Matt Goddard

For many gamers, it’s in the commercial before it’s in the game. Consoles and their headline franchises have competed on graphics and technology for years. But their advertising has been just as competitive. Rivalry and ad agency creativity has meant some of the biggest video games have made their marks on pop culture through TV campaigns as much as in-game campaigns.
Many commercials have stood the test of time, outliving the games and consoles they promoted. We’ve picked out the best...

Independent cinemas used to be a premier hang-out for students. But with multiplexes pushing smaller venues out of picture, Matt Goddard asks whether it's curtains for the art-house cinema.

Black Hawk Down: Two decades on from the battle whi...

Jack Kirby earned the nickname ‘King’ for a good reason. No other writer or artist has influenced comic books like the Manhattan native. Although he described comics as a “form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper,” Kirby was a prolific all-rounder who left us with a galaxy of works and a multiverse of characters few can match.
When he was 14, Jack Kirby left the Pratt Institute just one week after enrolling. He later explained to The Comics Journal that it was because he “intend...

What makes a good movie trilogy? As this list demonstrates, there are many ways to approach it, but no strict formula. Some of cinema’s best-loved trilogies have emerged by accident.
Some trilogies stick to Scream’s jokey formula, increasing threat and spectacle while adding callbacks and twists. Others have picked up unfilmable book sequences and made adapting them look simple.
But there are rules...

The Flash first sped onto the pages of All-American Publications in 1940. Since then, several super speedsters have carried the name, each battling an array of colorful villains in the twin cities of Central and Keystone.
When DC revived superhero comics in the 1950s, they kickstarted what we now call the Silver Age. A new Scarlet speedster, police scientist Barry Allen, was at the forefront of the resurgence. It was against him that a group of foes banded together...

Where would horror be without fear of the unknown? That’s what the 1990s had to deal with, trapped at the end of a century that had advanced cinematic scares from Edison’s Frankenstein to Jason arriving in Manhattan. Horror had exploded onto the big screen throughout the ’70s and ’80s, introducing sub-genres and a whole new generation of boogeymen. No wonder ’90s horror is so self-conscious.
Very few ’90s releases can claim a spot in the all-time horror top 50, but it was a decade that knew i...

Post-apocalyptic fiction has captured our collective imagination for thousands of years. When it comes to speculative fiction, it’s hard to beat. It’s the ultimate story of humanity facing impossible odds, even if we’ve brought them on ourselves.

The Justice League has been defending the world, and the multiverse, since 1960 when they took up the torch left by the Justice Society of America. That earlier superteam disbanded in the early 1950s, not because of a villainous plot, but the greater threat of falling comic sales. Less than a decade later, the Silver Age of Comics rejuvenated the superhero genre and unleashed a new generation of famous characters...

It’s hard to think of a medium where the Dark Knight of Gotham hasn’t made his mark. Batman and his distinctive gallery of villains have taken a prominent place in pop culture, and over the past thirty years, that’s included animated features as well as live-action films.
Batman first jumped into animation in 1993 on the back of his critically and commercially successful runs at movie theaters and on television.

Quentin Tarantino 50th birthday: Tarantinoverse flo...

The Star Wars films are famous for their action, set pieces, epic space imagery, and stirring music. They’re also full of classic quotes. You don’t need to have bullseyed many womp rats in a T-16 to know one or two lines from Star Wars.
The first Star Wars movie didn’t just change cinema when it was released in 1977⏤it found an immediate place in pop culture that it has never left. While the scripts and their quotability vary, the Skywalker saga and its tie-in movies have inspired everything ...

Marvel’s What If…? is the new animated anthology show that spins alternative realities from the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it.
What would have happened, for instance, if Peggy Carter had become the First Avenger instead of Steve Rogers? What if Tony Stark was saved from his company’s missile by Erik Killmonger? What if T’Challa had become Star-Lord? These questions and more are being answered weekly and exclusively on Disney Plus through October 2021.
The possibilities of What If…? ...

What If…? is a Marvel animated series that explores alternative timelines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s the fourth streaming series to launch as part of the MCU’s Phase 4 and features many of the characters and cast from the movies. What If…? has a long history. The new show is based on the comic series of the same name, which has been published since 1977...