By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 20 seconds ago

It’s a very interesting time to be an X-Files fan right now. Next month, Chris Carter will be releasing a director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want To Believe, which is generally considered the second worst thing in the franchise (the worst thing was that crappy revival).  But what really has the fandom excited is that the entire series is getting rebooted, with Ryan Coogler serving as showrunner. After all, this isn’t just anybody bringing a beloved series back to life; it’s the Oscar-winning writer and director behind the modern horror classic, Sinners. If there’s anybody who can restore The X-Files to its former glory, it’s this guy. 

And make no mistake, restoration is desperately needed. The original X-Files series took a nosedive after Season 5, eventually ending with one of the worst finales in television history. The second film was a critical and commercial flop, and the revival was bad enough that it should be classified as a war crime. However, Coogler has the passion, drive, and (most importantly) the talent to restore this spooky series to its former luster. It helps that he’s gone all-out: the showrunner shot the pilot on 65mm film, and he’s now considering giving this first episode a theatrical release.

The Dream Of The ’90s Is Alive On Hulu

Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files replaces David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson entirely. Instead, our pair of erstwhile FBI agents will be played by Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler. This show has its own unique canon, one in which the X-Files had previously been established and, later, shut down. These new agents are tasked with reopening the division and exploring various unexplained phenomena. The show will be exclusive to Hulu and doesn’t yet have a fixed release date, though it could drop on the streaming platform as early as late 2026.

When it does, it’s going to look absolutely fabulous. That’s because Coogler shot the pilot episode on 65mm film, which is a major rarity for television. Typically, things shot in this high a quality are reserved for the big screen, and the showrunner is reportedly considering giving the X-Files reboot pilot a theatrical release. Right now, Hulu is reportedly on the fence about doing this, especially because they have only commissioned a pilot and not yet ordered an entire series. If the pilot makes it to theaters, you’ll want to see it on the biggest screen possible because Coogler hired Oscar-winning cinematographer and Sinners collaborator Autumn Durald Arkapaw to shoot the first episode.

Will The X-Files Reboot Get Canceled?

Whether the X-Files reboot gets a series order depends on how well Coogler can impress the Hulu execs. As fans of the Slayer know all too well, the powers that be at the streaming platform didn’t like the initial cut of the highly anticipated Buffy reboot, requiring reshoots. Those reshoots did not impress them, and the show ended up getting canceled altogether. After the success of Sinners, Coogler has a lot of star power and momentum going for him, but that may not be enough. After all, the canceled Buffy series was also a reboot of a highly popular genre show from the ‘90s, spearheaded by another Oscar winner: Eternals director Chloé Zhao.

Of course, the Buffy series died in large part because it was difficult to create a reboot that matched the consistently high quality of the original show. That’s not going to be a problem with The X-Files, though: the original show diminished in quality, and after that, all we got was a terrible movie and an even worse, briefly lived revival. Fans have spent years hoping to get a truly great new incarnation of this once-great show. Is Ryan Coogler the man to give it to us? As Spooky Mulder himself might say, I want to believe.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 17 seconds ago

One thing that Marvel Comics fans have long joked about is the sheer number of superheroes who are based out of New York City. Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four…believe it or not, these are just a few of the characters and groups based around the iconic city. How and why did this happen? Simple: Marvel Comics has always been located in New York City, and in the formative days of the publisher, most of the writers, artists, and editors lived in that same city. Accordingly, the stories they created reflected the lived experience of walking those streets, day in and day out.

These days, however, very few comic writers live in New York City due to its notoriously high cost of living. And now, even the company itself is forsaking the city. Earlier this week, Marvel informed its employees that it would be moving its publishing division out of Midtown and to Burbank, California, which is home to both Marvel Studios and The Walt Disney Company. Along with this big change, the publisher also named Stephen Wacker as its new editor-in-chief. These major shifts at the House of Ideas have one major purpose: to help Marvel Comics beat DC and become, once more, the market share leader in comic book publishing.

DC Keeps Kicking Marvel’s Butt

If you only pay attention to superhero movies, you might wonder why Marvel would fret about beating DC. After all, the DCEU ran itself into the ground trying to compete with the MCU, which is still going strong. Now, James Gunn’s DCU is floundering: Superman was a success story last year, but Supergirl, the second film in this cinematic universe, turned out to be a critical and commercial bomb. Throw in the fact that this year’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday are going to collectively make billions of dollars, and Marvel’s cinematic success is undeniable. Unfortunately, Marvel’s publishing side has been consistently losing ground to their biggest rival.

How is Marvel losing out to DC? As The Hollywood Reporter reports, Marvel “lost its position as comics market share leader for the first time this century.” In terms of numbers, ICv2 reports that DC successfully captured somewhere between 34 and 40 percent of the market share compared to Marvel’s 29 to 33 percent. This is due to multiple factors, including DC making its older works more affordable and accessible through its Compact Comics line and offering exciting new books like Absolute Batman. Compared to DC’s success, Marvel has recently looked like they were just publishing filler to keep readers interested between movies.

An Uncanny Team-Up

Now, however, Marvel is taking big swings to try to take back the market share from their greatest opponent. As Kevin Feige noted at a recent town hall event, moving remaining operations to the West Coast is intended to create better synergy between Marvel’s publication, animation, and live-action storytellers. This sentiment was echoed in a letter Brad Winderbaum (head of television, animation, comics, and franchise) and David Abdo (general manager, comics and franchise) sent to The Hollywood Reporter. “Bringing our comics, film, television, and other creative teams together will help us learn from one another, collaborate, and build on the strengths that make Marvel the true House of Ideas,” they wrote.

In a perfect world, this collaboration will give us more high-quality projects like X-Men ‘97 (when are we getting that animated cinematic universe, Brad?!) while improving the MCU, which has been very inconsistent since Avengers: Endgame. If nothing else, giving the publishing division a new editor-in-chief will give a shot in the arm to Marvel Comics and help them provide proper competition to DC once more. This, too, is good for the long-term health of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has become successful by adapting the best comics of yesteryear. The only way to make sure the films of the future rock is to make sure the comics of today don’t suck.

If that can happen, readers and viewers alike will proudly say “Make mine Marvel” yet again. Otherwise, the audience for this storied publisher might do their best impression of Spider-Man from Avengers: Infinity War by disappearing altogether. 

A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to.

That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on.

The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva.    

Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019.

Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch.  The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce — bringing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.

The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”

Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction. “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said.

When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.

Not just about language

An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either,” she said.

Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data.

Current’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.

The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.

Who owns the data?

On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn’t mince words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,” she told TechCrunch.

The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.

None of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.”

As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.”  

Building the stack

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power.

Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.