South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker almost made a Donald Trump deepfake movie.

During an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the duo revealed that their first film after 2004’s Team America was almost a full-length deepfake mocking the former president.

“It’s sort of on hold,” said Parker. “It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed. We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”

The full-length Donald Trump deepfake would have starred Peter Serafinowicz voicing Trump, exactly as he did in Stone and Parker’s viral deepfake video, “Sassy Justice”.

The video was an unexpected hit, featuring then-president Trump reporting news out of Cheyenne, Wyoming under the name, Sassy Justice.

“It was going to be Deep Fake: The Movie,” explained Parker. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”

“Even though the script was sort of timely, we ended up keeping the deep fake part of the studio going,” added Stone.

After the film fell through, Stone and Parker kept the project going on a smaller scale, creating the short video “Sassy Justice” that went viral during the pandemic. It was essentially the first content to come out of Deep Voodoo – Stone and Parker’s deepfake studio.

“We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’ I went to the office to start packing up my things because I was just kind of in shock.”

Unfortunately, it sounds as though the movie has been all but scrapped… sort of.

“I don’t know,” said Stone when asked if it could eventually see the light of day. “[Trump] could be running again.”

If Trump does run for office in 2024, expect the South Park duo to rethink the return of Sassy Justice.

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

Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker almost made a Donald Trump deepfake movie.

During an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the duo revealed that their first film after 2004’s Team America was almost a full-length deepfake mocking the former president.

“It’s sort of on hold,” said Parker. “It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed. We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”

The full-length Donald Trump deepfake would have starred Peter Serafinowicz voicing Trump, exactly as he did in Stone and Parker’s viral deepfake video, “Sassy Justice”.

The video was an unexpected hit, featuring then-president Trump reporting news out of Cheyenne, Wyoming under the name, Sassy Justice.

“It was going to be Deep Fake: The Movie,” explained Parker. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”

“Even though the script was sort of timely, we ended up keeping the deep fake part of the studio going,” added Stone.

After the film fell through, Stone and Parker kept the project going on a smaller scale, creating the short video “Sassy Justice” that went viral during the pandemic. It was essentially the first content to come out of Deep Voodoo – Stone and Parker’s deepfake studio.

“We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’ I went to the office to start packing up my things because I was just kind of in shock.”

Unfortunately, it sounds as though the movie has been all but scrapped… sort of.

“I don’t know,” said Stone when asked if it could eventually see the light of day. “[Trump] could be running again.”

If Trump does run for office in 2024, expect the South Park duo to rethink the return of Sassy Justice.

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

Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Blizzard has announced when loot boxes will be phased out of Overwatch in anticipation of the new Battle Pass system.

The announcement was quietly mentioned in a blog post about the Overwatch Anniversary Remix Volume 3 event. The company confirmed that the loot boxes would "no longer be available for sale" come August 30th.

However, the post notes that you'll still be able to earn standard loot boxes after the Remix event.

This Anniversary Remix event is Blizzard's way of "cleaning house" of sorts, allowing players to earn (or buy) cosmetics before Overwatch 2 launches on October 4, 2022. This includes skins and cosmetics from previous Overwatch Challenge events.

Players will also be able to participate in "brawls" and relive certain game types such as past story missions such as Uprising and Storm Rising and past Summer Games modes like Lucioball.

Blizzard formally announced that loot boxes were going away in June, replacing them with a battle pass and in-game store. The company said they wanted to give players "a lot more control over how they interact with the game and acquire new content."

Loot boxes have long been a controversial subject in the gaming industry. Games such as Overwatch, Call of Duty, and EA Sports franchises have been criticized for their monetization methods. Additionally, there have been links found between loot boxes and gambling.

Fortunately, it seems Blizzard wants to get away from those tactics and stick with a more fair method of dolling out skins and cosmetics (maybe). In fact, Blizzard confirmed that all unopened loot boxes in Overwatch will automatically open before the launch of Overwatch 2.

Overwatch 2 releases this year on October 4th and will completely replace the original Overwatch. Check out the major differences between the original game and the sequel.

David Matthews is a freelance writer specializing in consumer tech and gaming. He also strongly believes that sugar does not go in grits. Follow him on Twitter @packetstealer

There's reportedly another casualty in Warner Bros. Discovery's restructuring of the DC Universe, as filmmaker Kevin Smith said the Strange Adventures animated series is not moving forward.

According to Smith on his Hollywood Babble-On podcast (via THR), Strange Adventures is the next project to hit the cutting room floor as a result of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

“Strange Adventures being a casualty kind of made sense to me, I'm like, nobody necessarily knows these characters, and it sounded like an expensive show,” Smith said on the podcast.

WarnerMedia first announced Strange Adventures back in 2019. The show was intended to be an anthology series produced by Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and John Stephens. Stephens was also set to serve as writer and showrunner. At the time, the show was described as, "An anthology series of cautionary tales set in a world where superpowers exist".

Smith said the show would focus on characters other than Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and other DC characters everybody knows. For example, in an episode Smith wrote, he said he picked Jimmy Olsen and Bizarro to focus on.

According to Smith, the actor they were pursuing to play Bizarro in this story was Nicolas Cage, but the talks never progressed prior to production coming to a halt. The show was announced alongside a Green Lantern series, which according to THR, is still on track for HBO Max.

In the same podcast, Smith also spoke out about Warner Bros. Discovery's sudden cancellation of the Batgirl movie, calling the move "an incredibly bad look."

Beyond Batgirl and now Strange Adventures, a handful of other DC projects have been impacted by the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Other affected movies and series include Season 9 of The Flash, The Wonder Twins, The Supergirl movie, and more.

To read up on the whole situation, check out our report on The Batgirl cancellation, the social media fallout, and more.

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

A group of talented Better Call Saul fans have created an impressive video imagining what the television series may look like if it were adapted into a Nintendo Game Boy game.

Created by artist Lumpy Touch, along with 2bitcrook and branflakes, the video showcases the title screen, character select, and some gameplay from this hypothetical game. You can check out the intro of the project below, or take a full look at the video on YouTube.

Better Call Saul Gameboy'd
full video link below pic.twitter.com/Drf4d2ozpa

— Lumpy (@LumpyTouch) August 6, 2022

The imaginary game has three playable characters: Jimmy, Kim, and Mike. The creators even assigned different statistics to each character, including Guts, Hustle, Authority, and Lawyer. Following the character select is a cutscene, complete with warbled 8-bit voices.

The level shown involves running through the desert, stomping on scorpions and collecting money. The video also recreates Mike's sniping abilities and Jimmy and Howard's boxing match from the show.

The music used in the video is sampled from a number of Game Boy and NES games, including Turok, Castlevania the Adventure, Trip World, and more. There's also a Game Boy-ified version of the Better Call Saul theme used in the video.

Better Call Saul is in the middle of its sixth and final season right now. In last week's episode, the show finally gave us the long-awaited cameos from Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. Speaking of Cranston and Paul, the two actors were just in Albuquerque to celebrate the unveiling of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman statues.

For more on Better Call Saul, check out our article about what Better Call Saul gets right about prequels that most franchises get wrong.

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

Cobra Kai will return on September 9, 2022, with the debut of Season 5. The upcoming season of the hit Netflix martial arts drama Cobra Kai will also see the return of Karate Kid 3 villain, Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan).

That’s right – the sadistic karate-based villain who Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) hired to terrorize Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is back… and judging from these 10 newly-released images, he’s going to be putting up a fight once more.

Of course, this makes a lot of sense. At the end of Cobra Kai Season 4, we saw Silver wrestle control of Cobra Kai from his former friend, John Kreese (Martin Kove) who he also framed for murder… and it looks as though he’s brought in some backup to keep Daniel and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) in line.

Season 5 comes several months earlier than expected – the show usually debuts around New Year.

And honestly, it can’t come soon enough. Season 4 was a thrilling continuation of the Cobra Kai story with Daniel and Johnny finally putting their differences aside, and it looks as though they’ll need to rely on each other even more in Season 5.

Unfortunately, we still don’t know how Barnes is going to make his entrance into Cobra Kai… but it looks as though he hasn’t stopped training. But these new images do give us a glimpse of the Cobra Kai dojo, which seems to have been given more than a lick of paint by Sensei Silver.

Not to mention, the return of some of our favorites including Miguel Diaz (Xolo Maridueña), Hawk (Jacob Bertrand), and even Robby (Tanner Buchanan).

IGN’s review of Cobra Kai Season 4 said that “the heart and soul of what makes the series what it is, is still present. A different kind of hokeyness is evident in Season 4, but it’s met by more complex emotional journeys and unexpected team-ups that will leave fans counting down the days until Season 5.”

Want to read more about Cobra Kai? Check out how the Cobra Kai creators want the show to continue past Season 5 as well as which Cobra Kai characters you can suit up as in Fortnite.

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

Jurassic World: Dominion is already a hefty 2 hours and 26 minutes, but a new extended release will bring the total runtime up to a whopping 2 hours and 40 minutes. Universal has announced that the Blu-ray and 4K UHD physical release, as well as a new digital version, will come with 14 extra minutes of previously unreleased footage.

The new release, titled Jurassic World Dominion Extended Edition, is launching next week on August 16. The 14 extra minutes of content is made up of an alternate opening and even more dinosaurs.

In addition to the extra content, the physical release also includes behind-the-scenes footage and an original short film called Battle at Big Rock. The short film is directed by Colin Trevorrow, and it takes place one year after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom at Big Rock National Park.

Jurassic World: Dominion is the conclusion to the Jurassic saga, which spans six films dating back to the original Jurassic Park. We called the film 'good' in our review, saying, "it manages to introduce an impressive marriage between ever-present nostalgia and the constantly evolving challenges of having prehistoric creatures roaming free in our world."

For more, check out our opinion piece on why the Jurassic Park sequels should embrace their stupidity. Or, check out our breakdown of Jurassic World Dominion's Easter eggs and ending explained.

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

You'll soon be able to cook over 150 chili recipes recommended by The Office's Kevin Malone... Just make sure not to spill it all over the floor.

Available for preorder now on Amazon, the new Seriously Good Chili cookbook has 177 chili recipes hand-picked by Brian Baumgartner, the actor who played Kevin Malone on NBC's The Office. On Instagram, Baumgartner posted a video of him unboxing the cookbook, saying it will be available this September.

As for the recipes themselves, they come from famous chefs, food bloggers, and celebrities. The book also includes a foreword written by The Office's Oscar Nunez, and a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic chili scene from The Office.

Kevin's famous chili appears in Season 5, Episode 26's cold open, when Kevin is very excited about his annual tradition of bringing a pot of his famous chili to the office. The character even proclaims, "It's probably the thing I do best." The cold open ends with Kevin dropping the pot and spilling chili all over the floor of the office, in a scene you've probably seen countless times on social media.

Earlier this year, a Peacock subscriber discovered that the streaming service hid Kevin's famous chili recipe within Peacock's terms of service. So, you can recreate the entire original recipe without the new cookbook.

For more on The Office, check out how NBC may be standing by for a reboot of The Office. And, Office superfans should check out the official The Office LEGO set.

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

An anime adaptation of popular manga Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoku Kui has been announced, with an official website and Twitter account.

The new series will adapt the story of the Manga, where an RPG-style party of dungeon-crawling adventurers try to make their latest trip as cheap and efficient as possible, forgoing supplies and doing their best to make the monsters they fight into edible treats. The series also offers in-depth recipes for each of the opponents the characters encounter.

A broadcast date for the anime has not yet been announced, but there’s a beautiful piece of art showing the main characters huddled around a meal, being stalked by monsters in the darkness.

The anime will be produced by the renowned Studio Trigger, known for Kill la Kill, Promare, and the upcoming Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

Previously, Studio Trigger produced an anime-style commercial for the 8th volume of the manga, which led to a massive amount of interest from fans in seeing them make a full adaptation. It may give us a sense of what the anime could look like, and you can watch it in the tweet below:

It's not surprising to see that Studio TRIGGER has been left in charge of Dungeon Meshi's animation production. After all they were assigned the task of making a promotional CM for the titular series a few years ago, which miraculously comes full circle. pic.twitter.com/VL5d4jccg3

— Baleygr (CEO of 86 EIGHTY-SIX) (@Baleygr086) August 9, 2022

Dungeon Meshi began in February of 2014 and by August 2017 the first 4 volumes saw over 2 million copies in print. It was rated number one for male readers in 2016’s This Manga Is Amazing’s rankings, the result of 400 manga professionals voting on their favorites.

Mat Jones is IGN's UK Social Coordinator, and will turn back into a pumpkin at midnight.

The key thing to know about Gotham Knights’ factions is that they aren’t just henchmen for a named villain. The gangs of enemies you’ll find across Gotham’s darkened streets are sorted into affiliations – with their own preferences of street crime and equipment – but they’re mercenaries, not cultists.

Take our subjects for today: the Regulators faction, and classic supervillain Mr. Freeze. The Regulators are an existing gang in this version of Gotham, a group of tech-enhanced ne’er-do-wells who steal advanced goods, traffic organs and augment their own power with their ill-gotten gains. You can meet them doing their own thing as you clean up the streets – but you can also find them allied with Mr. Freeze, and adopting his penchant for ice-enhanced elemental attacks as a result. In effect, Freeze hires the Regulators for portions of his storyline, they don’t just flock to his cause.

It led to a very interesting design challenge for Gotham Knights’ art team – how do you design a villain and a gang that feel like they could work together, but don’t necessarily always do so?

Interestingly, that process was more organic than forced. The team knew they wanted to include the iconic Freeze, but his association with a gang came later. At first, it was all about building a villain who felt recognisable, without feeling overly familiar.

“When we get a villain like Mr. Freeze, I mean the guy's got so much history, it's a challenge for our team when we get it,” explains character art director, Jay Evans. “It's, ‘Where do we go from here?’ Because we look at all the past [versions of the character] that have been done really well. For us, the kind of jumping off point was where does he fit in our Gotham City, on a technological kind of level? So he is the most advanced technology piece in our Gotham.”

That’s not to say this version of Freeze is a pure sci-fi fantasy. The key for the design team was in creating someone whose advanced technology was still rooted in reality.

“A lot of our reference was medical equipment,” says Evans. “Molded, cool, almost sci-fi shapes with part lines and product design influences. But then, he's still understandable. There's still mechanical connections. It's still relatable. It's not just sci-fi blobs where you have to use your imagination.”

Brilliantly, to help build advanced tech that felt in some way realistic, the art team… used some advanced tech to help make that happen.

“We started experimenting quite early on with using VR in our concept art pipeline,” says Evans. “What makes it awesome is when you're designing a weapon or a piece of a character, just having that there in real life floating in front of you at the correct scale, it just really helps the artists. [...] Then exporting that rough mesh, exporting that into a game engine right away. It seemed like a really natural, quick pipeline. And we used it on Mr. Freeze.”

“VR just [adds] that tangibility,” adds Wu. “If you [have a gauntlet in front of you], you feel like you can wear it right here, right now. And then you can see all those different perspectives right away in real time. That's very useful.”

Using VR helped the team get a sense of not just how Mr. Freeze looks as piece of design, but how he’d feel to be close to in an interactive space, helping them build a tangible new version of an iconic character. But of course, you can only push a known supervillain so far, and the team made sure early on to identify what it is that makes Freeze immediately identifiable to even a casual comic book fan:

“The dome, the goggles, his face,” explains associate character art director, Jianli Wu. “The lore of Mr. Freeze is iconic. We don't want to deviate from that, because everyone, when they see that, they know it’s Mr Freeze. But we elevated the tech level a little bit, and we want to bring our own flavor into his design. We want to be faithful to the IP and, but at the same time, we want to bring something new to the table. So that's kind of the philosophy we have for a lot of the characters in the game, from the player-characters to someone like Mr. Freeze.”

The Regulators, on the other hand, are a brand new addition to the universe. While there have been a couple of DC supervillains called The Regulator over the years, the Gotham Knights faction doesn’t appear to be associated with them. Initially, they weren’t even created to be associated with Mr. Freeze, either.

“Our approach was to design the factions as standalone factions first,” explains Evans. “The Regulators in our fiction are the fantasy of these hackers, safe crackers, various other tech-related criminals. And what makes them unique is they have this ‘found technology’ layer to them. So the Regulators are grabbing technology from the most futuristic or the most advanced places in Gotham – maybe it's STAR Labs or something.

“And then they're building their weapons and their equipment, and it's all visible on the outside of them. So on the base layer, we have this kind of contemporary, almost athletic wear with bright colors. But then on top, we have this tech layer. On the base units, it's smaller elements, [but] on some of the more advanced archetypes, it can be things like a completely augmented arm that has a upgraded weapon.”

In the gallery above, you can see that advancement in action, a visual representation of how the game increases enemy strength alongside you. Enemy goons can range from Base, to Veteran, to Champion, to Named Champion difficulties, and in the case of a Regulator, you can see how much more of that pilfered tech they’re applying to themselves as they increase in importance to the gang.

Regulators can be Brawlers, Shooters, Snipers, Shockers, and Dronemasters, all of whom use their tech in different ways to try and take the Knights down. It was only when that faction philosophy was established that the team realized they’d created the perfect mercenary force for their power-suited take on Victor Fries – but that also created a little more work.

“We linked up the Regulators with Mr. Freeze,” says Evans. “It seemed like a natural fit, based on their technology levels, where they fit artistically and in their writing, stuff like that.”

“I remember at some point we went through the Regulators all over again,” continues Wu, “because it would fit with Mr. Freeze a little bit better. So yeah, I think that's just one of those things that's inevitable at certain parts of the project.”

After that redesign, things truly came together. The Regulators can be found all over Gotham under normal circumstances, but you’ll stumble on Freeze-aligned pockets of them, too, presumably working under the supervillain’s direction. Later in Freeze’s optional villain arc, it will seemingly be the Regulators that help him to ice over the top of Elliot Centre for a boss battle (which we saw in some 2020 footage of the game).

They make for a natural team, but one that feels more rooted in business than devotion – a part of Gotham Knights’ more grounded take on the legendary comic book city. We’ll be talking more about that very soon in our month of IGN First coverage, but if you want to learn more right now, we have the first 16 minutes of the game to watch, and a reveal of 28 unlockable superhero suits, and how they were designed.

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.