Star Wars Rogue One

The end of one month means the start of another, which also means that new things are coming to a streaming platform near you. Netflix’s July instant releases are stacked, and include a few classic cartoon dinosaur movies, the premieres of a new Netflix original shows, and one Star Wars Story.

Rogue One will have to settle for being the second-highest grossing film of the year — damn you, cultural juggernaut Finding Dory! — but it does have the distinction of being among the better-reviewed films in its franchise. Many critics have praised director Gareth Edwards’ vision of some unexplored pockets of George Lucas’ universe, singling out Darth Vader’s castle lair that appears in the film on a violent, molten-lava planet. (The planet bears a strong resemblance to Mustafar, the magma-covered site of the final showdown between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith.) Now, one of the key designers from Rogue One has provided a little background on the memorable locale and how it came to be.

Even if you’re not the biggest fan of CGI actors returned from the dead, you probably had to appreciate the ways that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards tried to bring the events of Star Wars: A New Hope more directly into his film. In several key sequences, Edwards was even able to feature unseen footage from the original 1977 film, causing fans to wonder where that new footage came from (and why they hadn’t seen it before). Are there entire archives of unseen footage that Lucasfilm has been hiding from fans for all these decades?

Everyone knew that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story wasn’t going to match the opening weekend of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That film had hype on its side, drawing off the power of a lengthy dry spell for fans and the presence of the original trilogy’s cast members. It’s unlikely that any Star Wars movie will match it ever again. With all of that said, the opening weekend of Rogue One should still be considered an enormous success, especially since these numbers would be nothing short of indisputably incredible if Star Wars wasn’t in the title.

The trailer for the handsomely-mounted live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast surfaced on Tuesday, and drew strong reactions across the board. Many were taken with the first look at the Emma Watson/Dan Stevens romance, allowing themselves to be flooded with the same swooning emotion that Disney’s animated film conjured back in 1991. Some were less impressed, expressing low-level terror at the unnatural-looking designs for Mrs. Potts, Cogsworth, Lumiere, and the rest of the anthropomorphized household object gang. But regardless of overall reception, one thing is for certain: The Guardian notes that an unprecedented crap-ton of people accessed the trailer on YouTube, making 2017’s Beauty and the Beast the most-viewed-in-a-24-hour-period trailer of all time.

A storm in the area? Brain talks about the frustration of losing your satellite TV signal.