Grease star Olivia Newton-John has died today aged 73.

Newton-John passed away surrounded by family and friends at her home in California according to a statement from her husband, John Easterling.

“Dame Olivia Newton-John (73) passed away peacefully at her Ranch in Southern California this morning, surrounded by family and friends,” he said via Facebook. “We ask that everyone please respect the family’s privacy during this very difficult time.”

Renowned for her iconic role as Sandy in Grease, she was also a four-time Grammy winner and even represented the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974.

“Olivia has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer. Her healing inspiration and pioneering experience with plant medicine continues with the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, dedicated to researching plant medicine and cancer.”

Back in 2017, Newton-John announced that the breast cancer she first developed in 1992 had since returned and spread to her spine.

She also revealed that she had been given a second cancer diagnosis in 2013 but had not spoken publicly about it.

“I believe I will win over it and that's my goal,” she told the Australian TV show, Sunday Night (via BBC News). She also called upon the Australian government to follow California in legalizing marijuana for medicinal use – a cause she continued to support via the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund.

“My dream is that, in Australia soon, it will be available to all the cancer patients and people going through cancer that causes pain,” she said.

Her family has asked for donations to the Olivia Newton-John Foundation in lieu of flowers.

Following her role in Grease in 1978, Newton-John enjoyed several smash hits with the Grease soundtracking spending 12 consecutive weeks at number 1 in the US, while her performance was nominated for a Golden Globe.

She also performed Hopelessly Devoted to You at the 1979 Oscars.

More recently, she appeared in Sharknado 5: Global Swarming and made an appearance as herself in the first season of Glee, as well as appearing as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race and Dancing with the Stars.

Olivia is survived by her husband John Easterling, daughter Chloe Lattanzi, sister Sarah Newton-John, and brother Toby Newton-John.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Take-Two has just released its first set of earnings since it fully acquired mobile developer and publisher Zynga, and it looks like mobile is already playing an absolutely massive role in the publisher's future.

Take-Two's net bookings for the quarter were up 41% year-over-year in no small part thanks to Zynga. And recurrent consumer spending was up 48% and accounted for 73% of that total, again largely thanks to Zynga, though NBA 2K22 and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands also played a role.

What's more, Take-Two is expecting Zynga to account for a whopping 45% of its total net bookings for the entire fiscal year ending March of 2023, with 2K making up 37%, Rockstar accounting for 17%, and Private Division making up 1%. Admittedly, Take-Two has officially folded in its former T2 Mobile division into Zynga, so it's not all Zynga. But for context, during its previous fiscal year, mobile games accounted for only 12% of Take-Two's net bookings. So this is a pretty massive jump.

In a call with IGN ahead of today's earnings release, CEO Strauss Zelnick affirmed the company's strategy to use its new mobile flexibility to create more mobile spin-offs of its existing IP, assuming the conditions were right.

"The first criterion would be that we have a team that's incredibly passionate about working on that IP and bringing it to mobile. And then of course we'd look at the connection that the historic intellectual property has with an audience, the format in which it would reside, and the like."

When asked if Take-Two was looking at mobile ports of existing games or spin-offs, he pointed out that Take-Two has historically brought many of its games to tablets and smartphones, but added that "what we're talking about when we talk about bringing Take-Two core intellection property to mobile is a brand new title made for mobile."

On the same call, we also learned that NBA 2K22 has sold over 12 million copies, GTA V has once again sold around 5 million in a single quarter and brought its lifetime total to nearly 170 million sold, and Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold over 45 million copies. We also learned that Marvel's Midnight Suns has been delayed once again.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

This article was amended after publication to correctly read that Rockstar accounted for 17% of net bookings.

Marvel's Midnight Suns has been delayed a second time, and while it doesn't seem to be a long delay, we're now once again without a clear release date for the Firaxis tactical RPG.

In today's Take-Two earnings results, the publisher revealed that it has moved back the launch of Midnight Suns "to ensure the teams at Firaxis Games and 2K deliver the best possible experience for our fans."

It's expected to arrive "later this fiscal year," which for Take-Two means sometime before March of 2023, but we don't have a specific date yet. Additionally, only PC, PS4, and Xbox Series X and S players will get to jump in on that date - the PS4, Xbox One, and Switch versions are planned for even later.

Midnight Suns was originally planned for Take-Two's previous fiscal year with a scheduled release this past March. But it was delayed once already, pushing it into October of this year. At the time, it was implied that the delay was at least in part connected to increases in the difficulty of making games as technology has improved.

Speaking to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, he reiterated that this second delay was due to a "search for quality, and a great deal of confidence that we have a wonderful title on our hands and we want to make sure it's as good as it can possibly be." When asked if there was any concern that Midnight Suns would dip out of the fiscal year a second time (aka, get delayed a third time) he replied, "I'm not concerned about that."

On the same call, we learned that Take-Two had a couple of other games that moved "within the year" that impacted its financials, but it has not confirmed what those are.

Midnight Suns was first revealed almost a year ago at Gamescom 2021 as a superpowered version of XCOM featuring characters like Captain Marvel, Iron Man, and Wolverine.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher may not be returning after all…

After comments suggesting that Marvel’s Punisher would be back in a new series, it looks as though actress Rosario Dawson has had second thoughts.

“I can’t be trusted,” she said via Twitter. “Getting intel from fans during signings is iffy apparently. My bad. I get excited. Confirmation is key when you’re told what you want to hear…”

I can’t be trusted…!
Getting intel from fans during signings is iffy apparently.
My bad.
I get excited.
Confirmation is key when you’re told what you want to hear…

— Rosario Dawson (@rosariodawson) August 8, 2022

The 43-year-old actress played Claire Temple (aka Night Nurse) in several of Marvel’s recent Netflix shows, including Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist, not to mention their eventual team-up in The Defenders.

She first encountered Bernthal’s version of The Punisher in Daredevil Season 2 and clearly enjoyed working with the iconic Marvel character after she excitedly told fans that Jon Bernthal would be returning as Frank Castle.

“I found out yesterday that The Punisher was happening again,” she said. “So, I feel like it's my second chance because that's the only one of the shows I wasn't in and I love Jon Bernthal. So, let's all make it happen collectively, guys.”

However, now it looks as though she’s completely walked it back – playing dumb while claiming that her info came from fans and not Marvel itself.

If that’s true, it looks as though Bernthal’s Punisher may not return after all.

There’s certainly been no hint of The Punisher getting his own series once more after there was no mention of Frank Castle in Marvel’s upcoming slate that was announced at San Diego Comic Con.

Of course, The Punisher could return in one of Marvel’s other projects – the upcoming Daredevil series is a likely candidate since the pair already have a history on screen. But with Rosario claiming she had no insider info, that’s looking less likely, too.

Whether or not The Punisher returns to our screens remains to be seen… and while it could happen, it looks as though Dawson may not have the inside info we thought.

Find out more about Marvel’s upcoming slate with our full look at Marvel’s Phase 5 line-up as well as what to expect from Phase 6 and The Fantastic Four.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Netflix has been working on its video game initiative for a while now, but it seems Netflix subscribers aren't catching on. Acording to a new report from CNBC, 1.7 million Netflix subscribers are interacting with the service's games on a daily basis, which is less than 1% of Netflix's 221 million subscribers.

Netflix's games have been downloaded 23.3 million times, which equals about 10% of Netflix's subscribers. However, that doesn't account for individual users who may have downloaded multiple titles. Any way you look at it, it's a very small slice of Netflix's customers that are taking advantage of the available games. This data is according to Apptopia, a global app tracker.

Netflix's current game catalog consists of 24 games, from Netflix adaptations like Stranger Things, to multiplatform indies like Moonlighter. We also know the company is working on adaptations of some of its original streaming content, including The Queen's Gambit, Shadow and Bone, and The Money Heist.

In January, Netflix said it was aiming to have "the absolute best" gaming service for its customers. It began rolling games out in November 2021, where active Netflix subscribers can access the catalog of available games for no additional cost. The company is hoping to increase its catalog to nearly 50 available games by the end of 2022.

It's been a rocky few months for Netflix. In July, the company announced it lost nearly 1 million subscribers over the last quarter. Netflix is also in the midst of a password sharing crackdown, as it blames customers sharing accounts for part of its struggles.

It hasn't been all bad for Netflix, though, as Stranger Things 4 rapidly became the second most-watched series in Netflix history, only trailing Squid Game.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson really wanted to forget making those movies.

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the 60-year-old filmmaker explained why he wanted to forget all about Middle-earth… and it was for a very good reason.

“When we did The Lord of the Rings movies I always felt I was the unlucky person who never got to see as a coming-out-of-the-blue film,” he said. “By the time they were screening, I was immersed in it for five or six years. It was such a loss for me not be able to see them like everyone else.”

Jackson was instrumental in bringing The Lord of the Rings to the big screen, starting with The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. He followed it up with The Two Towers in 2002 and finally The Return of the King in 2004.

Additionally, Jackson followed them up with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as well as its sequels, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies. That’s a lot of Tolkien over the years.

But he still yearns to watch the films solely as a fan.

“I actually did seriously consider going to some hypnotherapy guy to hypnotize me to make me forget about the films and the work I had done over the last six or seven years so I could sit and enjoy them,” he said. “I didn’t follow through with it, but I did talk to [British mentalist] Derren Brown about that and he thought he could do it.”

Thankfully, he didn’t go through with it and still remembers making the Lord of Rings films… and Amazon, who made the upcoming Lord of the Rings show The Rings of Power were all too aware of his contributions, too.

Even if they did end up ghosting him after asking for his help.

Still, it looks as though this time around, Jackson will finally get to enjoy a Tolkien project that he hasn’t worked on… and he gets that fan experience for the first time.

“I’ll be watching it,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m not the sort of guy who wishes ill will. Filmmaking is hard enough. If somebody makes a good film or TV show, it’s something to celebrate. The one thing I am looking forward to is actually seeing it as a perfectly neutral viewer.”

Want to find out more about the Rings of Power? Check out our guide to the best way to watch the Lord of the Rings movies as well as what the upcoming TV show is all about.

Blogroll image credit: Hagen Hopkins / Getty Images

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Classic video game Pac-Man is getting a live-action movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the retro arcade classic is heading to the big screen with a live-action adaptation.

Although video game movies don’t have the best reputation, this one is coming with quite a pedigree – produced by original game creators Bandai Namco Entertainment with a script based on an idea from none other than Sonic the Hedgehog producer, Chuck Williams.

A coin-op classic, Pac-Man was a pivotal title during the rise of video games in the 1980s. Released in 1980, it soon became an arcade staple and was followed by Ms. Pac-Man as well as the inimitable Pac-Land in 1984.

Everyone has played a version of the classic game. Pac-Man follows the titular hero making his way through a series of mazes while avoiding several ghosts – Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.

Quite how this will translate into live action remains to be seen.

However, the long-running arcade series has already seen several cartoons over the years, notably the Hanna-Barbera classic, Pac-Man, which first appeared on ABC in 1982, with Disney XD taking a swing at the arcade classic with Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures in 2013.

The Pac-Man live-action film will be made by Bandai Namco Entertainment as well as Wayfarer Studios – the studio behind Disney+ movie Clouds, as well as The CW series My Last Days.

Justin Baldoni, Manu Gargi, and Andrew Calof of Wayfarer Studios join as producers alongside Chuck Williams and Tim Kwok of Lightbeam.

How Pac-Man will work in live-action remains to be seen, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen the classic video game character on the big screen.

Pac-Man recently appeared in the video game movie, Pixels, starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage. Several Pac-Man characters also made predictable cameos in Wreck-It Ralph and its sequel.

Want to read more about video game movies? Here are the upcoming video game adaptations in 2022 and beyond, not to mention every video game movie coming to Netflix.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Microsoft recently released a new Xbox software development kit, which gives developers access to more memory. The change should help improve the performance when playing game on Xbox Series S.

As spotted by The Verge, the latest game development kit frees up hundreds of additional megabytes of memory for Xbox Series S game developers. "This gives developers more control over memory, which can improve graphics performance in memory-constrained conditions," Microsoft's Game Dev team noted in the June Game Development Kit video.

While this should help provide a much-needed boost to the Xbox Series S, it will take time for developers to optimize games, and there's no promise games already out on Series S will get a patch to improve their overall performance.

Either way, Microsoft freeing up more memory is a step in the right direction for the console. As Digital Foundry has pointed out, developers have reported the issues with the previous memory limitations on the Series S, which made it harder to optimize games on the system.

The Xbox Series S launched roughly two years ago as a $299 console far less powerful than Microsoft's current flagship, the Xbox Series X. As noted in our review back in 2020, the Series S has its place in the current home console market, but its limitations for resolution and storage make it hard to recommend for everyone.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Kevin Smith has weighed in on Warner Bros. Discovery's sudden and unexpected cancellation of the Batgirl film, calling the decision "an incredibly bad look."

Speaking on the latest episode of his Hollywood Babble-On series, Smith condemned Warner Bros. Discovery for axing the Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace. He recognized the talents of directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah as he struggled to find a reason as to why the $90 million film had been scrapped when it was already so far along in post-production.

"It's an incredibly bad look to cancel the Latina Batgirl movie," Smith said. "I don't give a sh** if the movie was absolute f***ing dogsh** — I guarantee you that it wasn't. The two directors who directed that movie did a couple of episodes of Ms. Marvel, and it was a wonderful f***ing show and they had more money to do Batgirl than they had to do an episode of Ms. Marvel and stuff."

El Arbi and Fallah have been inundated with messages following Batgirl's cancellation, with several filmmakers reaching out to share their support. El Arbi publicly thanked Marvel CEO Kevin Feige and directors James Gunn and Edgar Wright for their kind words, which came in stark contrast to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav's comments that suggested Batgirl wasn't up to scratch.

"We're not going to release any film before it's ready," he said in a statement. "We're not going to release a film to make a quarter, we're not going to release a film — the focus is going to be, how do we make each of these films, in general, as good as possible. But DC is something that we think we could make better, and we're focused on it now."

Warner Bros. Discovery has since announced a new 10-year plan for DC films going forward that will be similar to what Disney and Kevin Feige have done for Marvel, but the "reset" has not gone down well, even with those inside the company, triggering wild speculation about the company's intentions for HBO Max and beyond, with reports suggesting that Supergirl could be in trouble as well.

DC Films president Walter Hamada was reportedly on the brink of quitting over the high-profile cancellation of Batgirl but has agreed to stay with the studio until at least the October 21 release of Black Adam. That film will usher in "a new era" of the DC universe — one that features the Justice Society of America represented by Atom Smasher, Hawkman, Cyclone, and Doctor Fate.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

House of the Dragon, the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel, will include some elements that are told "very differently" to the book it's based on – but the showrunners have a very good (and very interesting) reason for that.

The source for House of the Dragon is Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin's spin-off book that tells the story of the Targaryen family in the guise of a history book. House of the Dragon, on the other hand, isn't being told like a history book, but a document of the real events.

In an interview with IGN (below), co-showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik explained that they want their show to feel like it interacts with Fire & Blood, rather than just telling the same stories onscreen.

"We're taking more of the approach [of] playing with the history as it was written. Essentially, saying that this is the objective truth that happened," Condal says of the show.

"The fun of this show is that it plays as a bit of a companion piece to the history book. It communicates with the history book. In a sense that, some things will line up. Other things will be told very differently. But the idea is that, in the end, the events are the same. It's just the 'why' and 'how' they happened that changes as you see the actual history."

It's a fascinating approach to take, effectively giving existing fans of the book new reasons to pay attention to the events of the show, and compare them to Fire & Blood – and hopefully without inflaming the normal kinds of arguments about changes to the source material.

Condal – a huge fan of George R.R. Martin's original work – is clearly bringing his expertise to bear here, pointing out why the truth of the events and the history books might differ based on teh source material itself:

"Most of those historical accounts that [Fire & Blood's fictional writer] Archmaester Gyldayn was sifting through, at least two of them weren't really around at the time. Or at least weren't present as the events were happening. [Court jester] Mushroom was, if you believe Mushroom, but one was written after the fact. And then, Gyldayn certainly lived long after [the Targaryens] did.

"We're taking the approach that history in its telling changes the story. Because the historian only ever knows so much about what happened, which is why primary sources and eyewitness accounts are so important. But we didn't have all of that in this."

Of course, we asked how big those changes might be – could a character who dies in the book survive in the show? Condal was understandably enigmatic:

"Certain events will play out in ways that surprise the audience if they have read the book. Given their understanding of the underpinning history."

The other benefit for the showrunners was that Fire & Blood's more academic approach means that the real surpises can come in the characterisation of the major players in House of the Dragon. Previously, we knew them just by the facts of their lives, but the show can show us the humans behind those acts.

"I think it was a gift," says Sapochnik of that opportunity, "because it gave us stuff to do. To think through not the, 'What they did,' but how they did it and why they did it. I think it was a blessing, really."

We'll find out quite how big those changes may be when House of the Dragon premieres on August 21. The show is just one of many Game of Thrones spin-offs in development (not to mention a bunch of unused ideas).

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.