One of the main attractions of the 2024 Paris Olympics is, of course, Paris. The City of Lights and its many world-famous landmarks will take center stage at this year’s Games. While equestrians will compete at Versailles, beach volleyball matches will play out in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Swimmers will, weather permitting, race in the Seine. But it’s hard to imagine that any one event will offer as magnificent a tribute to Paris as Friday’s Opening Ceremony, which eschewed the confines of a stadium and made the entire city its stage. The ceremony, which took place in the hours surrounding sunset in France and will re-air in “enhanced” form at 7:30 pm ET on NBC, was occasionally weird, wildly ambitious, ultimately wonderful, and extremely French.

The torch relay was a spectacle in itself, as French soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane carried the flame through the cafes and skate parks of Paris, before passing it off—in a Métro tunnel—to a masked figure who would shepherd it over rooftops, across a zipline, and beyond, en route to the Olympic cauldron at the Trocadéro. Meanwhile, the Parade of Nations proceeded along a 3.7-mile stretch of the Seine by boat, pausing for the musical performances and other themed vignettes that artistic director Thomas Jolly interspersed throughout the four-hour event, in order to give each country’s delegation a moment in the spotlight.

Each show-stopping moment—from Lady Gaga’s surprise-but-not-really appearance, during which she sang flawlessly in French, surrounded by dancers with feathery fans, to the unexpectedly moving sight of a pianist Alexandre Kantorow playing Ravel in the rain—was situated in an iconic Parisian setting. International pop sensation Aya Nakamura gave an energetic performance in a gorgeous, monochromatic, Olympics-appropriate gold ensemble, on the Pont des Arts, which connects the Institut de France with the Louvre. On the roof of the Grand-Palais, mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel sang “La Marseillaise.” A footbridge was converted into a catwalk, near the Eiffel Tower, for a celebration of French fashion.

Read more: Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Photos

And in the ceremony’s final minutes, there was Celine Dion, long rumored to be performing in Paris, singing Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” on a stage midway up the same tower, belting triumphantly for all the city and the world to hear. You didn’t have to be her biggest fan to feel your heart swell at the sight—and, more to the point, the sound—of the singer, who had been sidelined by stiff person syndrome, back in top form. With all there is to feel hopeless about in 2024, it’s hard to imagine a more elegant embodiment of resilience.

As is often the case for events freighted with tradition, the most enjoyable moments tended to be the strangest—and the most idiosyncratically French—ones. Dozens of dancers in hot pink doing the can-can? Fantastique. Marie Antoinette holding her freshly decapitated, singing head, as the introduction to a set piece that would pair opera singer Marina Viotti with French metal stalwarts Gojira? Vive la révolution. An ode to love and literature that began in the library and ended with what was, by all appearances, a ménage à trois entering an apartment and saucily closing the door on the camera operator? Ooh la la. It wouldn’t be Paris without that frisson.

Were there missteps? Mais oui; a show of this scale and length could never be perfect. The amount of time devoted to Minions, weeks after the release of Despicable Me 4, during a cinema segment that also featured such deserving pioneers of French film as Georges Méliès, struck me as obscenely promotional. (If you’re wondering about the French connection, the movie was produced by Illumination Studios Paris). The pre-Celine final hour was boring, if unavoidably so, with its welcome speeches and laser lights and ceremonial boat ride. NBC’s coverage for American audiences was also, while not weak enough to become a major distraction, something of a lowlight; announcers and correspondents offered plenty of canned sports factoids and bland Team USA interviews but little information about the performances.

But no false note could spoil the city-spanning spectacle that Jolly and his team pulled off, with rain adding another major obstacle to the event’s execution. Especially after two Opening Ceremonies, Beijing 2022 and Tokyo 2020 (which was postponed to 2021), that were relatively anticlimactic and impersonal due to COVID-19 restrictions, the Paris edition felt both grand and human. When it was cheesy (see: the obligatory rendition of “Imagine,” this time on a barge with a burning piano that all-too-clearly symbolized a world on fire), it was endearingly so. More than high-end entertainment for spectators who pay handsomely for seats at the stadiums or viewers in living rooms around the world, it resonated as a show about and for Paris, making the city’s buildings and monuments and history and, above all, people the center of the celebration.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine. 

In Deadpool & Wolverine, which hit theaters on July 26, the titular characters finally make their long-awaited debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This introduction is five years in the making after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox for $71.3 billion in 2019. With the merger, the media conglomerate gained access to the IP rights for a whole host of new characters—exciting heroes and villains alike—finally giving them a chance to get a proper place in the MCU canon.

There’s a lot to remember and watch (if you’re committed to the Marvel franchise at large) to know where Deadpool & Wolverine picks up in both of these characters’ timelines. But if you need a refresher and don’t feel like watching hours of movies, we’ve got you covered. In the newest edition of the MCU, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is taken in by the Time Variance Authority and is told that the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in his timeline was the “anchor being” and that without him, his timeline (and thus all of his friends) would perish. He sets out on a mission to find a Wolverine in a different reality to replace the lost one to keep his timeline from disappearing. He comes across a Logan variant in a different reality, who drinks away his feelings after most of the X-Men in his reality die and he fails to save them.

Deadpool takes the variant to the TVA and Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) tells him he can’t just replace an “anchor being” and the two of them end up being “pruned” and sent to the Void. It’s here when two major fan-service fights happen—right before they happen, Deadpool breaks the fourth wall and says, “People have waited decades for this fight.” Here’s what he means by this—and why the two fights are significant.

Deadpool and Wolverine

Soon after the titular characters get sent to the Void, the two argue and Wolverine unsheathes his claws. Right before they fight, Deadpool looks straight to camera, addressing the excited fans, and says fans have waited years for this fight and if they were gonna do it, they need to do it right. We get a slow-mo of Deadpool showing off as he reloads his guns and they brawl. 

Deadpool and Wolverine—specifically played by these two actors in the Fox timeline—have a long history. The two characters met in the comics in 1994 in Wolverine #88 and appeared throughout the years together as frenemies, fighting and slashing each other. Audiences got the first live-action iteration of Wade Wilson/Deadpool in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. However, this version of Deadpool had his mouth eventually sewn shut and it wasn’t until Deadpool’s standalone movies that fans actually enjoyed how he was portrayed. He’s called Merc with a Mouth for a reason and it angle off multiple members of the X-Men, including Wolverine in the new movie. Now that they are finally in a movie together, fans were excited to finally see the two mutants who are incapable of dying battle it out and see who comes out alive. Spoiler alert: they don’t kill each other.

Wolverine and Sabertooth

One of the trailers revealed that fans of the Marvel franchise will be getting a fight that they’ve long been waiting for: Wolverine and Sabertooth. After Deadpool and Wolverine almost tear each other to shreds in the Void, they encounter a Mad Max-style gang filled with tertiary level Marvel characters like Pyro, Toad, and Sabertooth—a character with a history in the comics who was depicted by two different actors.

The earliest iteration of the character and his debut in the X-Men franchise came in 2000’s X-Men, who was portrayed by Tyler Mane. Mane reprisest the role in Deadpool & Wolverine for the major fight. However, he’s not the only actor to done the claws of Sabertooth. Liev Schreiber assumed the role of Sabertooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine—the same movie in which Deadpool makes his debut—and in this version, he’s Wolverine’s half-brother. The two have had multiple run-ins throughout the length of the MCU timeline and fought in both X-Men and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They go head to head in the new movie for the first time in years, which is why Deadpool makes the comment that fans have been waiting for this match-up.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.

Deadpool & Wolverine is the only Marvel movie released this year, making it the most anticipated—for a good reason. The fast-talking anti-hero Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds) is finally making his way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe through a sort-of buddy comedy team-up film with Wolverine (with Hugh Jackman reprising his role from Fox’s X-Men movies). However, it is hard to say that Wolverine would call each other buddies. This movie is filled with cameos from forgotten X-Men and Marvel characters that were the most at risk of getting lost in the Disney/Fox acquisition shuffle, such as Blade (revived by the original actor Wesley Snipes), Elektra (reprised by Jennifer Garner), and Gambit (played by Channing Tatum—who has been trying to make a film centered around the character for a while).

In addition to the star power in the cameos, there’s one character that got a lot of buzz and sparked conversation online as first-look stills began to flood the internet: Lady Deadpool.

In the comics, Lady Deadpool is a female version of Deadpool from an alternate universe named Wanda Wilson (the male Deadpool is Wade Wilson). In the film’s publicity leading up to its release, Marvel didn’t reveal who was playing the masked character, preferring to leave it as a mystery to tease fans. And even in the movie, Lady Deadpool doesn’t take her mask off; it’s only revealed who she is in the end credits scene.

Rumors began swirling about who was behind the mask, with some suggesting that Taylor Swift was making a cameo in the movie, while others theorized that Reynolds himself was playing the character. But it’s Blake Lively, Reynolds’ wife, making her MCU debut as Lady Deadpool.

Lady Deadpool’s movie moment

In the movie, Deadpool and Wolverine try to stop the villain, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin), from using a device called a Time Ripper to heighten her powers that seemingly already have no limits. Cassandra has enslaved almost all of the living beings in The Void —a receptacle for forgotten and abandoned heroes and villains—and she seems to have collected a few Deadpool variants along the way, including Cowboy Deadpool, Kid Deadpool, and, bizarrely, floating skeleton head Deadpool.

As the original Deadpool (who refers to himself as Deadpool prime—or better yet, Marvel Jesus) and Wolverine try to reach Cassandra, the Deadpool variant army is her first line of defense. Lady Deadpool leads the pack.

Cameos and plot points for the MCU are notorious for being kept under wraps. However, on Tuesday, IMDb had already listed all of the cameos and guest stars that appear in the movie with Lively’s name appearing next to Lady Deadpool as well as Snipes, Garner, Tatum, Henry Cavill, and Chris Evans.

Deadpool & Wolverine is chock full of cameos. Brilliantly, the film reintroduces several characters who have been forgotten or abandoned in various Marvel movies and explains that they have been banished to The Void, essentially the MCU’s version of a cosmic trash heap.

After being sent into The Void themselves, Deadpool and Wolverine meet Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Dafne Keen’s X-23 from Logan, and even Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm from the original Fantastic Four films, before Evans took on the mantle of Captain America. These characters never got true endings—their franchises ended abruptly. So they team up with Deadpool and Wolverine in hopes of getting an epic, noble conclusion.

But perhaps the most curious cameo is a character played by Channing Tatum who never got his own live-action movie—despite the actor’s best efforts. When Tatum waltzes in, you would be forgiven for wondering, “Who is this dude with an incomprehensible New Orleans accent slinging playing cards as weapons?”

Well, he’s Gambit, and some of us are (unfortunately) old enough to remember when 20th Century Fox announced a Gambit film that never materialized—perhaps with good reason based on how ridiculous the character is in Deadpool & Wolverine. Here’s everything you need to know about Tatum’s Gambit.

Who is Gambit?

Gambit, otherwise known as the Ragin’ Cajun or Prince of Thieves, is a lesser-known but beloved mutant in the X-Men universe. Remy LeBeau has the ability to create explosive projectiles using kinetic energy. His projectiles of choice are, intriguingly, playing cards.

The New Orleans-based mutant worked as a pickpocket before joining the crimefighting team of the X-Men. He became a breakout favorite character in X-Men: The Animated Series and returned to the small screen in Disney+’s animated X-Men ’97 earlier this year.

Has Gambit appeared on the big screen?

Gambit has actually appeared on the big screen before in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He was played by Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch since Tatum was busy filming G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra. But it’s Tatum, not Kitsch, who has spent the last decade trying and failing to get a Gambit solo movie made. The fact that he finally makes his debut as the character in this fourth-wall-breaking movie is a sly commentary on Hollywood superhero movie making.

Neither the character nor X-Men Origins were well received. Ryan Reynolds also made his debut as Deadpool in that movie. For inexplicable reasons, a character so loquacious he’s called “the Merc With a Mouth” had his lip sewn shut in the film. Reynolds was so unhappy with Deadpool’s portrayal in X-Men Origins that he became determined to do right by the character, eventually launching the Deadpool franchise in 2016.

Gambit, by contrast, never found his way to the big screen again…until Deadpool & Wolverine.

What happened to the Gambit movie?

Coming off the success of 21 Jump Street, Tatum was determined to make a Gambit solo flick, and in 2014, 20th Century Fox officially green lit the film. Tatum then spent years in development hell.

Several directors, including Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), joined and then departed the production. Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright recently revealed in an interview with SlashFilm that X-Men producer Simon Kinberg offered him the Gambit movie, but he turned it down. Tatum even proposed that he co-direct with producing partner Reid Carolin. “The studio really didn’t want us to direct it,” Tatum told Variety. “They wanted anybody but us, essentially, because we had never directed anything.”

There was also apparently disagreement over the portrayal of the character. “They would call him ‘flamboyant’ in his description,” Tatum said. “I wouldn’t — he was just the coolest person. He could pull anything off. Most superheroes, their outfits are utilitarian. Batman’s got his belt. Gambit’s like, ‘No, this sh—t’s just fly, bro! This sh—t walked down the Paris runway last year.’ He’s just wearing the stuff that’s so dope because he loves fashion.”

Tatum compared the tone of his Gambit film to Deadpool, in fact, and said it aimed to be an R-rated romantic comedy. In the comics and animated series, Gambit’s love interest is fan-favorite X-Men character Rogue.

When Disney merged with 20th Century Fox in 2019, Tatum gave up hope the film would ever be made. Carolin says they were ready to start shooting in New Orleans when the production was shut down.

Tatum toldVanity Fair in 2023, “It got swallowed up into Disney by way of Marvel when they bought Fox, and ultimately I just think that the tone of the movie we wanted to make was very far from what they wanted to do—or, you know, maybe they’re waiting to see how they do it with us or without us. We call every once in a while, but we’ve got to spiritually, emotionally, kind of mentally let it go.”

Is the Gambit movie still dead after Deadpool & Wolverine?

Probably. Tatum claimed in the interview with Variety that he was “so traumatized” by the deal falling apart that he couldn’t watch other Marvel movies. “I shut off my Marvel machine. I haven’t been able to see any of the movies,” he said. “I loved that character. It was just too sad. It was like losing a friend because I was so ready to play him.”

Presumably, Tatum will make an exception and screen Deadpool & Wolverine. The actor seems to have gotten over the pain of the cursed production process for Gambit: He’s game to be the butt of several jokes. Deadpool criticizes Tatum’s accent work and argues that the audience is missing critical exposition every time Gambit speaks. He refers to him as an up-close magician and mocks his fashion. It’s fun, but not exactly a promising start to a potential spinoff.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Deadool & Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman’s beloved Wolverine isn’t the only mutant to show up in the third Deadpool movie. Deadpool & Wolverine is chock full of superhero cameos from the X-Men universe, Fantastic Four universe, and the Marvel cinematic universe.

How, exactly, all these disparate characters who have never shared a screen before wind up in the same place is rather complicated. As Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) himself explains in the fourth-wall-breaking movie, Disney merged with 20th Century Fox five years ago. Pre-merger, Disney—who owns Marvel Studios and their MCU—held the rights to the Avengers. Fox, meanwhile, had the rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four. As of 2019’s merger, Disney owns all the characters and has begun to fold the characters of X-Men and Fantastic Four into the MCU.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a love letter to the 20th Century Fox Marvel movies that are largely dead—or getting rebooted—post-merger. Early in the movie, Deadpool and Wolverine get banished to a place called The Void, a kind of dumping ground for comics characters at the end of space and time. There they run into several characters whose own movies were abandoned or never made. Deadpool & Wolverine offers those characters some closure. It even ends with a montage of behind-the-scenes footage from various X-Men and Fantastic Four movies with “Good Riddance” by Green Day, a classic graduation song.

Here are all the cameos you may have missed in Deadpool & Wolverine.

The Hulk

At the beginning of the movie, Deadpool goes universe-hopping to find a Wolverine who can help him save the universe. He encounters several different Logan variants across different timelines, including one who is fighting the Hulk. From the brief glimpse of the big green guy, we’d guess it’s Edward Norton from Marvel’s 2008 Hulk movie before the role was recast with Mark Ruffalo.

Henry Cavill as Wolverine

In a bit of fan service, Deadpool also runs across a version of Wolverine played by Henry Cavill. Cavill played Superman in the Warner Bros. DC Comics movies, though fans bemoaned the fact that reshoots on Justice League resulted in the post-production team having to digitally remove Cavill’s mustache with poor results. Deadpool cracks a joke about how Disney will treat Cavill better than that other studio did.

Chris Evans as The Human Torch

In case you were living under a rock for the 2010s, let me remind you that Chris Evans rose to superstardom playing Captain America in the Avengers movies. Many fans blame the recent MCU slump on the fact that Evans left the franchise after Avengers: Endgame.

So audiences, like Deadpool, were surely elated to see Evans finally return to the MCU. At first, Deadpool and Wolverine hear only his voice, then they see his chiseled jawline. But, in a hilarious twist, when Evans seems poised to utter the iconic phrase, “Avengers, assemble!” he instead calls out, “Flame on!” He catches on fire as he rises into the sky. Unfortunately the bad guys immediately extinguish his flame and he crashes down to earth.

The appearence is another wink at pre-MCU movie history. Before Evans was Captain America he played Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch, in the Fantastic Four universe where his power was, well, setting himself on fire.

As he lies smoldering, Wolverine backs away, saying, “We don’t know that guy.”

“We thought we did,” Deadpool adds, a bit depressed.

Toad, Lady Deathstrike, Pryo, Colossus

The villain of the movie, Cassandra Nova, has recruited quite the crew of henchmen from past X-Men films. Among them are Toad (Ray Park) from X-Men, Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) from X-2: X-Men United, Pyro (Aaron Stanford) from X-Men: The Last Stand, and Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) from Deadpool.

Ant-Man’s corpse

Does this even really count as a cameo? Nova uses the corpse of a giant version of Ant-Man as her headquarters in The Void. Which Ant-Man, exactly, was sent to The Void and how he died, we do not know. But when Ant-Man’s skull is revealed, Deadpool cracks, “Paul Rudd finally aged.”

Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth

We’ve gotten two versions of Sabretooth in the Hugh Jackman Wolverine movies. Tyler Mane played the clawed villain in the first X-Men movie where he fought Wolverine on the top of the Statue of Liberty. Ultimately, Sabretooth lost that battle when Cyclops blasted him off the landmark with his laser vision.

Later, Liev Schreiber took over the role in the prequel film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That film revealed that Sabretooth and Wolverine are half-brothers (though comics readers might take issue with that particular movie invention). But Origins got such bad reviews that most fans pretend it never happened. Indeed, Deadpool himself travels back in time in Deadpool 2 to kill off the version of his character that stars in that film.

Anyway, when Mane’s Sabretooth pops up in Deadpool & Wolverine, and Deadpool gleefully tells Wolverine that “people have waited decades for this fight,” he’s probably referring to the rematch from the original X-Men film.

Jennifer Garner as Elektra

While stuck in the void, Deadpool and Wolverine seek out other superheroes who have been banished to the no man’s land. One of the first characters they encounter is Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner in both Daredevil and her solo spinoff film, Elektra.

When she and her friends list off the various superheroes who Cassandra has murdered, they mention that Daredevil died. Longtime Marvel fans may remember that Ben Affleck, Garner’s now ex-husband, played that character.

“I’m so sorry,” Deadpool says to Elektra of Daredevil’s death.

“It’s fine,” Elektra says in a wink to the audience about the actors’ off-screen separation.

Wesley Snipes as Blade

Before there was Iron Man or Spider-Man or even the X-Men on the big screen, there was Blade. The vampire hunter played by Wesley Snipes arguably kicked off the era of modern comic book movies with his 1998 film.

After a long hiatus, Snipes is back. At one point in the film, he quips, “There’s only ever been one Blade. There only ever going to be one Blade.”

That line seems to be a reference to a cursed reboot of the Blade franchise. A new version of the film starring Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali was announced way back in 2019 but has yet to shoot a single scene. The movie has lost two different directors and reportedly been rewritten several times. When Black Panther director Ryan Coogler recently began production on his own vampire movie starring Michael B. Jordan, fans joked that Coogler was so fed up with the delay he decided to make his own Blade.

Do not fear, Blade fans: Snipes’ line seems to be a snarky comment, not a death knell. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige recently said that the Ali movie is still in the works and teased it will have an R-rating.

Channing Tatum as Gambit

Channing Tatum spent a decade trying to get a Gambit movie made. The actor fell in love with the Cajun thief from the X-Men franchise and co-wrote a screenplay that he’s described as an R-rated rom-com. But Gambit got stuck in development hell: Directors like Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) came and left the project. Finally, the Disney-Fox merger seemed to kill Tatum’s Gambit dreams…until now. Tatum’s version of Gambit bemoans the fact that he never got his own movie—his adventures were cut short before they even began.

The version that pops up in Deadpool & Wolverine is admittedly ridiculous. He is incomprehensible. Deadpool pillories Tatum for his poor accent work and frets over the audience missing important exposition. And his ability to make playing cards explode seems silly, until he starts blowing up bad guys.

Dafne Keene as X-23

Deadpool sets the tone for the movie early in its run. In a voiceover says the audience is probably wondering how they will resurrect Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine while still respecting his noble death at the end of 2017’s Logan. “We’re not,” Deadpool quips, before exhuming Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton and using his bones to brutally murder dozens of enemies.

But one character the movie does respect is X-23. In Logan, the character is played by Dafne Keene, a child who has been experimented on and given Wolverine’s DNA. (In the movies, she’s basically his clone or his daughter, depending on your perspective.) Wolverine ultimately sacrifices himself to save her.

In Deadpool & Wolverine she shows up largely to buck up Wolverine and tell him he’s capable of saving the world, despite his shameful past.

Blake Lively as Lady Deadpool

Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are one of Hollywood’s most enduring It Couples. They’ve been spotted hanging out with Taylor Swift backstage at her concerts and traveling to one another’s shoots so their family can stay together even as they work on their respective films. So it seemed only a matter of time until Lively cameoed in one of Reynolds’ action flicks. She finally does so as Lady Deadpool, the female version of the Merc With a Mouth.

Though we never see Lively’s face under the mask, there are several references to Lively throughout the film that hint she might appear. Early in the movie, Deadpool states there are 206 bones in the human body. “207 if I’m watching Gossip Girl,” he gleefully adds, referencing his wife’s breakout television series. Later when he’s groped during a fight, he yells, “I’m telling Blake!”

And Lady Deadpool herself is previewed by another adoring version of the Deadpool character. “She just had a baby, and you can’t even tell,” he says, referencing the child that Lively and Reynolds welcomed last year, their fourth. Finally, when Lady Deadpool does show up, she sports a long, high, blonde ponytail, just like the one that Lively herself wore to the premiere of the movie.

(LOS ANGELES) — Hollywood’s video game performers voted to go on strike Thursday after negotiations with game industry giants that began nearly two years ago came to a halt over artificial intelligence protections.

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have billed the issues behind the labor dispute — and AI in particular — as an existential crisis for performers. Game voice actors and motion capture artists’ likenesses, they say, could be replicated by AI and used without their consent and without fair compensation.

The union says the unregulated use of AI poses “an equal or even greater threat” to performers in the video game industry than it does in film and television because the capacity to cheaply and easily create convincing digital replicas of performers’ voices is widely available.

“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members. Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement Wednesday.

Here are five things to know about the strike, which starts at 12:01 a.m. Friday:

Who is covered under the contract?

The agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera voiceover performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to SAG-AFTRA.

Which game companies are involved?

The union had been negotiating with an industry bargaining group consisting of signatory video game companies, including divisions of Activision and Electronic Arts. Those companies are Activision Productions; Blindlight; Disney Character Voices; Electronic Arts; Productions Inc.; Formosa Interactive; Insomniac Games; Take 2 Productions; VoiceWorks Productions; ad WB Games.

The game companies have said that they were negotiating in good faith and had reached tentative agreements “on the vast majority of proposals.”

Read More: The 10 Best Video Games of 2023

Not the first time video game actors have gone on strike

Wednesday’s labor action marks the second time SAG-AFTRA’s video game performers have gone on strike. Their first work stoppage, in October 2016, began after more than one year of negotiations failed. The union and video game companies reached a tentative deal 11 months later, in September 2017. At the time, the strike — which helped secure a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists — was the longest in the union’s history, following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

What are performers asking for?

SAG-AFTRA has said that some of the key issues include securing wages that keep up with inflation, protections around “exploitative uses” of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances as well as vocal stress. Union negotiators told The Associated Press that they had made gains in bargaining over wages and job safety, but that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members.”

The signatory companies refused to extend AI protections to on-camera performers, the union said.

“They’re saying we’ll protect voiceover performers, but we won’t protect anybody else,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said in an interview last month. “The bottom line is if you have performers working for you, helping create the content that’s in your game, whether it’s voice content, whether it’s stunt work, whether it’s motion work…all of those performers deserve to have their right to have informed consent and fair compensation for the use of their image, their likeness or voice, their performance. It’s that simple.”

AI is the sticking point

Although the unchecked use of artificial intelligence has been a sticking point in talks, voice actors and members of the union negotiating committee have said they are not anti-AI. The performers are worried, however, that unchecked use of AI could provide game makers with a means to displace them — by training an AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or to create a digital replica of their likeness without consent.

Some also argue that AI could also strip less experienced actors of the chance to land smaller background roles, such as non-player characters, where they typically cut their teeth before landing larger roles. The unchecked use of AI, performers say, could also lead to ethical issues if their voices or likenesses are used create content that they do not morally agree with.

SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry bargaining group rejected.

The union also announced a side deal with AI voice company Replica Studios in January that enables major studios to work with unionized actors to create and license a digital replica of their voice. It also sets terms that allow performers to opt out of having their voices used in perpetuity.

Deadpool, expertly played by Ryan Reynolds, is a rarity in the Marvel canon. He’s a foul-mouthed hero cursed with immortality and humor curated explicitly for a teenage boy. He’s already gotten two movies from 20th Century Fox. After Disney merged with the company, it absorbed the rights to superheroes like the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and, of course, Deadpool. The merger means that the motor-mouthed antihero can officially make his debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Based on the movie’s trailer, Deadpool has been looking forward to it.

Deadpool & Wolverine, out July 26, has been in the works for a while, and a lot is riding on this film. Marvel is entering a new era, trying to figure out how to get moviegoers back to the theaters in droves, and constantly shuffling their meticulously planned timeline. With the amount of backstory Deadpool and Wolverine have in the comics and their previous movie appearances, there is more than enough material to pull from.

Deadpool has appeared in two prior movies, and Wolverine has been integral to several X-Men movies. Here’s everything you need to know about Deadpool, Wolverine, and where they fit in the MCU before watching Deadpool & Wolverine.

The status of the MCU

Marvel has been in sort of a slump and is currently pulling its way out. Its last three films, released last year, were Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and The Marvels—and all required the viewer to have watched other Marvel projects to understand the full context. The same goes for Deadpool & Wolverine. In the movie, Deadpool is summoned by the Time Variance Authority when a man named Paradox (played by Matthew Macfadyen) takes him to a room and tells him he has a purpose, before sending him on a mission (this is when Deadpool adopts the nickname he gives to himself, Marvel Jesus).

The Time Variance Authority are the keepers of the Sacred Timeline—it is precisely what it sounds like—and they keep alternate timelines from forming and “pruning” variants. When a variant is pruned, we learn in Loki, they don’t die—they get sent to the Void. In Loki, this is where the titular character meets his variants: Kid Loki, Classic Loki, Boastful Loki, Alligator Loki, etc. (This will come into play in Deadpool & Wolverine). However, variants are not the only thing that exists in the Void. One of the guardians of the Void is Alioth, a giant, scary cloud monster that has consumed many of the variants exiled to this desolate land.

The Deadpool movies

The Deadpool movies provide the origin story for how the world became blessed with this quick-witted, vulgar guy. But before that, we must note that Deadpool was not Reynolds’s first brush with Marvel, or his first time playing the character. In the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds played Deadpool. However, his mouth was taped shut, and fans hated it, so he committed to doing the hero justice with standalone movies.

The revamped version of Deadpool got his first standalone movie in 2016. Wade Wilson falls in love with a woman named Vanessa, but shortly after proposing to her, he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He gets an opportunity to undergo an experimental treatment that would allow him to activate any mutant genes in his system via the Weapon X project. With the treatment, he becomes deformed after being tortured by the lead scientist on the project named Ajax (but his real name is Francis). Still, he gains healing and regenerative abilities, just like Wolverine.

Once he assumes the role of Deadpool, Wade ventures off to find the man who tortured him to get revenge. He almost does but is stopped by Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, who try to get him to join the X-Men, but Deadpool declines. At the end of the movie, he kills Ajax and reconciles with Vanessa.

In the second movie, Deadpool is seen hard at work taking out mob bosses and such. One of those groups then finds out where he lives and kills Vanessa. This leads Deadpool to try and die by suicide, but his remains are found by Colossus, who again tries to make him a member of the X-Men. This time, Deadpool agrees. While responding to a call at a mutant orphanage, Deadpool encounters a mutant named Russell Collins, aka Firefist. Wade realizes that a staff member is abusing Firefist and kills them, leading him and Firefist to be detained and sent to the Ice Box. They wear collars that suppress their powers, meaning they are mere mortals and can be killed.

A time-traveling mutant named Cable tries to kill Russell, but Deadpool stops it and breaks out with Cable. He does feel for Russell and organizes a team called the X-Force to break him free—but they all die except for Deadpool and a character named Domino (played by Zazie Beets). Russell escapes and frees Juggernaut, who agrees to help him kill the abusive headmaster of the orphanage. Cable tells Deadpool that if Russell kills the headmaster, he becomes a serial killer who kills Cable’s family. Wade agrees to help Cable stop him, but only if he’s given a chance to talk to Russell, and Cable obliges. When they finally get to Russell, though, Deadpool cannot convince him, and Cable fires a shot at Russell, but Deadpool jumps in front of it wearing the power-suppressing collar and dies. Cable is surprised by his decision to save Russell, reverses time, and puts a Skee ball token that Vanessa left behind after she died where the bullet eventually hits Wade, saving his life, and a taxi driver kills the headmaster.

Deadpool then uses Cable’s time travel device to travel back in time and saves Vanessa before she’s shot.

The X-Men movies

With Wolverine, there’s a lot of ground to cover. The first time we are introduced to Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is in the 2000 film X-Men, which also brings us Patrick Stewer’s Professor Charles Xavier, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, Halle Berry’s Storm, and James Marsden’s Cyclops—and Sabertooth, which will become important later in the timeline. The original X-Men sees Magneto trying to use Rogue’s powers to turn the world’s leaders into mutants and bring about a wider acceptance of mutants. The X-Men subdue him, and Logan joins the “family.”

In the second X-Men film, X2, Logan attempts to learn more about his past. Colonel William Stryker was the man who coated his skeleton in adamantium, the fictional metal. All you need to know is that the X-Men defeat Stryker after he tries to kill every mutant on Earth. A flood destroys his lab, and Jean Grey (the woman Cyclops and Wolverine are secretly in love with) is killed as she helps the X-Men escape.

The third movie sees Professor Xavier killed by a Jean Grey lookalike called the Phoenix, leading Wolverine to become the leader of the X-Men. The Phoenix is recruited by Magneto, who is unable to harness her powers, and she goes rogue, meaning that Wolverine is the only person who can kill her. So, Wolverine kills the love of his life or a version of her.

We won’t get into the three prequels because they don’t mean much for Deadpool & Wolverine. But you need to know what happens in the 2017 movie Logan. There are few mutants in this movie due to a mutant apocalypse, and many of the X-Men are dead. Logan encounters a young girl named Laura with claws like his after Logan’s blood was used to create her. The most crucial part of this movie is that Logan’s healing abilities are weakened, and he fights his clone, who kills him for good. Jackman did announce that he was not interested in reviving Logan or Wolverine (let the man do his Broadway shows!), but Reynolds was able to get him to don the claws once more for Deadpool & Wolverine.

(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — A man who severely injured author Salman Rushdie in a frenzied knife attack in western New York was motivated by a Hezbollah leader’s endorsement of a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing new terrorism charges.

The three-count indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo offered for the first time a potential motive for the 2022 attack on “The Satanic Verses” author.

Hadi Matar, a U.S. citizen from New Jersey, was attempting to carry out a fatwa, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kruly said. According to the prosecutor, Matar believed the call for Rushdie’s death, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.

“We allege that in attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization aligned with the Iranian regime,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release. “The Justice Department will prosecute those who perpetrate violence in the name of terrorist groups and undermine the basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.”

Matar, who faces separate state charges of attempted murder and assault, pleaded not guilty to the new federal charges of terrorism transcending national boundaries, providing material support to terrorists and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

“The investigation was lengthy, for the last two years, and I’m sure involved a number of different agencies, a number of different countries and a number of individuals,” Matar’s attorney, Nathaniel Barone, said after the arraignment. He said the federal case will be far more complex than the state charges, which focus largely on the assault on Rushdie while he was onstage and about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022.

Read More: Salman Rushdie Is Recovering, Reflecting, and Writing About the Attack on His Life

“Federally, you’re looking at more of conspiracies,” the lawyer said.

Matar, he said, “plans on proceeding with a vigorous defense and maintain his innocence.”

Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the attack, during which he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times before a stunned audience of about 1,500 people. Knife wounds blinded Rushdie in one eye. The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded before bystanders subdued the assailant.

“This defendant put time and effort into traveling to the western district of New York with the intent of taking the life of another,” U.S. Attorney Trini Ross said. “Only because of the brave efforts of those who were present that day, the defendant was prevented from completing his murderous intention.”

Rushdie detailed the attack and his long and painful recovery in a memoir published in April.

The federal charges come after Matar earlier this month rejected an offer by state prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence if he agreed to plead guilty to both state and the anticipated federal charges. Instead, both cases will now proceed to trial separately. Jury selection in the state case is set for Oct. 15.

A detention hearing in the federal case is scheduled for Aug. 7.

The author spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s death over his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Khomeini considered the book blasphemous. Rushdie reemerged into the public in the late 1990s.

Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. He lived in Fairview, New Jersey, prior to the attack. His mother has said that her son became withdrawn and moody after he visited his father in Lebanon in 2018.

The attack raised questions about whether Rushdie had gotten proper security protection, given that he is still the subject of death threats. A state police trooper and county sheriff’s deputy had been assigned to the lecture. In 1991, a Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses” was stabbed to death. An Italian translator survived a knife attack the same year. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times but survived.

The investigation into Rushdie’s stabbing focused partly on whether Matar had been acting alone or in concert with militant or religious groups.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a dirty romp about two potty-mouthed superheroes full of fourth-wall breaking jokes, sexual innuendo, and unexpected cameos. It also, somehow, has the potential to become the biggest movie of 2024. Deadpool and Wolverine are both beloved characters, after all, and it’s the only movie Marvel Studios is releasing in theaters this year.

That’s quite the strategy pivot for a studio that was putting three movies in cinemas every year. But Marvel Studios has recently hit a slump critically and commercially. Fans complained about the overwhelming stream of content on streaming service Disney+. Last year, superheroes lost out at the box office to a doll, a plumber, and even a physicist. That state of affairs would have seemed impossible just a few years ago when Marvel movies topped the box office year after year.

So Marvel Studios is rethinking its path forward. And all eyes are on Deadpool & Wolverine, its first R-rated movie, to see whether the MCU can venture into new territory while doubling down on two of the most popular characters in comic books. Here’s what you need to know about why the stakes are so high going into Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening weekend.

Read More: How Marvel Lost Its Way

Can Marvel get its groove back?

Ever since Avengers: Endgame wrapped up the decade-long Infinity Saga, Marvel Studios has struggled to plot its future. Though Spider-Man: No Way Home proved a big ol’ hit, the movie also seemingly concluded the story of one of Marvel’s most beloved characters, Peter Parker. Eternals flopped, Black Widow was released simultaneously in theaters and on streaming because of the pandemic, and Thor: Love and Thunder came and went without much thunder at all.

Disappointing critical reception and box office returns for both Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels in 2023—along with the endless assault of mediocre-to-outright bad television shows on Disney+—stoked debate over whether Marvel had lost its way. Meanwhile it’s been five (five!) years since a Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali was announced, and two directors have already left the project. Captain America: Brave New World has been plagued by delays related to the writers’ strike, though it’s now slated for 2025.

And that’s all before Jonathan Majors, who was set to play the Thanos-level big bad in the future Marvel films, was found guilty of two counts of assault. Disney dropped from its lineup. A movie named after his character, Kang Dynasty, has presumably been scuttled. The studio is now forced to completely rethink several years of storytelling.

In short, Marvel, which at one point in time couldn’t generate a flop, keeps misfiring. The CGI has taken a precipitous downturn in quality. So have the stories. Fan favorites like Captain America and Iron Man are gone with few compelling alternatives. There are too many characters to keep track of—and too few to care about.

Deadpool & Wolverine probably won’t serve as a North Star for the future of the MCU, even if it winds up the highest grossing movie of the year. It is, after all, Marvel Studios’ first R-rated movie. Marvel is poised to make some big announcements about its future at San Diego Comic Con and Disney’s fan conference, D23, this summer. But a major showing at the box office from the third Deadpool movie would at least prove that Marvel is still capable.

Can the MCU’s X-Men reboot succeed?

When Disney and 21st Century Fox merged in 2019, Marvel Studios (which is owned by Disney) suddenly found several new toys in its sandbox. Fox had owned the rights to both The Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Though it took several years to get treatments of those characters off the ground, Marvel Studios is finally bringing these beloved comic book characters into the fold.

Both franchises have had a checkered past with Fox. The first two Fantastic Four movies starring Chris Evans have been largely forgotten. And the reboot starring the impressive cast of Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell was a historic disaster.

The initial X-Men movies starring Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen and the prequels featuring Jackman (again), James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence hit and missed at different moments. But the box office bomb X-Men: Dark Phoenix left a sour note in audiences’ mouths.

Marvel Studios has already cast its new 1960s-set Fantastic Four movie with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby. As for the X-Men,Variety reported that screenwriter Michael Lesslie, who penned The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, is in talks to write a new X-Men movie for Marvel Studios.

It’s unclear whether Deadpool or Wolverine will appear in that X-Men movie—or whether the two films have more than a casual relationship to one another. But Deadpool & Wolverine will certainly serve as a proof of concept that the X-Men can still draw audiences to theaters.

Is superhero fatigue real?

For the first time in recent memory, the top three movies at the 2023 box office contained no superheroes. The success of Barbie, Super Mario Bros., and Oppenheimer last year, paired with the underperformaning Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, The Flash, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom lent itself to the narrative that audiences were done with superheroes. Or, at least, they were done running to the theater en masse ready to watch whatever DC or Marvel had on offer.

Deadpool & Wolverine director Sean Levy has been quick to shut down chatter about superhero fatigue. While agreeing “Marvel had some misses,” he told Entertainment Weekly that “people are way too quick to declare the last rites of the superhero genre. I don’t buy into that fatigue narrative.”

If Deadpool & Wolverine rises to the top of the box office heap—with an R-rating no less—the movie will all but banish the notion that superheroes are dead. And if anyone can coax fans back to theaters it’s these two particularly popular characters.

In the annus horribilis of 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, a generation that had yet to experience a cataclysm of precisely this nature and scale turned to art for insight into how we might survive it. Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from Ling Ma’s novel Severance to Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion, surged in popularity. Readers also turned to tales of pestilence past: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. But no dusty tome got a bigger boost than Giovanni Boccaccio’s early-Renaissance classic The Decameron. Virtual book clubs sprung up to dissect it. The New York Times commissioned stories from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Tommy Orange for its own update, The Decameron Project. “Six Centuries Later, The Decameron Is Suddenly the Book of the Moment,” reported that self-proclaimed arbiter of relevance, Vogue.

Set amid the Black Death that decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, Boccaccio’s masterpiece follows 10 young nobles fleeing a plague outbreak in Florence that would ultimately reduce the city’s population by half. To pass the time in their rural idyll, they tell the stories that make up the bulk of the book—one apiece for 10 days, hence the title. The consensus interpretation of The Decameron has long been that it illustrates the unique power of storytelling to buoy humanity through history’s most devastating moments. The author Rivka Galchen sums up this reading in her introduction to The Decameron Project: “Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.”

Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix’s The Decameron, came away from her pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different understanding. What if, her black comedy proposes, the book’s true timeless message is that, whether they’re Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always blithely abandon their less fortunate neighbors when the plague comes to town? Jordan has stripped The Decameron of its stories, choosing instead to riff on the frame narrative. Somehow, her irreverence pays off. As successful as it is on its own terms, the series raises the question of which derivative works, devoured by platforms hungry to capitalize on trending intellectual property (especially if it predates the advent of copyright law), even deserve to be called adaptations.

The Decameron without stories sounds about as promising as The Inferno without circles of hell, but if anyone can pull off an impossible premise, it’s Jordan and her fellow executive producer, Jenji Kohan. With Orange Is the New Black, Kohan reshaped a middle-class white writer’s prison memoir into a dark yet vibrant ensemble dramedy of carceral injustice starring the Black and brown women disproportionately ensnared in that system. Jordan and Kohan’s frustratingly short-lived Teenage Bounty Hunters proved that, when executed with enough warmth and wit, even the stupidest-sounding concept can yield a wonderful show.

The same audacious humor suffuses The Decameron. Like the original, the series opens in the corpse-strewn wasteland of 1348 Florence, as a handful of nobles and their servants prepare to skip town to wait out the plague at a luxurious country villa. The characters share names with Boccaccio’s brigade, but little else. Zosia Mamet and Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson are perfectly paired as Pampinea, a bossy 28-year-old so desperate to marry, she’s accepted a proposal from the villa’s owner sight unseen, and her weirdly loyal maid, Misia. Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a pompous hypochondriac who has just inherited his family’s fortune, arrives with his hot physician, Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow. Canny Panfilo (Karan Gill) and pious Neifile (Lou Gala) are the married lovebirds—but neither can stop staring at Dioneo. Then there’s bratty Filomena (Jessica Plummer) and her long-suffering servant Licisca (Sex Education standout Tanya Reynolds), whose mistress gets her to leave the deathbed of Filomena’s own father by claiming he’s already dead.

Upon arriving at the villa, the party finds their host absent but his accommodating steward (the great Tony Hale) and surly, noble-hating cook (Leila Farzad, a highlight of the season’s second half) at their service. No matter; the rich kids are determined to have a fun holiday even as the plague shreds the fabric of civilization. “We are here to eat and drink and move into a bright new future,” announces the delusional Pampinea—who, as the ostensible soon-to-be lady of the manor, eagerly and a bit dictatorially assumes the role of hostess.

That is precisely what they do for a while, guzzling wine and indulging in the kind of innocently illicit sexcapades that Boccaccio’s virtuous characters only told tall tales about. (Like most streaming series, The Decameron’s episodes and season are a smidge longer than they need to be.) As their employees labor to satisfy the bosses’ absurd whims, the nobles seize the moment of societal flux as an opportunity for self-discovery. “If the pestilence has taught us anything,” says a character trying to lure Panfilo out of the closet, “it’s that we’re to choose the parts of ourselves we wish to keep and the parts we wish to throw away.”

It’s a great philosophy if you’re confident you’ll survive. But, as viewers who’ve lived through the past four years already know, the assumption that wealth and seclusion alone are infallible defenses against a pandemic attacking society from all angles is hopelessly naive. In truth, the villa has never been a safe refuge, and its gates are useless against not just the infected but also the marauding mobs it has empowered. One great thrill of Jordan’s lively, earthy, and hilarious Decameron is watching the spoiled discover that, for the filthy horde circling their oasis, they are the spoils.

Is the show really The Decameron, though? In fairness, it would be virtually impossible to adapt the 860-page, 100-story volume in full. When admirers borrow from it, as Shakespeare did with All’s Well That Ends Well and, just a few years ago, filmmaker Jeff Baena did in The Little Hours, they usually appropriate just a story for two. English translations of the book have often been heavily abridged, while even relatively faithful adaptations like the Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film The Decameron depict just a small selection of its tales. Still, there’s something about the idea of taking Boccaccio’s title but leaving his stories that doesn’t sit right.

Hollywood’s eagerness to slap a familiar, if unearned, title on every project is one red flag. Yet Jordan has a solid justification for her approach. While the brief stories didn’t strike her as right for TV, she has said that she “loved the armature and skeleton” around them, “this idea of a group of wealthy people who think that they can escape a pandemic.” It’s through this COVID-informed interpretation that she accesses the soul of Boccaccio’s work. Her Decameron doesn’t just reference the famous story where an adulterer hides from his lover’s husband in a barrel; it also captures the author’s ribald sense of humor, his scorn for a corrupt Church, the glee with which his characters scheme and transgress, his prescient insight about a pandemic’s potential to remake society.

It isn’t fidelity to the letter, or even the basic structure, of the source material that makes a worthy adaptation. What matters more is that the retelling embodies the spirit of the work that inspired it. In the best cases, among which I’d surely count Netflix’s Decameron, it also challenges received wisdom about that work. As Licisca, the show’s sharpest character, notes once the villa has begun its descent into chaos: “Independence is the greatest luxury.” Her revelation applies as much to a 21st century TV creator adapting classic literature as it does to a servant fleeing her tyrannical mistress while the plague consumes their city.