How to Make a Successful D&D Movie

With Hasbro and Sweetpea Entertainment snarling at one another like two litigious displacer beasts, it's unlikely we'll be seeing a new D&D movie any time soon. As a result, it's fun to speculate what might happen if the legal arguments are cleared up and someone is able to make a film, hopefully with also the rights to use the franchise's vast number of novels and characters as source material. The way I see it, there are three viable options:

"The Shadow!"

1) D&D: The Metafilm


In this idea, the film takes place from two different perspectives. In the first, we follow a group of real-life D&D players. They're in the here and now and meet up once or twice a week to play the game. When they're playing, rather that us just watching some people sit around a table, instead we slip into the D&D game itself. The same actors are now playing the players' characters, swinging swords, firing lightning bolts and pausing in mid-action for fifteen minutes whilst someone tries to perform a grapple check. There are a lot of effects. It's all kind of awesome, except it's interspersed with scenes of the players playing around the table. You could show how random out-of-game decisions are portrayed in the game world. This could include the classic dodge of one character dying, so the player creates a new character who bumps into the old adventuring party, usually somewhere incongruous like the middle of a vast desert or ruined temple, and is immediately accepted into their ranks with no questions.

Of course, this is such a good idea that it's already been done several times, most notably in Dead Gentlemen Productions' very fine Gamers trilogy of fan films (the first movie even has the unconvincing replacement character scene). My preference would be to remake one of them and give Dead Gentlemen a truckload of cash for the pleasure.

Also, for added geek-cred, you could cast well-known real D&D players in the film, like Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day and of course Vin Diesel. How about Diesel as the DM? Who'd ever argue with a decision? In addition, with this sort of project you can make it as high or as low-budget as you like, and vary the tone from comedy to drama and back again. Most importantly, it is true to the D&D experience in a way just a generic fantasy movie isn't.

2) Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Actually, this has already been done but few people ever saw it. Mainly because it was a bit rubbish (though still the best D&D movie made to date), but also the fact it was animated put a lot of people off. Still, as far as 'classic D&D narratives' go, this is the most obvious to go for. It has built-in franchise appeal (the core Dragonlance mythos consists of two trilogies of novels, with a multitude of spin-off books and a later series of less well-received sequels), some fairly iconic characters and some spectacular action set pieces. These include massive aerial battles featuring dragons, dungeon adventuring, storming an ice castle and spooky encounters in haunted forests. It pretty much encapsulates a lot of the traditional D&D tropes into one story.

There are of course two problems. The first is the budget, which would need to be 'large', to put it mildly. The second is that Dragons of Autumn Twilight is only the first third of a longer story, not a self-contained story in its own right. If the movie bombs, it'll be left on an annoying cliffhanger. The scale and budget means it's more of a project you build up to rather than lead with straight out of the gate. And that neatly leads to my third and final choice:

3) The Crystal Shard

Originally published in 1988, The Crystal Shard, a novel set in the Forgotten Realms world, has become one of the best-known and most iconic D&D novels. It introduced the world to the character of Drizzt Do'Urden, a drow (or dark elf) ranger. Unlike most of the rest of his species, which was cursed and evil, Drizzt was noble and honourable, seeking to live in peace away from his evil kin. And kick ridiculous amounts of arse. Whilst later Drizzt books can be charitably described as 'formulaic', the early books were (relatively speaking here) fairly engaging action-adventure stories. Drizzt was a (very much speaking relatively here) complex character and author R.A. Salvatore gave him a lot of character stuff to work through, including parenting issues, the problems of racism and how to make friends with people when you're going to outlive them by centuries.

In addition to that, The Crystal Shard has the benefit of being an ensemble (Drizzt is just one of a team, unlike later books in which he becomes the dominant hero) and also of being self-contained: it was later retconned as Book 1 of The Icewind Dale Trilogy, but its own narrative ends in the first instalment, with a simple segue into further adventures at the end. Whilst there are also major effects moments (a battle with an ice dragon in its lair; the people of Ten Towns fighting off a monster assault; a duel between Drizzt and a demon), it also wouldn't be quite as expensive as a Dragonlance movie.

More to the point from a commercial viewpoint, R.A. Salvatore has sold more than 15 million novels in the USA alone (which indicates worldwide sales likely double that, if not more). Far more Salvatore novels have been shifted than D&D rulebooks, and Drizzt and Forgotten Realms are better-known brands than D&D itself. If Hasbro want to maximise their potential revenue, this is definitely the course to pursue. I wouldn't bet on it being a good movie unless they get a particularly talented director and scriptwriter, but it would have commercial clout. And of course, they already have the perfect actor ready to play Drizzt:

"Magic-user, baby!"

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out after the litigation is over, and what sort of film we get.

The Sandman: The Wake by Neil Gaiman

One of the Endless has fallen, so there must be a wake. As the millions whose lives they touched gather to remember the fallen, a new Endless must arise to take their place.

Note: normally I try to stay spoiler-free in reviews (even if the book has been out for seventeen years). However, it's simply impossible to discuss this collection without spoiling the biggest plot twist in the entire Sandman series, so be forewarned before continuing.

The Wake is the tenth and concluding graphic novel in the Sandman sequence. It is an extended coda to the main narrative of the series, which climaxed in the preceding book, The Kindly Ones. As such the story is about wrapping up (or at least addressing) loose ends, revisiting some old characters and paying off some old debts. There's no real threat or tension in the narrative, just a loosening of the pace that allows Gaiman to quietly (but still effectively) develop and round off character arcs and leave the series with grace.

The first three parts of The Wake form a single narrative. A wake is held for Morpheus (who died at the end of The Kindly Ones) and beings from across the universe arrive to take part. There are numerous cameos from familiar characters (including brief ones from Superman and Batman, since Sandman is part of the DC Universe) and Daniel, the 'new' Dream, frets about his new role as he rebuilds the Dreaming. There is some tension to be mined from Daniel's meeting with Lyta Hall (who was arguably responsible for Dream's death) and from Matthew's decision to remain in the Dreaming or not, but mainly the emphasis here is on the loss and how it effects the other characters in the series. Wisely, after setting it up as a big event, Gaiman chooses not to show us the first meeting between Daniel and the rest of the Endless (in some parallel universe where Gaiman cashed in and sold out, we can imagine that scene as the opening of The Sandman II).

The latter three parts are more diverse. In the first, Hob Gadling attends a terrible American Renaissance Faire. Gadling is six hundred years old, the result of a bargain between Dream and Death, and is horrified at the romanticising of the England of his youth, a place of plague and death where life was cheap. Gadling, who is now dating an African American woman, is also wracked by guilt over the spell of his life he spent dealing in slaves. Ultimately Gadling is offered the chance by Death to end the bargain and die, since the other partner in the bargain is also dead.

Gadling has always been one of the more interesting characters in the Sandman series, appearing intermittently since the early issues and providing Dream with arguably the only true friend he has. This story sees Gadling severing his ties with the dead Dream and moving on with his life in a touching and human way.

In the penultimate part of the series, Gaiman cheekily takes a big risk ("What are they going to do? Stop buying it with one more issue to go?") by having a story told mostly in text, in which a Chinese government minister from a thousand years ago is exiled into the desert and inadvertently passes through a 'soft place' into the edge of the Dreaming, where he meets both Morpheus and Daniel at different parts of their existence. It's a bizarre and existential story which is intriguing and amusing (especially with the cameo from a cat).

In the final part, we suddenly reverse back to the early 17th Century. William Shakespeare has decided to end his writing career, but has to fulfil a promise: the second of two plays commissioned by Dream. As he labours on the work - a play called The Tempest - Shakespeare reviews his life, considers his legacy and muses on the choices he did not make. He wonders if a person can every truly change, and of course this what the entire series was about: Dream coming back from his captivity a changed being, but in the end not able to change enough, resulting in his destruction.

The Wake (****½) is not a blood-and-thunder grand finale, but instead it's an effective analysis and wrapping-up of what has come before. There are perhaps minor signs of the author overdoing it (dedicating three issues to a funeral and wake might be seen as over-indulgence), but for the most part Gaiman restrains the sentimentality in favour of an attempt to finding meaning in life and death and the choices that are made. The collection is available now in the UK and USA, and as part of The Absolute Sandman, Volume IV (UK, USA).

Tomb Raider (2013)

An archaeological expedition is searching for the legendary kingdom of Yamatai, believed to be located in a hazardous, storm-wracked area near Japan. The expedition is shipwrecked on an uncharted island and attacked by hostile other castaways, who seem to be part of a cult following a maddened priest. When several members of the expedition are kidnapped it falls to the youngest and most inexperienced member - one Lara Croft - to rise to the challenge, save her friends and find a way of getting off the island.

Tomb Raider is a fresh reboot of the series of the same name, discarding the continuity built up over the previous eight games in favour of a fresh take on the premise and the central character of Lara Croft. Croft was very much a child of the 1990s: ballsy, confident, arrogant and a bit cartoonish. Her fresh incarnation is younger, constantly doubting herself and doesn't know how to chamber a round, let alone how to dive around dual-wielding pistols and shooting tigers. This is, much as it pains me to say it, a 'gritty and more realistic take on the character'.

Tomb Raider is a curious hybrid of several game types. It's a third-person action game with a linear story, but which keeps the map open, allowing you to revisit previous areas to find more resources and new locations, once you have unlocked new equipment later in the game which allows you scale previously-inaccessible cliffs and blast open hitherto-invulnerable blockades. It isn't an open-world game - the island is portrayed as an interlocking series of explorable zones, not a wide-open space like the recent Far Cry 3 - but it throws in enough nods at an open world structure to make for an interesting hybrid. The semi-open-world structure makes for a curious incompatibility with the game's storyline, however, which is almost always urgently demanding you rush to the next objective and complete the next mission. This urgency is diminished when Lara decides to spend 2 hours painstakingly combing a forest for GPS trackers and magic mushrooms. Doing these side-objectives is important as it gives you more experience points which you can use to improve Lara's abilities, and also gives you more salvage to upgrade your weapons and equipment with.

Lara is a fairly athletic character, able to scale vertical walls with the help of an improvised pickaxe, jump large distances and shimmy all over the place on rope bridges, some of which you create yourself by using a bow and rope-arrows. The game signposts where you can use these tools - literally by using a special view mode which highlights all usable objects in an area in bright yellow - but it can be fun seeing your destination and working out how to get there using the tools at your disposal. Tomb Raider is at its best when you have control for long periods and are given objectives without being hand-held through the whole thing. This is best exemplified by the optional tombs, which Lara has to explore (or 'raid', if you will) through her own ingenuity. Unfortunately, these tombs tend to revolve around one puzzle each and most of them about about 50 feet across in size, making them more like the 'dungeons' from Skyrim that consist of one winding passage and two rooms than substantial locations in their own right. Still, the idea is good.

There is also quite a lot of combat, initially against animals (though, sadly, not tigers) and later on against human opponents. The gaming media has gone rather overboard in praising the scene in which Lara overcomes her first human opponent, kills him and then expresses realistic feelings of shock, panic and revulsion at having to do such a thing. All of this is effective in the moment, but undercut by Lara blowing away hordes of attacking nutcases literally a minute later without any qualms at all. By the endgame, in which Lara has to taken on an entire army of attackers in a temple forecourt spanning multiple levels and featuring tons of explosive barrels you can detonate to obliterate half a dozen foes at a time, this moral disconnect between story and gameplay has become absurd. Entertaining, certainly, but the game's musings on the desensitisation of killing and possible symptoms of PTSD ultimately feel like a sop to critics of videogame violence more than any real desire to explore the issues in depth (something else it shares with Far Cry 3).

When the game stops wangsting about this stuff, it's often excellent. The freeform stuff is very good. Unfortunately, the main storyline is corncheese. It starts off trying to be grim and gritty and realistic, but by the end it's become an out-and-out fantasy involving undead creatures and spirit beings. Major story beats are transmitted through either cut scenes or particularly tedious Quick Time Events. The game's use of QTEs is obnoxious and over-the-top, taking over from the proper gameplay all too often. So do cut scenes, which are not differentiated from the gameplay either, often with the camera retaining its standard position over Lara's sholder, meaning (particularly in the first hour or so) that sometimes they end and the player has no way of knowing they're back in control until they die. Also, the game's moment of victory is in a cut scene rather than through player agency, which is a completely unfathomable decision. The less said about the supporting cast - Lara's fellow castaways who are only around to get rescued or provide awful dialogue about why Lara's next plan is going to fail despite her last three working fine and saving all their live - the better as well. From a technical standpoint, the graphics are excellent (despite the odd glitch), the controls are smooth, responsive and fully customisable (and you can remap the Enter key, which is awesome and inexplicably rare these days) and overall the game is fun to play.

The problems prevent Tomb Raider (****) from achieving its full potential. The game's curious mixture of Far Cry freeform jungle stuff (including hunting and skinning animals), Prince of Persia style puzzle-solving using the equipment available, enjoyable combat (including one of the best and most natural cover systems I've seen in a game) and tons of bonus objectives all makes for an excellent gaming experience. But that experience is undercut by the game wrestling control away from you all too-often for indifferently-written cut scenes and repetitive Quick Time Events. When the game lets you play it how you want to, rather than how it wants to, it's superb. The game is available now in the UK (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360).

Hasbro wins initiative round in ongoing D&D battle

The confrontation between film producer Courtney Solomon, who is developing a new Dungeons and Dragons movie with Warner Brothers, and Hasbro, the parent company of D&D owners Wizards of the Coast, has escalated futher. Hasbro have filed a lawsuit against Solomon and his Sweetpea Entertainment company, asserting that Solomon does not have the rights to make such a film. Hasbro themselves are developing a new D&D movie with Universal.

According to Hasbro, the original deal with Solomon stated that the rights would revert to the IP-holders if Solomon did not produce a sequel film every five years. According to Solomon, that requirement was satisfied by the release of the low-budget TV movie Wrath of the Dragon God in 2005 and by the release of the straight-to-DVD movie Book of Vile Darkness in 2012 (though it entered production in 2010). However, Hasbro assert that this does not satisfy the terms of their contract since straight-to-DVD movies and TV films are legally not the same entities, either as one another or as cinematic features, and as a result the film and TV rights have now reverted to them.

Solomon has come out fighting, saying that he and his company will defend their rights. However, this exchange of views has also confirmed that the previous arbitration (which Solomon was using to show the matter had already been settled) took place in the late 1990s , before even the release of the first movie, and did not address of the sequel issues. As a result of this, Hasbro's position appears to have more merit than previously thought.

Expect this one to run on for a while.

Star Trek - Into Darkness

After breaking the Prime Directive in order to save the life of a crewmember, Captain James T. Kirk is recalled to Earth and is removed from command of the Enterprise. When a rogue Starfleet agent named John Harrison carries out a devastating pair of terrorist attacks on Earth, Kirk is reinstated and given orders to track down and eliminate Harrison. This involves a dangerous journey into the heart of Klingon space...and into secrets that some in the Federation want kept hidden.

Star Trek Hyphen Into Darkness (not colon, apparently) is the sequel to J.J. Abrams's 2009 reboot of the venerable SF franchise, which is quickly closing in on its fiftieth anniversary. It picks up shortly after where the previous film left off, with a new timeline established in which the crew of the Enterprise have just started working together and need to confront a new threat to the Federation, this time in the form of a canny and intelligent Starfleet officer who knows them better than they know themselves. This enemy is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who brings presence, menace and brooding intensity to every scene he's in, even when he's given some distinctly ropey dialogue to work with. Cumberbatch rises above the limitations of the script to deliver a great performance, bringing a sense of danger to the film that Eric Bana's Nero never really achieved in the previous film.

The rest of the casting is pretty much excellent. The Enterprise crew were well-established in the previous movie, though I had niggles over Chris Pine as the young Kirk, who brought the Shatner-requisite bluff arrogance but little of his charm or sense of vulnerability in the face of his own overconfidence. Whilst that remains an issue, Pine's performance is much-improved and some of that vulnerability does come out. The other actor whom I thought didn't quite gel was Simon Pegg as Scotty, who didn't really come across as Scotty but as Simon Pegg doing a bad Scottish accent. This time around, the writing is stronger for Scotty and he gets a decent arc through the film. It's also good to see everyone having their moment in the sun: whilst the emphasis remains strongly on Pine and Zachary Quinto's Spock, we also get solid (if somewhat brief) subplots for Sulu, Uhura and Chekhov. Bruce Greenwood also returns as Captain Pike, bringing a formidable sense of gravitas and charisma to his role, whilst Peter 'RoboCop' Weller does a good turn as Admiral Marcus. Less well-served is Alice Eve as Carol Marcus, who is given little to do other than a gratuitous strip-tease scene.

So, great cast, what about the plot? It could be better. Some ideas are great, such as bringing Deep Space Nine mainstays Section 31 into the Abramsverse. Seeing more of 23rd Century Earth is cool, and we get a little bit of a feeling for how normal people live and work in this world, which adds a little bit of texture and depth to the setting. Beyond that, the film is just as rammed full of plot holes (the crew spend a ludicrous amount of time and trouble trying to secure a resource in the finale when they have seventy-two alternate sources of it sitting right next to them on the ship), technobabble and predictable plot twists as its predecessor, though it at least makes an attempt (although a rather clumsy and over-obvious one) at doing some decent foreshadowing this time around. Where Abrams sticks to action, explosions and fights, he does well, as he does with cheesy humour. Attempts at characterisation are variable, and emotion is a bit over-wrought.

Where the film falls not so much flat on its face but screaming plummeting off a cliff is its final fifteen to twenty minutes. For a film set in a rebooted continuity, promising a fresh take on the franchise and the exploration of new ideas, the movie is obsessed and indeed bogged down with paying homages to one of the original Star Trek films. Dialogue and character beats, including wholesale lifting of dialogue and even scenes, are taken from that older film to the point where you begin to wonder why they didn't simply remake the movie wholesale. The reboot becomes a pastiche, reaching farcical levels when a powerful character and emotional moment from the older film is inverted and then undone seconds later by a howlingly awful plot device.

Where Into Darkness truly stumbles is that it does not understand you have to earn your miracles. Having a miracle solve a problem is fine, as long as it has consequences and a price. In the original third Star Trek film, Kirk pulled off a miracle that was highly implausible, but it was sold because the price he paid - in the life of his son, the loss of his ship and the (albeit temporary) end of his career - was high and the consequences real. Into Darkness has a fortune-reversing twist in its ending but because we've spent very little time with this crew (as compared to the better part of two decades at the time of the original films) it does not resonate. Its resolution is cheap and easy, unearned and without apparent consequence: a sequence in which thousands if not tens of thousands of people must have died is shrugged off in a high-fiving, triumphant final scene.

Star Trek - Into Darkness (***) has early promise but its ending is disposable, fast-food storytelling, unworthy of its excellent cast. The deeply unsatisfying ending squanders the promise of some solid early action scenes and even a few effective scenes of character development which are superior to anything in the first film. Indeed, with a different set of final scenes (and much less riffing off of a far superior movie), Into Darkness would have effortlessly surpassed its forebear. Instead, the problems way it down just as much. Into Darkness remains visually impressive, fast-paced and, if you can switch your brain off, fun. But it's also derivative, unsatisfying and apparently terrified of doing anything new, which is a very odd position for a movie set in a new, unrestrained and exciting continuity to be in. The film is on general release in most countries now.

Neil Gaiman to publish a new NEVERWHERE story (with some help from George R.R. Martin)

Way back in 1996, Neil Gaiman penned the BBC mini-series Neverwhere, adapting it into a novel a year later. Almost immediately after the story first appeared, fans noted a continuity error where the character of the Marquis de Carabas recovered his coat after it had apparently vanished forever. Gaiman promised to explain all in a short story, enigmatically entitled 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back', but got a bit side-tracked with other projects.

The Marquis de Carabas as portrayed by Patterson Joseph in the original BBC TV series of Neverwhere.

It's been a while coming, but the story will finally appear in a new anthology entitled Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Rogues - the thematic sequel anthology to 2010's Warriors - will likely be published some time in 2014.


The full story list is as follows:

George R.R. Martin “Everybody Loves a Rogue” (Introduction)
Joe Abercrombie “Tough Times All Over”
Gillian Flynn “What Do You Do?”
Matthew Hughes “The Inn of the Seven Blessings”
Joe R. Lansdale “Bent Twig”
Michael Swanwick “Tawny Petticoats”
David Ball “Provenance”
Carrie Vaughn “The Roaring Twenties”
Scott Lynch “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Bradley Denton “Bad Brass”
Cherie Priest “Heavy Metal”
Daniel Abraham “The Meaning of Love”
Paul Cornell “A Better Way to Die”
Steven Saylor “Ill Seen in Tyre”
Garth Nix “A Cargo of Ivories”
Walter Jon Williams “Diamonds From Tequila”
Phyllis Eisenstein “The Caravan to Nowhere”
Lisa Tuttle “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives”
Neil Gaiman “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back”
Connie Willis “Now Showing”
Patrick Rothfuss “The Lightning Tree”

GAME OF THRONES producer expecting seven seasons

Game of Thrones producer Frank Doelger has said that he expects the show to last for seven seasons, assuming audience figures remain strong.

Doelger was interviewed backstage at the BAFTA Awards and said the following:

"[The number of series] is being discussed as we speak. The third season was the first half of book three, season four will be the second part of book three. George RR Martin has written books four and five; six and seven are pending.

"I would hope that, if we all survive, and if the audience stays with us we’ll probably get through to seven seasons."

The potential length of the series has been much-speculated about by fans, with the need to adapt the Song of Ice and Fire novels (relatively) faithfully clashing with the realities of TV production and how long a TV audience will wait for answers and resolutions. Previously showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had spoken of 90 episodes (nine seasons), whilst Doelger's comments seem to suggest that less is more likely. Indeed, with Book 3 spanning two seasons and seven books projected, it's telling that anything less than eight seasons (assuming the remaining books can all be fitted into one season each, which is not a given) is even being considered.

At the same time, even highly successful shows like Lost have ended after just six seasons, and shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer only managed to limp to seven years with a sub-par season (or two) thrown into the mix. True Blood arguably ran out of steam after three (four if we're generous) seasons and has been running on fumes ever since. So the chances of Game of Thrones - a massively expensive and time-consuming show to make which doesn't allow its producers much (or any) time off between seasons - making it to eight or nine years without burning out seem slim, so aiming lower and writing accordingly might be the better option.

To me, this suggests that the producers are envisaging a more radical move away from the books after Season 4 (if not this season), with perhaps more focus on bringing the existing characters and storylines to a resolution rather than bringing in lots of new characters and situations. Indeed, Benioff and Weiss previously said that Season 3 will be the peak of the cast in terms of size and future seasons would feature smaller casts. That suggests that we might not be getting the hordes of new characters the later books bring in, and casts doubt on whether we'll be going to locations like Sunspear where a dozen or more new characters would need to be introduced in one hit. This may improve pacing and clarity, but could backfire if some of the other storylines (particularly in Dorne) prove critical to the overall resolution of the story and the producers have to change their minds later on.

That the show would become much less faithful of an adaptation when it hit the problematic (from a structural point of view) fourth and fifth books has largely been expected by fans, but to get to the very end of the entire storyline in just forty more episodes after this season will require more compression and rewriting of the novels' storyline than what we have seen so far. If HBO and the producers can pull it off remains to be seen.

Music Monday: David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' performed IN SPACE

NASA Commander Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' on the International Space Station.

So he's actually playing this song about the Space Race whilst IN SPACE. Awesome.

AGENTS OF SHIELD trailer

ABC have released a trailer for Agents of SHIELD, the TV spin-off from The Avengers and the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Joss Whedon is producing the new show and has directed the pilot. The show is expected to start airing in September.

The show picks up shortly after the events of The Avengers and will explain how Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) survived the apparently fatal injuries he sustained in that movie. Gregg - who appeared as Coulson in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and The Avengers - will headline the show, which will also star Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, Chloe Bennett as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz and Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons. Former Whedon regular J. August Richards (who played Gunn on Angel) will guest star in the pilot episode.

Whedon is expected to supervise the first season before taking a back seat whilst he concentrates on The Avengers 2, which is expected to hit cinemas in the summer of 2015.

GAME OF THRONES wins a BAFTA

Game of Thrones has won a BAFTA Award. The show won the Radio Times Audience Award, the only one of the awards to be voted for by the general public. The result was a surprise, with most watchers expecting the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to walk off with the award, but clearly GoT's motivated fanbase was able to mobilise. However, GoT did miss out on the other award it was nominated for, Best International Programme, which instead went to its HBO sister show Girls (itself surprisingly trouncing the widely-expected winner, Homeland).

Tywin Lannister finds this victory approaching his bare minimum standards of adequacy.

GoT's trophy cabinet is rather full, with the show having already notched up multiple Golden Globes, Emmies and Hugo Awards, amongst others. Congratulations to the team for their success.