It has been the sort of week in which the end of the world was cancelled for want of interest, so it seems only fair to catch up on the stories that were not, strictly speaking, apocalyptic. The big ones have had pieces of their own: the Doomsday that never came, Star Wars at 50, Sir Patrick’s asteroid, M John Harrison’s Booker and the Godzilla Minus Zero record. What follows is everything else, starting with a film that is getting longer as we speak.
Film: Spider-Man Goes Back For Seconds
One brand new day was apparently not enough. An AMC Theatres listing, spotted on Reddit and then taken down again, as is traditional, has Spider-Man: Brand New Day returning to American cinemas on 4 December in an extended cut. GamesRadar and MovieWeb report that it runs about seven minutes longer, at two hours 32 minutes. MovieWeb says the title is Spider-Man: (Brand New) Brand New Day, which is either a clever joke or a typo that got promoted. Sony has not yet officially confirmed the date. Nor has anyone said what the extra minutes contain, although Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple, whose hospital scene was cut from the original release, is the favourite. The film has already taken more than $2.5 billion worldwide, according to MovieWeb, and the re-release lands a fortnight before Avengers: Doomsday. Disney+ and Blu-ray have taught us that every film now comes in a director’s cut, an extended cut and eventually a cut nobody asked for, but we didn’t expect Peter Parker to need the extra room. Brackets are clearly the new subtitles.
Meanwhile Ebenezer Scrooge is collecting his debts. Ti West’s Ebenezer, which we previewed in October, took $1.5 million from Thursday previews, according to The Hollywood Reporter. MovieWeb has it at $7.1 million on Friday, top of the chart and ahead of Godzilla Minus Zero, and heading for a domestic opening of more than $20 million, with about the same again from 63 overseas markets. That would make it Johnny Depp’s first No. 1 since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. The critics are less festive, with Rotten Tomatoes at around half. On a $38 million budget, though, Paramount will be content to keep the coal on the fire. Sunday’s estimates will settle the matter. There is something rather satisfying about a miser topping the box office at the start of the Christmas shopping season. Dickens would have seen the irony; Scrooge would have asked for the receipts.
Streaming: The Alien Comes Home
Allen, the Queensland-set alien reunion from Ludo Studio, the Brisbane firm behind Bluey, has now arrived on Netflix. It came out on 12 November, as promised in the trailer we covered last month. T.J. Power plays Petey, a man whose childhood alien friend vanished twenty years ago and has now turned up again carrying, in Netflix’s words, a secret big enough to change the world. Daley Pearson and Jeffrey Walker direct. It is Ludo’s first live-action feature, so parents who have learned to fear the emotional ambushes in Bluey may want to keep the tissues within reach. We haven’t seen it yet, and the reviews are still coming in, but any film that asks what became of the kid after the spaceship left is asking the right question.
Games: Horror Takes The Joysticks
When we last looked, the Golden Joystick Awards were still counting votes. The results came in on 11 November, and survival horror has come out on top. Resident Evil Requiem was named Ultimate Game of the Year and Console Game of the Year, Capcom won Studio of the Year, and Angela Sant’Albano took Best Lead Performer as Grace Ashcroft, according to GamingTrend. The game also won Best Game Trailer for one titled, with commendable restraint, “Evil Has Always Had A Name”. Elsewhere, CONTROL Resonant took Best Visual Design and Onimusha: Way of the Sword Best Audio Design, and DOOM: The Dark Ages won Best Game Expansion. The Witcher 4 was voted Most Wanted, which is a polite way of saying “please hurry up”. Subnautica 2 won Best Early Access Game. Then there is MECCHA CHAMELEON, which took four awards, including Best Multiplayer Game and both the Streamers’ and Developers’ Choice. We confess we had to look it up. A franchise that began in 1996 with a haunted mansion, a typewriter and a strictly rationed supply of ink ribbons is now the most decorated game of 2026. Thirty years on, the zombies have outlasted most of the consoles they appeared on.
Books: The Machine Said It Was A Machine
Literary prizes do not usually need forensic accountants, but the Caine Prize for African Writing has had to make do. This year’s winner, Zimbabwe’s Simbarashe Kundizeza, was accused in a report in The Atlantic of writing his story “The Blue Fighter” with AI, after the detection tool Pangram flagged it. According to the Associated Press, the prize carried out an internal review, with interviews and metadata analysis of his drafts, and has now cleared him. “We feel the evidence is clear and have made the decision that Simbarashe’s award stands,” said its chair, Ellah Wakatama. Kundizeza says the story drew on his own family life and that he is “relieved”. From now on, publishers and shortlisted writers will have to sign AI declarations. On the same day, according to File 770, 108 university presses led by Cambridge and Bristol signed a charter promising to keep human judgement at the heart of publishing. SF magazines have been here before: Clarkesworld had to close submissions in 2023 under a flood of machine-written stories. It is a curious age in which a writer’s best defence is an old draft with a timestamp on it. Keep your drafts, people. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.
For the print nostalgics, the revived Starlog went on sale on American newsstands on 13 November, as trailed here earlier. It is a 100-page annual edited by Annalee Newitz, with features on Star Trek at 60, how the original magazine covered the Star Wars trilogy, and the worldbuilding behind Dungeons & Dragons, according to Fangoria. We have yet to find any word on UK availability. As an online magazine that started in 1991, when Starlog was still in print, we welcome it back with the slightly smug warmth of a cousin who never left the house.
Farewell: The Voice Of Bambi, And A Marine
Donnie Dunagan, the original voice of the young Bambi, died on 4 November aged 92, after a battle with lung cancer, his agents have announced, as reported by the Daily Beast. Horror fans will remember him as little Peter von Frankenstein in Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (1939), the boy who strikes up a friendship with Boris Karloff’s Monster in that film’s most unnerving scenes. That same year he appeared in Tower of London with Karloff and Basil Rathbone. After Bambi (1942) he took a very different career path. He joined the US Marine Corps, became its youngest-ever drill sergeant, served three tours in Vietnam and retired as a major in 1977, with a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Few careers run from a Disney fawn by way of the Frankenstein family to the parade ground. His agents called him “the best of us”, and on that record it is hard to argue.
That’s the week. The world did not end, Spider-Man got longer, Scrooge got rich and the zombies got a trophy. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll be back with the next lot once the world has had another go at ending.
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