Dexter Fletcher’s fantasy Elton John biopic has given us its first glimpse of Taron Egerton in action – with a teaser that brings us singing, dancing, and a disco full of flying people. 

We already know that Rocketman is going to be a less than conventional biopic – with Egerton telling us the film will be a “musical fantasy” that uses John’s songs to “express important beats in his life at emotional moments” – and the teaser already looks like it has plenty of amazing musical set-pieces built around John’s hits. 

We also know that the film won’t be holding back on showing the singer’s dark side either. John is producing the film, alongside husband David Furnish, and Kingsman’s Matthew Vaughn, but reportedly told Fletcher to show him, warts and all. 

“This film is going to make people’s jaws hit the ground,” Vaughn told The Hollywood Reporter. “Elton just said, ‘Tell it all. Go as R-rated as you need to’. And we do just that, with his blessing. The flaws and the genius are all there.” (Cue the obligatory Bo-Jack Horseman shot of a celebrity looking jaded at the bottom of a swimming pool…). The film has also been through a bit of a rough ride already since John originally wanted Justin Timberlake to play him, before a very different version almost started shooting with Tom Hardy in the lead.  

Still, with flashes of Fletcher’s feel-good musical, Sunshine On Leith, some fantastic looking fantasy sequences, Fletcher’s spot-on voice and look, and John’s neck-prickling hits, Rocketman looks like it could be something pretty special when it opens on May 17^th, 2019.

This review contains spoilers.

12.2 The Wedding Gift Wormhole

The gulf between the season’s first outing and this couldn’t be bigger. While The Conjugal Configuration opted for reestablishing the status quo without much wit or humour to speak of, The Wedding Gift Wormhole packs a huge amount of plot and hijinks into twenty-one minutes while also managing to put a smile on your face and a laugh in your belly.

The main thrust of the episode involves, as it should, the interplay between Sheldon, Amy, Penny and Leonard. When the latter couple gifts the former with a mysterious glass cylinder, it slowly becomes apparent that its mystery was part of the gift and Leonard and Penny are simply treating their friends to same maddening curiosity that they experienced when handed it by Howard and Bernadette.

The wand, which Amy theorises might be a ‘marital aid’ (nothing like a butt plug joke to liven up an episode), actually originates from Raj, who gave it to Howard as a genuine wedding gift. The game of hot potato led Penny and Leonard to torture their friends, but it’s them who come out looking silly when Amy and Sheldon have a wonderful time searching for clues.

There are several great things about this storyline, but the main one is the nostalgia tour that it sneaks in. No one owns up to the game at the end, and Sheldon and Amy are happier than ever thinking that they’ve won some grand scavenger hunt. The cherry on top – they’ve locked Leonard and Penny out of their Wi-Fi and written down their new password in a code they now have to solve.

But the thing everyone’s talking about is Raj. Finally – finally! – the show appears to be taking Raj’s love life seriously, and not treating it as an excuse to invite various guest stars into the show for its final season. For too long the poor lad has drawn the narrative short straw, and its rarely led to anything good, funny or impactful. Now, Raj is getting married, and it promises to be a huge boost for the season.

He comes to the realisation that he’s had enough of being single in his late-thirties, and decides that an arranged marriage might not be the worst thing after all. It’s done sensitively and without judgement, which is nice, and I’m as excited to meet Anu as everyone else. Special points to Kaley Cuoco for her delivery of a simple ‘no’ when Raj makes the announcement.

Even Stuart gets his turn to shine in this episode, finally asking Denise on a date but completely overcompensating beforehand by getting his hair dyed, a spray tan and a third thing that’s hidden by his pants (I dread to think). She doesn’t mind, and that’s the nicest anyone’s ever been to Stuart.

The Big Bang Theory always benefits when the characters are being kind to one another, and maybe, just maybe, everyone on the show can end up happy, in love and fulfilled. Best of all, The Wedding Gift Wormhole suggests that we might have a whale of a time getting there, and this much-maligned series can redeem itself in its eleventh hour.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, The Conjugal Configuration, here.

Kathleen Kennedy will continue in her role as Lucasfilm president for at least three more years through to 2021, according to THR. Indeed, with one swift stroke of the pen, Kennedy has struck down the small contingent of Star Wars fans who have demanded her resignation since she took over as head of Lucasfilm.

While Kennedy’s time as Lucasfilm president has come with some drama behind the scenes, including the exit of Solo directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and Episode IX director Colin Trevorrow, not to mention replacing Gareth Edwards and Josh Trank as the directors of Rogue One and the Boba Fett movie respectively, those headlines have been eclipsed by the massive box office success of the Disney era Star Wars movies. Despite Solo‘s notably poor performance last May, Kennedy’s Star Wars movies have collectively earned almost $4.5 billion at the global box office. It’s not all that surprising that Disney wants to keep Kennedy around.

Next up on Kennedy’s list is getting Episode IX ready for its December 2019 release date. No other movies have been given a firm spot on the Star Wars release schedule beyond the last installment in the Skywalker saga, but there are other projects in development, including a new trilogy being developed by The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and a series of films from Game Of Thrones creator D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. 

While Disney head Bob Iger recently said that fans should expect a slowdown in the production of new Star Wars movies, the franchise is poised to make a bigger jump into television than ever before. Not only is a new animated series, Star Wars Resistance, set to premiere on The Disney Channel in October, but there’s also a live-action series from Jon Favreau on the way as well as a new season of The Clone Wars set to premiere on Disney’s upcoming streaming service. 

There’s a lot more Star Wars coming in the next few months and it will all be under Kennedy’s watchful eye. May the Force be with her.

Ed Boon, Creative Director of NetherRealm Studios and co-creator of the Mortal Kombat series, has shared what he imagined Spider-Man PS4 would have looked like if his studio had made the game. 

No, it’s not a serious take on that concept. Instead, it’s a gif that has been edited to include some very Mortal Kombat elements in the base Spider-Man game for PS4. Specifically, it shows Spidey beating up his foes as usual, but this time we get to see the very real damage that such tremendous blows would cause via a Mortal Kombat-like x-ray camera system. 

The footage is not only genuinely well edited, but it addresses an odd problem with Insomniac’s Spider-Man: the fact that Spider-Man arguably kills quite a few people during the course of his adventure. We see in this video that you can certainly make the argument that some of Spider-Man’s normal fights would result in the deaths of quite a few bad guys, but there are also instances in the game where Spider-Man does things like punch people off buildings. Some of those thugs are caught and trapped by a mysterious web, but others are allowed to float right to the ground. We’re also fairly sure that taking a rocket to the face is going to do some pretty extensive damage.

In any case, Insomniac seems to approve of this interpretation of their game. Their Twitter account replied to Ed Boon with the message “You’d be seeing some inner INNER Demons then!!”

So what is Ed Boon actually working on? Don’t ask us. The man has been teasing Mortal Kombat projects for quite some time now, but we’ve yet to see any definitive prove that anything is actually being done with the franchise. Of course, NetherRealm did make the amazing Injustice and Injustice 2 fighting games, so there is some precedent for them being allowed to work with superheroes.

All the same, we doubt that Marvel will let them take this approach with their characters. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.