  Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC Now Lestat is doing the telling. But to whom? With a new season and a new name comes a new framing device (one that the more fluent-in-musical among us noticed is a direct Phantom of the Opera reference). At some unspecified point in the future, an auction takes place in an airplane hangar. Several known quantities arrive looking the worse for wear: Louis is missing a foot, Armand (Assad Zaman) an eye. There’s a cardinal? (The church guy, not the bird; IMDb lists him as “Vatican rep.”) Raglan James (Justin Kirk) looks just fine, though he gets up in apparent alarm when the second item goes up for sale: a “music box” curated by Lestat, containing a vinyl pressing of all his masters and 111 vinyl records containing an “omniscient history” of the album release and tour of the band The Vampire Lestat—and the global catastrophes that followed—as narrated by Lestat. The collection is called The Failures. There is also a bottle of port from 1863 and a bottle of Lestat’s blood. Armand and Louis both bid for this object, but it is not at all clear who obtains it. That’s a lot to process all at once, but there is no time to linger: It’s straight into Lestat’s version of events, picking up in Detroit, in the middle, he says. One must leave room for lots of flashbacks, after all. Lestat also makes a casual reference to the attempted extinction of the Y chromosome, which was not totally his fault, promise! It’s just teaser after teaser, and he hasn’t even gotten on stage just yet. Lestat’s voiceover has the distinct flavor of someone looking back from some distance, which does make a person wonder from how far in the future he’s speaking. Or, alternately, he’s just fucking with us—“us” including his unknown, in-show listener. Everything is a performance, darling. “Detroit” is a lush and chaotic tangle that asserts itself, repeatedly, dizzyingly, as a whole new show. It’s stage lights and dingy backstage spaces, black hallways and band flyers and stickers everywhere; it’s lush hotels and a mystifyingly spacious tour bus (complete with middle-of-the-room shower); it’s insistently of the now, giddy and replete with references to FOMO and Tiktok dances and how humans shouldn’t be allowed to swipe left on “a god.” Louis and Armand’s Dubai penthouse was almost as far from this as it was from Louis’ New Orleans flashbacks. This is a world where vampires said “Hey, we’re here,” and the world mostly just shrugged. Lestat is here to shock us out of our anesthetized algorithm comas. He may be going about it rather oddly, but at the same time he’s fairly poetic about it all: “They came for cosplay and left converted and I baptized them the beautiful unwell.” If his poetry has the ring of the overpracticed, well, he did say he needed about 50 years of practice.  Thrown into the chaos of Lestat’s narration of his pursuit of hedonistic delights are the practical details of vampiric life on the road with a band that doesn’t even really know there’s a vampire among them. There is a manager. There is a doofy body double (also played by Sam Reid) who is sent to strip-mall Applebee’s to take photos with fans in order to convince people that the vampire schtick is just a schtick. There is a familiar on-call doctor for blood transfusions. I am not entirely clear on the role of Dee (Amaka Umeh), but she seems to serve in several capacities and be on the payroll, if her unintentionally hilarious, deeply stressed-out recitation of a mantra about work-life balance is anything to go by.  And then there is Daniel Molloy, now a vampire and quite chipper about it, who is directing a documentary about the tour. At present it mostly seems to consist of crowd scenes and Lestat being difficult to interview. The documentary, Lestat says, is the liner notes to his story. The band’s sound is what he hopes will “counteract Mr. du Lac’s portrayal of me as a mayonnaise villain with sociopathic tendencies.” Or is he just saying that?   Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC In The Vampire Lestat, the novel, it is rock that brings Lestat up out of the coffin where he has been sleeping for years. It is Satan’s Night Out, in part, that tempts him back to the world, where he decides to use music—and his own autobiography—to tell his side of the story. At the end of Interview with the Vampire’s second season, I had a theory about why he would do it this time: not just to tell his side of the story, but to take the heat off Louis, who closed out that season by basically inviting all the vampires in the world to come visit. It would, could, be a way of saving Louis again. But as far as we know, he’s still quite angry with Louis. The Montreal-at-Halloween flashback is charming as hell: vampire Facetime! Louis being naive about saving files in the cloud! Lestat’s outraged “NO THANK YOU!” at the bookstore clerks! Lestat’s editing binge!!! That moment may, in all honesty, be my favorite moment in this entire episode, especially for how it’s mirrored by his editing of the band’s painful song. But first: LITTLE TINY LOUIS HALLOWEEN COSTUME WITH HIS PERIOD-INAPPROPRIATE CAMERA! That poor kid. Bless. I hope one of his friends traded him for that Mounds. (The worst candy. He can have all of mine.) Lestat is reacting to everything: someone else’s version of him, someone else’s bad songs, someone else dressed like Louis. It’s Lestat’s version of the story, and yet he’s not at all in control. But the next performance demonstrates that sometimes, it’s better to not be in control: When his guitarist (Noah Reid) once again steps all over Lestat’s violin solo (!!!!!!), he tries, in a rage, to bite him, and instead gets slapped back by… what, exactly? The majesty of the song going somewhere unexpected? The rawness of his own feelings? I’m not a thousand percent sold on his sudden onstage moment of transformation, or the revelation that he was the one holding the band back. In concept, yes: if it’s a band, not a frontman with a backing group of paid players, it has to be a band. But nothing changes except that Lestat tries to bite one of them. The song remains the song. (The best of the songs, to be fair.)  Our unreliable narrator feels extra unreliable here, when the muses come out. And he’s not even drugged to the gills yet. Lestat, Lestat, Lestat. I will take a million of his bad choices when they lead to scenes like the one in which Daniel and Dee are using blood and cocaine to revive drained Baby Jenks (Ella Ballentine), who meanwhile is floating on the ceiling, Trainspotting baby style, telling Lestat all kinds of things she could not possibly know. Why is Lestat so sad? Why does he keep coin-op dryering himself? And why is Daniel going to die badly? When Lestat is on drugs he is especially incoherent, leaping around in time (the narrative voice that announces which of his 111 albums you’re listening to skips attentively with him). Puking blood in a motel toilet. Dressed to the nines in a pink corseted suit for the fancy hotel opening. Face melting. Pissing in eco-friendly urinals and making the locals mad. (I quite liked Rus. They were right about “Long Face.” Even Lestat said so.) Sex in the elevator, with bonus tangent about where sex ranks on the things that vampires enjoy (fourth place, no trophy). He keeps talking about the queen’s blood (we are very clearly setting up Queen of the Damned, which feels like it’s going to creep into this season for sure). He gets disrespectful about pronouns when he’s mad. He is very into all the things about the body, about the physiology of vampires, that Louis, so tasteful, left out.  Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC This—when he’s high as a kite and peeing and fucking—is when he gets the most overt about what Louis got wrong and elided. The writing in this episode is dizzying, poetic, dense, cramming things in one on top of another, like Lestat wants to change the record through sheer overwhelm. He talks about the wolves he fought as a youth, and how for a time he let that define him, while fighting the Tooth Team in the hallway. (The way he snarls at their outdated vampire biases, like he’s stuck at dinner with a homophobic uncle!) He tosses off some lines about how he probably owes Daniel his life for that hallway save and a bit about how probably a bunch of other people wouldn’t be dead if he’d died then. He never stops talking. Where Louis was measured and cautious, trying to control the narrative, Lestat just goes. He’s a wind-up toy of emotional damage. And some physical damage, too. The hallway fight is great. There is a body stuck in the ceiling by the end of it. I do want to know about the cleanup, though. Lestat rolls back into the party, murders Tim, reveals his nature once and for all to his previously skeptical bandmates, and flies out the window while muttering about how gods hang out in the clouds alone. There are a LOT of bodies back in that hallway. These vampires don’t conveniently turn to dust like they did on Buffy. Did Daniel have to deal with them? Does the vampire themed hotel also have a handy incinerator?  I know these are not important questions. I know I’m supposed to be left gasping at the Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) reveal. This is where my recent reread of the book is a detriment: I love book Gabrielle, who wants to fuck off to the wild places of the world and basically ignore the world of men (one of the texts Lestat gets hints at this). I am not sold on Ehle’s wig and I am not sold on focusing on this part of her character rather than her immediate embrace of trousers and freedom.  But! It’s just an introduction. And showrunner Rolin Jones—who co-wrote this episode with Hannah Moscovitch—has, by the end, pulled off something astonishing: When Lestat crawls across the bed and kisses his “fledgling, lover, mother,” it’s just one more moment of excess. One more variety of physical chaos; one more item on the long list of ways Lestat has used, discussed, abused, enjoyed, overshared with, his physical being in this episode. The physical excess is everywhere: OD’ing on drugs and blood; the bassist getting a blowjob in the middle of the backstage space; Daniel drinking from Dee; the long, long scene of vampire pissing. Of course Lestat gives out full-size candy bars for Halloween. If you’re going to do it, do it. And if you have an immortal body, you get to do it—whatever version of “it” floats your boat—more, harder, louder, longer. (Or not that long, in the case of the elevator. But he was on a lot of drugs.) Rock is where you go to do excess. It’s where you go when you admire icons like Bowie and Prince and Freddie Mercury. It’s a welcoming place when you want to join a long and storied and occasionally dubious tradition of songs that are just elaborate metaphors for sex (“Black Licorice” is going on that playlist along with “Little Red Corvette” and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” among ever so many others).  Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC In the early pages of The Vampire Lestat, Lestat says: I was enchanted by the world of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don’t think the world of ages past had ever seen. He also compares it to the Italian commedia. He compares it to a lot of things. Lestat has been a performer for centuries (though sure, yes, he spent one of those literally underground. Or so he says). He’s a theater kid who is also a vampire. Honestly I don’t think he could do anything but rock. (That doesn’t mean he’s doing it well.) I have a million more thoughts on this—sorry not sorry, but you got as your Lestat reviewer the last unembarrassed rock-enjoyer on the internet, apparently—but I’m trying to stop myself from doing too much theorizing until I see more of what the mad geniuses behind this show are doing here. “Detroit” is a new paradigm, a new narrator, a new everything. It takes the beautiful, perfect two seasons of Interview with the Vampire and tosses them up into the air to scatter like cocaine-laced glitter. It’s carnal and lush and overtly destructive. This is what a quarter-millenium crisis looks like.  LITTLE SIPS CORVALLIS. I am deceased that he got sloppy in Corvallis. Corvallis is a town in Oregon of about sixty thousand people. Corvallis is in between Portland (where a lot of bands play) and Eugene (where a decent number of bands play). Corvallis is not a place where a lot of bands play. Someone on this writing staff has been to Corvallis.  The way Sam Reid as Lestat pronounced Red-DEET just sent me. I was quite charmed to find that Joey Chestnut is in fact a real competitive eater.  As a fan of the Scottish band Idlewild I was intrigued by the many posters for “Idyllwild.” Lestat noting that there are “no witches” in Montreal made my ears prick right up. VAMPONS Really feel like that was entirely too casual a response to the entire city of Detroit going dark.  You absolutely know that Lestat calls Daniel “Dan” to annoy him.  “And yet it’s respectful, like silence at a urinal.” “I am building a career that supports my well-being.” If the Talamasca put Sam (Christopher Geary) at the Theatre des Vampires, and then he wrote that terrible play for Santiago—were the Talamasca involved in trying to overthrow Armand? I know that show got cancelled but I feel like I really need to go back and watch it. [end-mark] The post The Rewrite Begins: <i>The Vampire Lestat</i>, “Detroit” appeared first on Reactor.

News Hercule Edward Bluemel Will Play Young Poirot in Upcoming Series, Hercule The BritBox show will center on Agatha Christie’s iconic detective as he tackles his first cases By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 8, 2026 Credit: Mammoth Screen / Jonathan Ford Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Mammoth Screen / Jonathan Ford Hercule, the BBC and BritBox television series centered on Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective, has found its lead. Today, BritBox announced that Edward Bluemel (We Might Regret This, My Lady Jane) will play Hercule Poirot, the famous investigator known for sporting an extravagant mustache. Hercule, however, is more of an origin story for Poirot, and will cover the detective’s first cases. It’s not clear if the young Bluemel will sport the mustache or not. According to BritBox, the show will be “an intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars.” It will focus on three of Christie’s “most celebrated stories” and also center on Hercule’s new friendship with Captain Arthur Hastings, his first run-ins with Scotland Yard’s James Japp, and butts heads with “one particular nemesis,” though BritBox is being coy on who the last will be. Poirot, of course, has been played by several actors over the years, including Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich, and David Suchet. “I feel very lucky to have been trusted with such an iconic character who has been played by so many great actors,” Bluemel said in a statement. “I can’t wait to continue Hercule’s legacy.” The new Poirot series comes from Benji Walters (Code of Silence, The Leopard, Obsession), with Jonny Campbell (Am I Being Unreasonable?, Dracula) directing the first two episodes. Filming will begin this summer primarily in Liverpool, with no news on when the show will make its way to BritBox. [end-mark] The post Edward Bluemel Will Play Young Poirot in Upcoming Series, <i>Hercule</i> appeared first on Reactor.