Welcome to Multiverse News, your source for information about all your favorite fictional universes. Marvel left D23 with a full X-Men cast, a Doomsday sizzle reel, and a VisionQuest trailer, but not one new Disney+ series. In the August 20 edition of What I'm Hearing, Puck’s Julia Alexander wrote that multiple live-action Marvel series are quietly in development with announcements expected soon, which cuts directly against the last few weeks of reporting that had Marvel retreating from live-action TV entirely after VisionQuest lands October 14. Worth stressing that this is a single paywalled item with no titles, no dates, and no talent attached, and Variety, Deadline, and THR have all left it alone while the aggregators and fan sites ran wild with it, loudly, with everything from a Heroes for Hire spinoff to a Defenders reunion getting floated ahead of Marvel Television's New York Comic Con panel on October 8. While Marvel's TV plans stay stuck in rumor, DC just made one official. The Jimmy Olsen project we've been tracking for the better part of a year finally has a title, and it's The People v. Gorilla Grodd, now an eight-episode straight-to-series order at HBO Max. Jimmy Tatro is officially Grodd after months of being merely attached in reports, but the bigger get is how much of the Daily Planet came along, with Skyler Gisondo, Beck Bennett, Mikaela Hoover, and Wendell Pierce all reprising from Superman for a “true” crime docuseries reinvestigating Grodd's murder conviction. To close out our all-TV episode, here's the one DC show that actually made it to air, and it's doing numbers. Per Deadline, Lanterns pulled 9.3 million global viewers in its first three days across HBO and HBO Max, 6.6 million of them stateside, making it the biggest DC Studios premiere in HBO Max history and a top five series debut on the platform overall. That's a stronger opening than The Penguin and IT: Welcome to Derry, and the premiere has held the number one spot on HBO Max's daily top ten every day since Sunday, with Chris Mundy already sketching season two despite no official renewal yet. Kit Harington will play Gilderoy Lockhart in season 2 of HBO's Harry Potter series. Harington replaces Nicholas Hoult, who was originally cast in the role but left over scheduling issues. Spider-Man: Brand New Day continued its dominant run at the global box office and currently stands at $2.2 billion worldwide. The Odyssey opened in a few more territories and sits at $1.44 billion in its sixth weekend, while newcomer Insidious: Out of the Further opened to $60.3 million worldwide. In an interview at the For the Love of Fantasy & Sci-Fi convention in London, Hayley Atwell told attendees that she was frustrated by Captain Carter’s storyline in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness saying “If I’m really like brutally honest, I was so disappointed with how they positioned her and what happened to her in that scene. It’s so small, and she gets frisbeed to death. I tried on set to kind of go, ‘Can I just add? Can I just suggest?’ And they were like, ‘Sure, but no.'” FX has ordered Legends, a meta-thriller limited series spinoff of Sons of Anarchy that reunites the majority of the original cast, including Charlie Hunnam, only this time playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The logline has the cast reuniting at a fan convention after more than a decade, where the line between life and art blurs as the fractured brotherhood faces a real-world threat more dangerous than anything from the show. NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal in an interview with EW revealed that he attempted to get cast in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a role but was told no. He said “I wanted to be in the ‘Avengers’ and they were like, ‘Shaq, we fuckin’ love you and we’d love to put you in, but if your face pops up on screen people are going to go, ‘Hey, that’s Shaq!’ He said it truthfully, and I was like, alright… I guess my face is too bigtime.”
