Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight will be writing a new series about the life of the creator of the Ferrari supercar, which will air exclusively on Apple's streaming platform, Apple TV+, THR reports.

The show will be co-written by Italian director Stefano Sollima (Without Remorse, Sicario: Day of the Soldado), and is inspired by the best-selling biography Ferrari Rex by Luca Dal Monte. It'll focus on a particular five-year period in Ferrari's life.

"I am thrilled to be telling such an evocative story about this legendary man and his iconic brand," said Knight in a statement. "Enzo Ferrari’s utterly extraordinary life was defined by his dramatic personal and professional journey, and Ferrari is a celebration of an incredibly complex and fascinating human being."

A log line for the show was provided, and it seems to be more of a high-stakes period drama, focused on the hardships faced by Ferrari in his pursuit of automobile eminence.

"Five years. Five drivers. Five deaths. One trial. In the name of passion, in the pursuit of pure speed. At the center of it all a titanic man, complex and multifaceted, who dedicated his genius to the mission of building the fastest racing car in history."

It continues: "Enzo Ferrari: his name became a boast, an aspiration, and ultimately legend. But there was a trail of tragedy and torment along the way. Between 1956 and 1961, deeply wounded by the tragic death of his firstborn son Dino and by what he considered a betrayal by his lead driver Juan Manuel Fangio, Enzo Ferrari rebuilds his racing team from scratch, selecting five promising rising stars of motor racing to fight for victory."

Since its initial air date, Peaky Blinders has been a smashing success, holding a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and making Cillian Murphy (Inception, Batman Begins) a household name.

Though an official release date is yet to come, we do know that this will be one of two pieces developed by Apple about the life of the car manufacturer — with Michael Mann now directing a feature film (also titled Ferrari) that stars Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, and Shailene Woodley.

Diego Ramos Bechara is a Freelance Writer for IGN, and he's a fan of all things Star Wars, Rockstar, Naughty Dog and Batman.

You can follow him on Twitter @DRamosBechara.

The Iron Throne was always meant to be enormous. In the original books it was described towering over the room "like a great beast."

"It's put together by blacksmiths not by craftsmen and experts in furniture manufacturing. You have to walk the iron steps, and when a king sits on it he's like 10 feet above everybody else … He's in this raised position looking down on everyone," author George R.R. Martin said in 2014.

French artist Marc Simonetti was apparently the closest anyone ever came to matching Martin's vision for the Iron Throne, with his painting ultimately appearing in The World of Ice and Fire.

House of the Dragon's showrunners have taken Martin's feedback into account in redesigning the Iron Throne, using an estimated 2,500 swords in the show's version of the throne, including some that are real (and quite dangerous).

"Literally we had to put [up] fences when we first built it," co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik told EW in a new interview. "Some of them are real swords. It is as dangerous as it is [described] in the books."

The newly-remade Iron Throne apparently has Martin's blessing, which should please fans of the books looking for a greater sense of authenticity in the prequel series.

EW breaks down 9 exclusive photos from HBO's 'House of the Dragon.' https://t.co/lIdxqXQeOv

— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) July 13, 2022

In a minor but amusing detail, the swords in the new Iron Throne apparently include props used in other fantasy shows including Netflix's The Witcher and the Warcraft movie. Ultimately, there weren't enough swords to go around, which is why the House of the Dragon showrunners had to borrow some from other shows.

It's possible to glimpse the new Iron Throne in the background of one of the photos released earlier today. The new images were revealed in tandem with a host of fresh details about how the showrunners want to make a more diverse Westeros.

House of the Dragon is currently on track to release on August 21, with plenty more shows in production on top of that, including a sequel starring Jon Snow.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

We're rapidly approaching the end of Prime Day, and that means we're about to see the end of a lot of really great deals.

Among the best deals poised to expire is Amazon's special rate on Prime Video channels. You can get one of 13 different channels added to your Prime subscription, each for just $0.99 for two months.

Amazon Prime Video Subscription Deals

Here are all the channels you can sign up for under the promotional 99-cent rate:

• STARZ
• Showtime
• AMC+
• Paramount+
• Discovery+
• EPIX
• Acorn TV
• Hallmark Movies Now
• Noggin
• BET+
• PBS Masterpiece
• PBS Kids
• PBS Documentaries
• ALLBLK
• Motortrend
• UP Faith & Family
• MovieSphere
• Pantaya

I signed up for AMC+, because I wanted to rewatch Mad Men, and in doing so Amazon told me Shudder, Sundance Now and IFCFilms Unlimited were included with my AMC+ subscription. That's… an astonishingly good value. I'm not sure what other bonus channels are available with the other subscriptions, but that's a lot of streaming content to consume regardless.

I already have a Paramount+ subscription, which is basically me paying $10 a month to watch Star Trek: TNG whenever I feel like it. I'm selling the service short, it actually has a surprising number of shows and movies I'm interested in outside of TNG. It also has Strange New Worlds, which is a new-Trek show I'm enjoying. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. In our Strange New Worlds review we gave season 1 a 10, which is as high as it goes. I haven't finished season 1, so I can't speak to the review, but if you like Star Trek I can say it will scratch your itch for sure.

One thing to keep in mind, to subscribe to the Prime Video channels you need to be a Prime Subscriber. I know you can get a 30-day free Prime trial, but after that 30 days is up, not sure how you'd be able to access the programming without paying for at least 1 month of Prime.

Seth Macy is Executive Editor, IGN Commerce, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him hosting the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast.

Something occurred to me as I poured hour after hour into Loopomancer: Roguelites have become so ubiquitous that playing a new one has become a sort of meta-loop of its own. It can feel like you are playing through a remixed version of the same concepts, just with different titles and gimmicks, time and again – lather, rinse and repeat. To stand out, a game must either do something extremely creative, or distinguish itself with quality and polish. Loopmancer, which follows in the footsteps of other 2D action platformer roguelites such as Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells, opted for the latter – to great success. None of its mechanics are groundbreaking, and the cyberpunk story – while cool – is filled with cliches. But after riding this loop for close to 20 hours it’s clear to me that what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for by nailing the most important elements of the genre: outstanding gameplay, and making each run fresh and meaningful.

You play as Xiang Zixu, a generic tough-guy detective in techno-futurist Dragon City, who has been killed while investigating a missing person. Immediately after dying he wakes up in his bed, on the same morning of that same day, and given the same dispatch to investigate the same missing person. It’s a tried-and-true time loop formula, and effective as a premise for a roguelite. Zixu doesn’t have much in the way of personality, but it is enjoyable to listen to him impatiently explain to his handler at the detective agency that he already knows everything that is going to happen.

Progressing further allows him to piece together the interesting details of who’s pulling the strings and why. There are some branching paths along the way, and following them on successive runs leads to different story reveals and seven different endings. Even if the answer always seems to be pulled straight from Philip K. Dick knockoffs, they’re fun to watch as they unfold.

The Cyberpunk setting is leveraged very effectively in creating interesting environments. One minute you are beating down henchmen across grimy city streets while dodging oncoming traffic, the next you are fighting cyber ninjas in what feels like a modern recreation of Elevator Action as you search for the correct lift to ascend an office building. The Tang Dynasty Hotel, in particular, stands out for its varied design: you must navigate by grappling hook or elevator in one section and then engage in a massive, multi-tiered battle in which the action is shown only in silhouette behind hundreds of crimson banners.

Each level is divided into subsections with cohesive themes, and they remix each run in small but meaningful ways. Paths that had been open become blocked, while new routes become available. Enemy types reshuffle, powerups change locations. One visit to the dilapidated slum known as The Ditch may have you smashing giant spiders with a battle ax while you tiptoe between tripwires. Then you die, come back again, are shotgunning giant mutants while trying not to fall in electrified water. It’s enough to keep Loopmancer feeling fresh for a good while.

Combat is fast and aggressive. Melee weapons like swords and hammers mix with ranged attacks like shotguns or lasers to deal damage, while defensive dodges and parries add fluidity to exchanges. Tech items, like turrets or mines, can be deployed, and special attacks in the form of Skill Chips can instantly end a skirmish but come with a cooldown timer. Enemies have a lot of variety, and their design materially affects how best to approach them. Your melee weapon might make quick work of a generic street gang member, but the expert martial artist right behind him will shrug off your attacks and counter. Emptying your best attacks into the giant mutant may sound like a good idea… until you are swarmed by poisonous spiders. Sometimes all you can do when you are surrounded by invisible ninjas is start shooting and hope you hit something – ideally not the explosive barrel you didn’t realize you were standing on.

The best way to survive varies by the weapons and tools you have, and types and numbers of enemies coming at you. As a result, heavy fighting becomes an intricate dance of mixing attacks with quick twitch dodges, all while making snap decisions about when to use your limited ammo and tech items. It’s exhilarating, and keeps the experience fresh throughout.

With nearly 50 melee weapons, and dozens of guns, tech skills, and abilities, the variety of tools at your disposal is very similar in scope to your arsenal in Dead Cells. I’ve run into battle wielding swords, bo staffs, my fists, large fish, golf clubs, a frying pan, and much more as my primary weapon, and all have their own unique properties and animations that make them viable. The decision of which to take with you is rarely black and white: It may be tempting to take the grenade launcher into combat for its sheer explosive damage, but that poison-spewing SMG has much more ammo. Sure, a crowd-clearing grenade can help you get to the boss, but those deployable auto turrets would be a big help when it’s time for that big fight.

Speaking of big fights, the diversity of bosses is another one of Loopmancer’s strengths. Most levels feature a challenging fight against a unique enemy with patterns to memorize and windows for attack to learn. Earlier bosses, like the aptly named Big Guy, are easy enough to defeat with well-timed dodges and strikes, while others, like an AI-powered hacker, unfold more like puzzles and really benefit from carefully choosing the right tools before the fight. A boss fight against a man in a mech suit ended many early runs of mine, but later that encounter transformed into a speedrun as I memorized his attack patterns and gleefully unleashed righteous fury with whatever weapons I managed to get my hands on. I found the fights tough but fair, and the first time I beat the final boss (which I won’t spoil), I could feel my heart pounding and forehead beginning to drip with sweat.

The weapons and abilities are largely found scattered throughout the levels, and can be unlocked and upgraded by spending e-Coins, a currency that – in true video game tradition – flies out of defeated enemies and broken pots or crates. When you die you lose all of your equipment and must start anew from a random assortment, but the unlocks and upgrades are permanent, and there is a chance these new weapons will be among your selections at the start of the next loop. After struggling to defeat them in the early hours, there’s a supreme satisfaction to be had shredding an early level boss with a maxed-out, endgame rocket launcher.

On top of that, Zixu has a persistent upgrade tree of his own where you can increase your health, unlock new combat moves, or buy new cosmetic outfits. Alternatively, you can dump your upgrade cores into terminals scattered throughout levels to increase their healing ability. This presents you with another decision to make: Do you focus on your next upgrade to power up for future runs, or do you go all in on this one?

Optional challenges appear on screen throughout levels, prompting you to kill a certain number of enemies or eliminate them in a specified way. It’s completely optional, but their rewards can be well worth your time. Sure, maybe you’ve already sliced these goons to bits a dozen times already, but can you take them out with explosive barrels, or throw them into traffic for some extra cash on the side? Maybe you’ll earn a memento that you can view back in your apartment for some additional worldbuilding. It’s an added layer of intrigue, but naturally it can easily lead to unnecessary deaths if you stray too far from what fits your equipment and playstyle.

This risk-reward calculation is a constant part of progressing through Loopmancer (and any good roguelite). A key example is that each group of levels will have a defined exit, but many will also reward exploration (presuming you don’t die in the process). You could go through the elevator to the boss, but there are potential Buff Bots to be found if you are willing to climb some chandeliers or brave oncoming trains to reach a hidden platform. These are boosts which can enhance your health, increase the damage you deal, and speed up how quickly you can use abilities, among other things, for the duration of the run. Some will be hidden, others will be readily visible but surrounded by enemies. Of course, opportunities to refill your health are limited, so every hit you take materially affects your chance of survival. On more than one occasion I found myself torn, at a crossroads between advancing to the next section and pursuing a dangerously located Buff Bot. Those are the moments that make games like this shine even out of combat, and Loopmancer has no shortage of them.

Warning: Full spoilers follow for Better Call Saul.

This week’s stellar episode of Better Call Saul often looked and sounded like an hour of its predecessor, Breaking Bad. “Point and Shoot,” the first episode after a seven-week hiatus, and the start of the last stretch for the show before it ends in August, all came down to a big showdown: Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) vs. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton).

It makes sense that the prequel would start to feel more and more like Breaking Bad the closer the show’s timeline got to the adventures of Walter White. And indeed, throughout its run, Better Call Saul’s path has occasionally felt bisected as more Breaking Bad elements were woven in. But still, this is a show that has largely avoided the prequel trap that many franchises run into these days.

Before Gus and the Salamancas entered the fray, Better Call Saul was first and foremost a legal drama about the complexities between everyday rights and wrongs and the extent of their consequences. Later seasons have felt like more of a mix of that with the building of Gus’ drug empire. But with “Point and Shoot,” and the first half of Season 6 that preceded it, it’s suddenly clearer than ever that this prequel isn’t imitating its original; rather, it’s wielding it like a weapon.

At the center of Better Call Saul has always been Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn)—foils sucked into a doomed romance in which they continue to enable each other’s worst tendencies. At this point in the story, the actions they believed to be innocent have resulted in a pile of bodies.

The last 10 minutes of “Point and Shoot” feature Jimmy and Kim sitting in traumatized silence as Mike (Jonathan Banks) doles out a series of instructions on how to cover up everything that just happened during the Gus/Lalo altercation. He doesn’t sound much different than Lalo did as he gave them orders to kill Gus at the top of the episode, still standing over a dead body.

It’s taken five and a half seasons to get to this point. Conversely, Breaking Bad was violent from the get-go. Its brief commentary on the American healthcare system quickly morphed into a Shakespearean tragedy of underground wars and competing egos that ended just about as operatically as Game of Thrones tried to.

On Saul, however, the world of Breaking Bad lurked in the shadows, only sneaking up on Jimmy and Kim after years of careful character development (compared to Bad, Saul often relished in quieter moments with the pair). Now, their world just is Breaking Bad, and with five episodes left, they have no villain to vanquish other than themselves. All that’s left, ironically, is a fight for the soul of what Better Call Saul once was.

By modern Hollywood standards, this feels like the inverse of the prequel business model: “You love this thing? Here’s every detail of how it all came to be while we give you more of the same.” Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy flubs the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel in favor of a Lord of the Rings retread that lacks any distinct identity. The Fantastic Beasts series has firmly placed its titular fauna secondary to a slew of CGI brawls surrounding Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Solo: A Star Wars Story rushes to show how most of the important things that happened to Han before A New Hope occurred over the course of a week or so. Even the recently concluded Obi-Wan Kenobi series mostly exists so that Star Wars can make just a little bit more sense.

These stories were written with the sole purpose of paying tribute to what you’ve already seen. For the most part, they don’t have a distinct soul of their own. When it comes to prequels, they are the rule. Better Call Saul is the exception.

From its first episode, it was clear we were getting a very different, even at times honorable, version of Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman. As the series continued to develop Jimmy McGill – the man we knew would eventually become Saul – what became clear is that this version of the character still in all likelihood exists when Breaking Bad begins. There’s no Anakin-to-Darth Vader threshold here. Breaking Bad simply required Saul Goodman to be one thing, while Better Call Saul requires him to be another. That they ultimately feel like the same character, and that rewatching Breaking Bad now is legitimately a different experience as a result, is a testament to the writers who have long approached this prequel with care and precision.

Now, as the show’s finale looms and its world is just naturally starting to feel more like Breaking Bad’s, the story shifts again. “Point and Shoot” ends with two bodies being buried together, one of a violent drug lord, the other of a competent lawyer. Symbolically, the two series have collided in these instances of death. Two stories, just one grave.

On a meta level, Jimmy and Kim are now simply trying to escape the inevitability of Breaking Bad and return to their simpler Better Call Saul existences. We know Jimmy fails. But what about Kim? Can the moral high ground of the series find peace? Or has Jimmy’s influence taken hold? These questions speak to the soul of this series. Having so much time to explore that soul as the transformation between shows happens ensures that Better Call Saul is far more than a money-grabbing afterthought. With Andor, House of the Dragon, and The Rings of Power all on the horizon, Better Call Saul can be a turning point for the reputation of prequel storytelling at large. All creators and storytellers should be paying attention.