Greetings, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED's culture news roundup. Comic-Con International kicks off this week, so there’s a ton happening, but not all of the big news of the week is coming out of San Diego. Like, for example, all of these tidbits below. Enjoy!
Did you enjoy the hard-rocking good time that was Thor: Ragnarok? Good news: Taika Waititi, the man behind that film, is coming back for more. Waititi has reportedly signed on to write and direct Thor 4. Chris Hemsworth will reportedly return for the fourth Thor film, but few other details are known. Meanwhile, the upcoming Akira film, which Waititi was slated to direct, appears to be on hold.
The Television Academy announced this year's Emmy nominees on Tuesday and there were two big winners among the pack: HBO and Netflix. The cable network got 137 nominations—a record 32 of them for Game of Thrones—and the streaming service earned 117 noms. Other high-ranking nominees include Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (20 nods), HBO’s Chernobyl (19), and Netflix’s When They See Us (16).
Amazon has landed the rights to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books and is now planning a series based on them for Prime subscribers. Scorpion creator Nick Santora will work on the adaptation of the wildly popular novel series. Good luck not getting that series mixed up with Jack Ryan in your Amazon queue.
Continuing to fill its content coffers, Netflix is now working on a documentary series about the sea. The series—working title: Oceans—will be produced by Freeborne Media, the company from Blue Planet II creator James Honeyborne. Each episode of the series will look at a different ocean through the lenses of oceanography, earth sciences, and geography. Production will reportedly begin later this year.
- The hard-luck Texas town that bet on bitcoin—and lost
- How Waze data can help predict car crashes
- Notifications are stressing us out. How did we get here?
- The simple way Apple and Google let abusers stalk victims
- Disney's new Lion King is the VR-fueled future of cinema
- 📱 Torn between the latest phones? Never fear—check out our iPhone buying guide and favorite Android phones
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