Asa Germann Is Cast as Angel in MCU's X-Men, Wolverine's New PS5 Game Gets Trashed, and Hideo Kojima Jumps From PlayStation to Xbox

Asa Germann Is Cast as Angel in Marvel's X-Men Reboot

Asa Germann was announced as Angel in Marvel's X-Men reboot, and it was revealed that he had originally auditioned for Cyclops, which I think is stupid, so stupid. He is so not Cyclops. Whether he actually works as Angel became a debate as soon as the news broke, and I have mixed feelings on it myself.

Most people know Germann from a streaming superhero show where he plays a semi-villain and is not a very big character. That show's first season was well received, with a lot of people saying it played like an X-Men story, and it put Patrick Schwarzenegger on the map before he moved on to White Lotus. It also had strong turns from other cast members, including one actor I loved on the Sabrina show on Netflix. I disagree that the second season was as good. I thought it was pretty bad, though I always enjoyed Hamish Linklater in it.

Chance Perdomo, who was also on the show, died in a motorcycle crash while traveling to table reads and rehearsals for the second season, which was very sad, and the show had to rework itself afterward, which threw off the male to female balance of the cast. The show has been performing so poorly that it has not been renewed, to the point that Eric Kripke was going around asking people to watch it or there would not be a third season. I watched the whole thing because it is my job, and I do think it had some nice moments in it.

I do like Asa Germann. When he showed up on screen in Scream 7, my honest reaction was that I was glad he is getting more work, because creepy is his vibe. As soon as he appears, "that dude is sus," and the movie used that to misdirect people into thinking he was the killer, which he was not. Some people are upset that he was in Scream 7, seeing it as a project against Melissa Barrera, but I don't think that should be held against him. As I said, don't hate the player, hate the game, and if you want to be upset with somebody, be upset with Neve Campbell, who has more power in that situation.

Worries About a Young, Streaming Heavy X-Men Cast

Looking at this cast as a whole, I am nervous. It is extremely young, younger even than past versions of these characters. Anya Taylor-Joy, who played Magik, would now be considered the older version of these characters, and she still looks very young herself. Beyond the age issue, this is a cast built almost entirely out of streaming actors. Adam Driver is the only one here with a strong film career. I understand you have to discover talent somewhere, but there are older, undiscovered actors out there who could have given the movie a "who the heck is this person" casting surprise instead.

The actress cast as Rogue is one exception for me. She is a good choice for the movie, even if I am not sure she is a good Rogue, and my only worry is that she is going full force to promote another film for awards attention before the X-Men movie even comes out.

This streaming heavy casting worries me because of what just happened with Marvel's Disney Plus shows and with Fantastic Four, which also had a weaker cast built the same way. I like Pedro Pascal quite a bit, but I don't think he is Reed Richards, though the latest Doomsday trailer might change some minds. Chris Hemsworth was a total unknown before Thor, and that is fine, but the MCU does not swap actors out without turning it into a multiverse story, so they are stuck with a weak fit for years once it happens.

Jake Schreier is directing this X-Men movie, and he is the same director who made Thunderbolts, which I think is the least successful film in that whole run, making under four hundred million dollars after its two action scenes leaked online and nobody needed to go to a theater. That is the same move Warner Bros made with The Flash's director before that movie flopped too, and now the studio is stuck with them for a much bigger franchise film. My only hope is that Schreier has a Bryan Singer style jump in quality, going from the first X-Men to X2.

Angel's Rocky Screen History and This Cast's Other Worries

Nobody has ever seen a good X-Men movie with Angel in it, and that history is genuinely part of the concern here. Ben Foster, a great actor, played a small and forgettable version of him in X-Men: The Last Stand, and Ben Hardy played him in the also poorly received X-Men Apocalypse. Looking at Germann next to those two, I am a little scared that he fits right in with a run of mediocre Angels, though the bar is so low that he does not have much to overcome. In the comics, the character is not even that interesting until he becomes Archangel, when his money starts funding X-Men operations.

The rest of the ensemble worries me too. Mr. Sinister as the main villain is a weak choice to sell a film. Professor X is being played much younger, close in age to his own students, which is a strange dynamic. Emma Frost is older than Scott and Jean for no clear reason. And I really hate the casting of Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. It is so bad, in my opinion, because she is about the least edgy presence you could put in that role.

I ran a poll on this casting, and it came back mostly positive: thirty percent liked Germann from his streaming show, eight percent did not, fifty three percent had no idea who he is but think it could work, and another eight percent fell elsewhere. That puts roughly eighty percent of people open to the casting, which are good numbers. There is also a rumor that these new X-Men will debut in Secret Wars, and I think how they are received in that movie will make a big difference in how the standalone film is received.

Wolverine's New PS5 Game Is Getting Trashed by Reviews

Wolverine cannot catch a break. He is not in this new X-Men movie, and now his own game has gotten horrible reviews because everybody said it was bad. Insomniac Games, famous for its well regarded Spider-Man titles, made this one, and one bad game can apparently really hurt a studio's reputation, unless they put out another Spider-Man game and win people right back.

Marvel has been dominating in movies while DC has done better in animation and games, and Marvel is clearly trying to close that gap by treating Wolverine as its answer to Batman, complete with the same fan complaints about him being in everything. The problem is that Batman benefits from an incredible rogues gallery and supporting cast that Wolverine, as a character, does not really have. I think an X-Men game built around the whole team from Insomniac would have done a lot better than a standalone Wolverine game.

This reminds me of Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which I did not think was that bad from a cutscenes perspective, but which got swallowed up by political discourse over killing off fan favorite Justice League characters in what was clearly an Elseworld story, the same way a Deadpool kills the Marvel universe story would work and nobody would complain. That backlash really hurt Rocksteady as a studio. Games cost far more in money, time and manpower than movies, so a bad game can hobble a studio in a way a bad movie usually cannot.

What's Actually Wrong With the Wolverine Game

This is not an Old Man Logan story, and I think Wolverine is a genuinely tough character to stretch across the eighty to ninety hours of gameplay these games need, on top of roughly four hours of cutscenes. I am not surprised the reviews were poor, since the actual gameplay reportedly runs only about twenty hours, and when the official gameplay trailer aired, it got overshadowed by a God of War reveal about a dead wife, and my own reaction to the Wolverine footage at the time was that it seemed repetitive.

The reviews are saying exactly that: cool gameplay on paper, but you can only hack and slash for so long before it gets boring, since Wolverine keeps doing the same thing. Some reviewers also felt the characterization was poor, wondering where the classic moody, unpredictable Wolverine went.

I think one of the biggest problems is that everybody in this game looks bad. X-Men is one of the most soap opera, cheesecake properties out there, where everyone is supposed to look sexy, which is part of why they are always hooking up with each other. In this game, everybody looks rough, and that undercuts the fantasy. Insomniac has had character model issues before, with complaints about Mary Jane in past games, and this needs fixing, especially compared to the Arkham games, which were so well regarded for how good everyone looked that they helped redefine Harley Quinn ahead of her Margot Robbie, David Ayer version. On top of that, X-Men works best with multiple power sets used together, and while Mystique is in this game, she is not used in any meaningful way, when characters like Nightcrawler and Jean Grey should be showing up and using their powers alongside Wolverine.

Hideo Kojima Leaves PlayStation for Xbox After Being Blindsided

In a surprise announcement, PlayStation said it had parted ways with Hideo Kojima on his new game, even though the game's poster still carries the PlayStation logo. Kojima released a statement saying they were blindsided, describing a longstanding deal with PlayStation that fell apart when the company came out of nowhere and said they were out, leaving him to find a new home, which turned out to be Xbox.

Gaming is becoming extremely competitive, in a way that reminds me of the tech industry more than it reminds me of Hollywood, where these kinds of splits, like Christopher Nolan leaving Warner Bros for Universal, or Zack Snyder's issues with Warner Bros, have been unusual rather than routine. I think games are becoming more cutthroat because more money is at stake, and gaming has also become far more mainstream, moving from message boards nobody outside the community read to trending at number two on Twitter, which is how a lot of people, including me, ended up learning about this story at all.

Games are a different industry from movies and television. They cost more, and beyond story they have to be rewarding as interactive experiences, which is exactly where the new Wolverine game is reportedly struggling. I am also a little worried that career video game performers, who built their work in voice and motion capture, will slowly get pushed aside in favor of movie stars, the same way movie stars effectively ended the era of famous models.

I want to say I am glad to see the Xbox executive who signed Kojima doing such a strong job, at a time when other female executives, Kathleen Kennedy among them in my view, have struggled. One big misstep tends to erase all the good work a woman in that position has done, so I am rooting for her, and I also think Donna Langley at Universal is doing a great job, even if she keeps a lower profile than I would like.

Kojima's Social Media Savvy and His Eye for Talent

Kojima operates at what I would call a mega level in pop culture. I am not even a gamer and I still know who he is, which tells you something about his reach. He is working with A24, which he clearly knows is the cool kids' table, on a Death Stranding movie, and he reviews movies and television constantly, to the point where fans have noticed that if he goes quiet about something after saying he would watch it, that silence itself functions as a bad review. He also got into a public back and forth with Geoff Keighley, at one point saying he hated him, before the two made up and posed for photos together, which I found genuinely entertaining to watch play out.

I think Kojima has real star making power. I credit him partly with the rise of Elle Fanning, who appeared in one of his games; I thought the animation on her was not great, but she still looked cool with ice skating powers in black goo, and that helped make her more popular, especially with male audiences. His newest game also features Hunter Schafer alongside Sophia Lillis, and while I think Hunter Schafer could use more of a glow up, Kojima clearly has a good eye for talent. It is honestly strange to me that she is not part of this X-Men cast, since she fits right in with that group and is friendly with several of its actors. I think she would make an amazing Mystique and could help turn the project around.