Of all the films due for release this spring, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was one of my most anticipated premieres, solely on the strength of those killer trailers. The film does not disappoint. It’s a fresh, good-humored, energetic, and vastly entertaining fantasy/action/comedy, boasting a stellar cast and solid emotional core that serves as a worthy homage to the famous RPG that inspired it.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Honor Among Thieves is set in the hugely popular Forgotten Realms campaign setting. The film’s official premise is short and sweet: “A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.”

Said charming thief is Elgin, a bard who is played by Chris Pine. To defeat the evil that has been unleashed in the world, he’ll need the strength of Holga, a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez); courage from Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), a paladin; and magic thanks to Simon the Sorcerer (Justice Smith). Then there’s Doric (Sophia Lillis), a tiefling druid who can transform into various animals (including a ferocious owlbear). The cast also stars Hugh Grant as Forge Fitzwilliam the Rogue, a former member of Elgin’s band of thieves who is now Lord of Neverwinter, and Daisy Head as his top adviser, Sofina, a Red Wizard of Thay.

D&D the game has been around for decades and has built up a rich and complex mythology over that time, but directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley—both longtime fans—wanted their film to be accessible even for those with no familiarity at all with the classic RPG. That requires a certain amount of potentially awkward opening exposition. So we first meet Elgin and Holga as prisoners in an icy fortress, up for parole. This gives Elgin a chance to tell his tragic backstory in hopes of winning the parole board’s sympathy—and, not coincidentally, giving the audience an amusing narrative introduction to this fantasy world. It’s tricky to pull off long stretches of expository monologue without testing an audience’s patience. But Pine sells it with his cheekily irreverent delivery.

That backstory involves Elgin’s grief over his dead wife and his choice to leave his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) for one last heist, drawn by the promise of acquiring a resurrection tablet that could bring his wife back to life. The heist went bad, and Elgin and Holga were captured, while Simon and Forge escaped with Sofina—along with the resurrection tablet and a mysterious artifact that was clearly Sofina’s target all along. Elgin longs to return to his daughter, so he and Holga break out of prison and find Kira living in Neverwinter with the now-wealthy and respectable (but still roguish) Forge. Naturally, their former comrade in arms betrays them, and the rest of the film is their quest to rescue Kira and stop Sofina from performing an ancient ritual that would turn the good citizens of Neverwinter into her zombie slaves.

This year’s edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and show promoter ReedPop announced late Thursday that the planned June event—which was set to be the first in-person E3 since 2019—”did not garner the sustained interest necessary” from major publishers and potential attendees to justify a massive convention.

At this point, the cancellation of the 2023 show wasn’t a huge surprise. All three major console makers had already confirmed that they wouldn’t be attending, and major publishers Ubisoft and Sega publicly abandoned the show more recently. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis cited economic headwinds, digital marketing opportunities, and COVID-related game development timeline changes as reasons the companies backed out.

But the decades-long decline of E3 was also apparent well before this year’s problems—and even well before COVID forced the cancellation of the 2020 show (and every show in subsequent years). Part of me will miss the glitz and spectacle of the 15 E3s I’ve attended since 2004. But a larger part recognizes that E3 is a show that was built for a very different game industry and which has utterly failed to change with the times.

The console war’s premier battleground

Back before E3’s debut in 1995, a much smaller game industry than today’s dominated a significant chunk of Las Vegas’ sprawling Consumer Electronics Show. As the game industry grew, though, its major players decided that they needed a separate event to distinguish their business from the TV sets and music players cluttering the Las Vegas Convention Center every January.

The new game-focused show started with a bang when Sony executive Steve Race famously threw out his planned press conference speech about the then-upcoming PlayStation to deliver a single phrase: “Two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.” The price, which was $100 less than the stealth-launched Sega Saturn, practically settled that generation of the console wars before it had even started.

This kind of jockeying for console supremacy—in front of throngs of eager media—was a central focus of E3 for decades afterward. At E3 2006, the early meme-ification of Sony’s PlayStation 3—complete with its “giant enemy crab” and “five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars” price—helped cement the system’s early reputation as overpriced and overcomplicated for developers.

By 2013’s show, though, Sony was the one with a PlayStation 4 that came in at $100 cheaper than the Kinect-powered Xbox One. Sony also used its E3 presentation that year to get in some savage digs at Microsoft, which was facing widespread controversy over its plans to restrict some used game sales on the Xbox One.

This kind of competitive bombast helped cement E3’s position as the place where the future of the console gaming market was hashed out. In the last decade, though, the major console makers seem to have realized that they didn’t need an expensive E3 booth or associated press conference to get their customers’ attention anymore.

When it came time to debut the Switch in 2017, Nintendo hosted its own January hands-on event in New York City rather than rushing out demos for E3 months earlier. Sony followed suit in 2019, dropping out of that year’s E3 and then the planned 2020 event (before COVID hit), despite the impending launch of the PlayStation 5. And while Microsoft still hosted a press conference and game demos adjacent to E3 in 2019, the company decided it didn’t actually need an expensive booth on the convention center floor.

There’s officially another Star Trek series on the way, and this time it’s one we’ve been hearing rumors about since 2018: Starfleet Academy.

Announced today in a press release and reported by Deadline, the CBS Studios-produced series will follow a group of teenage Starfleet Academy students as they come of age while enduring rigorous training for future interstellar missions.

The central characters will reportedly have to navigate friendships, rivalries, and romances as they face a new enemy that threatens the Federation.

Co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau issue this in-universe statement in the show’s announcement:

Admission is now open to Starfleet Academy! Explore the galaxy! Captain your destiny! For the first time in over a century, our campus will be re-opened to admit individuals a minimum of 16 Earth years (or species equivalent) who dream of exceeding their physical, mental and spiritual limits, who value friendship, camaraderie, honor and devotion to a cause greater than themselves. The coursework will be rigorous, the instructors among the brightest lights in their respective fields, and those accepted will live and study side-by-side with the most diverse population of students ever admitted. Today we encourage all who share our dreams, goals and values to join a new generation of visionary cadets as they take their first steps toward creating a bright future for us all. Apply today! Ex Astris, Scientia!

The announcement didn’t specify when the Star Trek timeline the series will take place, nor did it name any characters or specific plot points.

Kurtzman is the current head honcho of Star Trek; he has overseen most of the work on all the franchise shows that have premiered in recent years. Before that, he worked on the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films and worked as a writer on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and on the films The Island, The Legend of Zorro, and Transformers.

Landau is a television writer who first became known as a story editor on the TV series The Magicians—another action-adventure show set in a fantastical school with coming-of-age plotlines—and who later became showrunner for The CW’s Nancy Drew series.

This won’t be the first time Starfleet Academy has been explored in works of Star Trek fiction, of course. Beyond the obvious example of the Kobayashi Maru references throughout the franchise, there were substantial plotlines about the academy in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, among others.

Further, there were Starfleet Academy video games in the 1990s for various platforms. While the PC game with full-motion video with original cast members had enough features to recommend it, I always felt the SNES/Sega 32X Starfleet Academy game never got the love it quite deserved.

The Starfleet Academy TV series will begin production in 2024, and it will premiere on Paramount+ at some point after that.