Greetings! Welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s pop culture news roundup. What big news did you miss this weekend? Well, Fornite is gone. So there’s that. Also, Joker is still making a lot of money and Martin Scorsese still doesn’t like Marvel movies. Let’s get going.
Fortnite Is Just Lost Now
A strange thing happened yesterday as the massively popular videogame Fortnite wrapped up its tenth season: It disappeared. The game went offline, and hasn’t been playable since. Following the season finale—appropriately titled “The End”—Fortnite got sucked into a black hole. Now the game’s YouTube channel, and Instagram and Twitter accounts all just show that void. Eagle-eyed gamers have spotted a series of numbers in the black hole and are fervently trying to decode them, Lost-style. Season 11 still seems likely to happen, but not until players have fully lost their minds.
Joker Is Still Ruling the Box Office
Director Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story continues to dominate the box office. The flick made another $55 million domestically in its second weekend, giving it a total of $192.7 million in the US and $543.9 million around the world. Meanwhile, Gemini Man brought in $31.1 million domestically and $59.5 million worldwide.
Martin Scorsese Still Doesn’t Like Superhero Movies
Director Martin Scorsese is still convinced that Marvel movies are nothing but “theme parks.” After causing a stir a few weeks ago for telling Empire that the MCU films aren’t “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” the director continued to disparage the movies over the weekend at the London Film Festival, where his new Netflix film, The Irishman, screened. “It’s not cinema, it’s something else,” he said. “We shouldn’t be invaded by it. We need cinemas to step up and show films that are narrative films.”
