The first trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash is finally here, and it looks like James Cameron might have made another banger.

Though Avatar: The Way of Water ended on a hopeful note with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their family finding a new home with a different group of Na’vi, Fire and Ash‘s trailer makes it clear that a brutal conflict is brewing on Pandora. While human / Na’vi recombinants like Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) are still a constant threat, the real danger appears to be Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People.

Jake and his clan have plenty of guns and arrows, but Varang’s ability to manipulate fire with just her hands seems like the sort of thing that might give her people a huge advantage as they set their sights on destroying their fellow Na’vi. Thankfully, the trailer doesn’t spell out how Fire and Ash will bring all of its characters together. But it does make it look like the movie’s going to be a feast for the eyes when it hits theaters on December 19th.

James Gunn knows that most people are familiar with Superman’s origin story, which is why DC Studios’ new feature about the Man of Steel opens at a point when he has already become a world famous superhero. Instead of rehashing the tragic beats of Krypton’s destruction, the movie is punctuated with moments that show you how deeply Superman cherishes the few remaining pieces of his homeworld. He loves his Kryptonian family crest and his out-of-control superdog. But the most impressive and alien keepsake that Clark Kent holds close to his heart is a massive stronghold buried deep beneath the ice in Antarctica.

The Fortress of Solitude (which originated in Street & Smith’s Doc Savage pulps from the 1930s) has been part of Superman’s lore since the Golden Age of comics, when it was first introduced as a hidden citadel tucked into a mountainside by Metropolis. Over the years, the Fortress has been located in a variety of places and taken on different forms, but Gunn’s Superman presents the structure as most people know it — a gleaming cluster of gargantuan crystals situated in the frozen wilderness. Everything about the Fortress is so grand and otherworldly that one could easily assume that DC Studios would have elected to create the whole thing with VFX.

There are digital elements to the new Superman‘s take on the Fortress, but Gunn has always been a fan of practically created effects. Having worked with Gunn on The Suicide Squad, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, production designer Beth Mickle was intimately familiar with his filmmaking sensibilities. Mickle could see Gunn’s vision for a Superman movie that was modern but nostalgic and vibrant like a classic comic book.

When I spoke with Mickle recently about her work on Superman, she told me that creating the new Fortress of Solitude wasn’t just difficult — it was an exercise in patience and experimentation. Mickle was certain that going the practical route would result in a much more magical final product, but she wasn’t always sure how she and the rest of Superman‘s production team would pull it off.

“I’ve been on those sets where it’s just a full blue screen and the poor actor is sitting there looking at a blue tennis ball, trying to figure out how they’re supposed to be reacting to it,” Mickle said. “I feel like, no matter what, practicality comes across in the filmmaking and in the performances. But it’s really tough to pull practicality like this off seamlessly.”

Like Gunn, Mickle was a big fan of Richard Donner’s first Superman film, in which Christopher Reeves’ Clark Kent summons the Fortress of Solitude by tossing a green crystal into Arctic waters. Though she wanted to pay homage to the 1978 classic, Mickle was also interested in exploring how else the Fortress could be depicted.

“I started looking at the way that crystals sometimes grow naturally from rocks, where they kind of splay upward and have this propulsive, explosive feel,” Mickle explained. “I thought to myself, ‘You know, that actually feels a bit like Superman, exploding up into the sky.'” 

Mickle’s ideas about the Fortress as a crystalline eruption also got her thinking about nature and how the structure’s shape could be inspired by things like the ocean and the way that sprays of water can freeze in mid-air in the right conditions. Photographs of crashing waves gave Mickle a general idea of what the Fortress’ silhouette should look like from a distance. But for the building’s interior, Mickle turned to DC’s Silver Age comics from the ’50s and ’60s — an era that depicted the Fortress, as Gunn described it, as “Superman’s man cave.”

“In those comics, the Fortress is where Superman has his lab set up to do experiments, and he’s got a zoo of all the interplanetary plant life and animals he comes across,” Mickle said. “Once we had committed to the Silver Age visual reference, we started looking at a lot of beautiful, mid-century, minimalist, Frank Lloyd Wright-style interiors for more inspiration. That helped us figure out the multilevel, terraced layout that our Fortress has.”

From there, the creative team had to decide where the crystals would go and how they would make the ethereal, translucent pillars. The crew spent about three months on research and development into different methods of using resin to build the Fortress of Solitude piece by piece. There were plenty of hiccups early on. Many of the larger resin crystals — which ranged in length from 12 to 40 feet — would crumble under their own weight or require a certain kind of ribbing to maintain their shape that was too visible to use on film. As other parts of the Fortress’ interior were being constructed on a soundstage in Atlanta, Mickle’s team was trying to figure out how to get the crystals to work. And at one point, she contemplated something a bit more elementary.

“After one sleepless night, I asked my art director, ‘Would it be crazy to actually build this out of real ice and just keep the stage really chilled?’” Mickle recalled. “We both laughed at the absurdity of it, but in that moment of desperation, I was like, ‘I don’t know, do we bring in ice sculptures?'”

In the end, Mickle and construction coordinator Chris Snyder developed a resin pouring method that, while more involved, resulted in crystals that were strong enough to work with. Rather than pouring the resin to make single columns, the team began pouring them as halves, letting them dry, and then bonding them together afterward. This had the added benefit of giving the crystals an unintentional shimmering luster that was in line with the film’s aesthetic.

While all 242 of the crystals now looked great, the next hurdle was getting them positioned to evoke that explosive, propulsive feel that Mickle aimed for. To resemble naturally forming crystals, the resin pillars needed to splay out at various angles. But because the pillars are translucent and backlit, rigging them with internal framing would have broken the fantastical illusion. That kind of internal framing could have been edited out digitally, but Mickle and the team opted for something more analog.

“We actually hung aircraft cable from the ceiling and put a little pick point on the top of each of the crystals,” Mickle explained. “We would put a crystal on its little metal base, lean it to whatever angle we wanted it to be, and then we would have a little point at the very top of the crystal that was attached to the aircraft cable so it would lock it to that exact space.”

Even though it sometimes felt like an uphill battle, Mickle said that she loved the explorational element of building it, and she’s excited to learn what else Gunn has planned for the franchise — especially when it comes to the weird and fantastical.

“I really loved the fantasy worlds here, and it was really fun getting to dive into the pocket universe of it all with Lex,” Mickle said. “We did a lot of that in Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’ll be fun to see if there’s opportunity to do stuff like that with any of the upcoming DC work. It’ll be an exploration for all of us.”

When Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, you could see flashes of the studio’s plan to further expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After years of Marvel Studios building up the Avengers, the Fox deal put the company in a position to start telling stories about the characters who ushered in the modern superhero movie frenzy, like Blade and the X-Men. But it was a little odd to hear that Marvel also planned to make the Fantastic Four a major part of the MCU’s future.

Even though the Fantastic Four have always been prominent in Marvel’s comics, the characters — created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee — had never translated well to the big screen. Fox’s first two takes on the super family from director Tim Story were fun in the so-bad-they’re-sorta-good sense, while Josh Trank’s 2015 reboot was a messy case study in how uninteresting the Fantastic Four could be when stories about them try to downplay the fact that, compared to many of Marvel’s other heroes, they’re a little hokey. 

Hollywood’s long-standing obsession with presenting superheroes as grimdark figures was at odds with the Fantastic Four’s roots in the colorful, whizbang silver age of comics — which is what makes The Fantastic Four: First Steps so refreshing. The new movie is actually kind of a blast and a promising sign that Marvel is shaking some of its bad moviemaking habits.

As meandering and largely uninspired as the MCU’s multiversal project has been, First Steps does a fantastic job presenting a reality that looks and feels truly different from what Marvel has been putting on the big screen. The story isn’t all that much to write home about. But its core quartet of performances are solid and its visuals are stunning, which might be enough to catapult it to box office success.

Set on Earth-828 (a nod to Jack Kirby’s birthday), First Steps tells the familiar tale of how genius inventor Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), diplomat Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Sue’s younger brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and former astronaut Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) become their world’s most famous superheroes. On this Earth, everyone knows the story of how Reed and his team gained strange abilities after surviving a freak accident in space that bathed them in cosmic radiation. In New York City, where the Fantastic Four are based, it’s not uncommon to see Sue whipping up force fields to shield civilians from out-of-control subway cars, or Johnny using his pyrokinetic abilities to snuff out infernos that firefighters can’t stop. But the team’s status as global icons has a lot more to do with their popular cartoon and the fact that they have established something very close to world peace through their work at the Future Foundation — a philanthropic organization focused on education and technological innovation.

The moment First Steps starts breezing through the Fantastic Four’s backstory with a series of stylized newsreels, you can see the kitschy, retrofuturistic vibe that director Matt Shakman is going for. It’s the 1960s, and the Fantastic Four are very much their world’s answer to the Beatles and the Osmonds, in terms of their international fame. On the ground, you can clearly see the work that production designer Kasra Farahani and costume designer Alexandra Byrne put into making the film’s more grounded and practical elements feel period-specific. But up in the sky, you can also see signs of how Reed’s super science has jumpstarted the development of technologies like flying cars, true artificial intelligence, and reusable space rockets. 

For understandable reasons, First Steps is going to draw a lot of comparisons to Disney and Pixar’s Incredibles movies — a franchise that obviously took a lot of aesthetic and narrative inspiration from Kirby and Lee’s comics. As was the case with The Incredibles, much of First Steps‘ story revolves around how the arrival of a baby changes the team’s family dynamics. But the new Marvel feature charts a very different course as it introduces Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), an alien from a distant planet, who arrives on a silver surfboard and warns the Fantastic Four that their planet has been selected for destruction by her master, Galactus (Ralph Ineson).

As Johnny flames on to chase the SIlver Surfer into the upper stratosphere during one of First Steps‘ early (and very good) set pieces, the movie starts to echo some of the beats of 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer for reasons that can’t entirely be blamed on screenwriters Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer. The alien villains are core parts of the Fantastic Four’s comics mythos, and there aren’t all that many ways to riff on their whole deal. Galactus is a hungry space god who must eat planets to live, and he forces the Silver Surfer to find worlds suited to his cosmic tastes. Here, Galactus is a gargantuan humanoid travelling in a massive ship, and so getting to his meals takes a bit of time. And in the days leading up to Galactus’ arrival, the world descends into a justified panic while the Fantastic Four try to figure out how to defeat a being whose existence predates their universe.

Much of what’s different about First Steps‘ take on its villains boils down to the way Shakman spends time depicting them in strange, fantastical environments out in space. Unlike many previous Marvel features that save their big, VFX-heavy set pieces for the final act, First Steps shifts into that gear much earlier with a visually stunning chase sequence that feels like a tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. You get the sense that Marvel made a point of giving its VFX teams ample time to really fine-tune their work and give it the kind of polish that can make projects like this gorgeous, even when they’re at their most ridiculous (complimentary). But as fun as those scenes are, there’s a stiffness to many of these characters’ interactions that makes the movie’s dramatic elements feel wooden and like a byproduct of shooting having begun before the script was fully fleshed out.

Though each of First Steps‘ leads delivers a solid performance that feels informed by an understanding of their characters, their chemistry is just a smidge off — not so much as to make the film bad, but enough to leave it feeling a little undercooked. It’s the sort of issue that this crew can easily iron out as the Fantastic Four go on to become fixtures within the MCU, but the studio has also been teasing that the team’s next outing will pull them out of their chic reality for a big crossover event that will probably erase Earth-828 entirely.

As solid as First Steps is, it’s arriving as Marvel is trying to course correct its way out of a flop era, and it feels like this chunk of the multiverse might have benefitted from being able to exist on its own for a little while longer before being added to the mainline MCU stew. Marvel’s movies have been hurting for a new gravitational center, though, and these characters are well suited to become headliners as the studio pivots to Doom — so it makes sense they might take their first step into the MCU a little prematurely.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps also stars Matthew Wood, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, Paul Walter Hauser, and Natasha Lyonne. The film hits theaters on July 25th.

When Nintendo first announced the Switch 2’s slate of launch titles, people were very quick to cry foul about how few original, exclusive games the company had lined up for its latest console. There were ports from other systems and updated versions of original Switch games. But Mario Kart World was the Switch 2’s only major new exclusive title, which, for some, put a further damper on a launch that was already mired in confusion about pricing and game key cards.

While the Switch 2’s sales disproved that pessimistic read, the system’s relatively thin selection of exclusives has continued to be a talking point in the ongoing discourse about whether the overall launch was exciting enough. But after a month of the Switch 2 being on the market, what do you know — there just so happens to be a new game for it out this week. Donkey Kong Bananza‘s arrival isn’t at all a surprise because Nintendo told everyone exactly when it would be available. Being made to wait a bit might have rubbed some folks the wrong way, but in a world where we all have a back catalog of games that we’ve yet to finish (or even start in some cases), a measured release schedule kind of feels like a good thing.

Back in April when Nintendo first announced all of the Switch 2 games slated to come out through the end of 2025, you could see that the company was loosely following a monthly release schedule for its new exclusives. June would go to Mario Kart World and Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. And Donkey Kong Bananza would drop in July amid the releases of a couple Switch 2 editions of older games. At the time, Nintendo said that Drag x Drive would debut at some point in “the summer,” but it has since pegged the game to a firm August 14th release date.

Currently, there’s nothing on the docket for September, but the month could easily go to Kirby Air Riders, which is supposed to come out this year. And after Pokémon Legends: Z-A‘s release in October, the “winter” will belong to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (and maybe Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which is also due out sometime in 2025).

Looking at Nintendo’s roadmap for the rest of the year, it feels as if the company is trying to pace things in a way that gives people time to really sit with and enjoy its exclusives. For every hardcore gamer who prides themself on speeding through a title and being the first to uncover or unlock all of its surprises, there are far more casuals who prefer taking their time. Nintendo could have opted to flood the zone with more exclusives from the jump — a move that probably would have made the Switch 2’s launch seem like a splashier beat in the console wars’ twilight hours. But by spacing things out, the company is guaranteeing that there will be a steady stream of new stuff for people to dig into, and giving people ample time to decide if they’re willing to pay the games’ higher prices.

The Switch 2 is Nintendo’s new flagship, which is to say it’s not going away anytime soon and there will be plenty more games for it in due time. Had Donkey Kong Bananza dropped alongside Mario Kart World, neither game would have been able to take up so much space and command attention they way they could with some distance between them. Releasing new titles at a steady pace was a major part of Nintendo’s vision for the original Switch, and that strategy paid off through the console’s life cycle. Now it looks like Nintendo’s sticking to its guns, and the Switch 2 will probably be better off for it.