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Donald Glover's PUBG Series, Netflix's Prison Experiment, Disney Buys Divine Rivals — Pop Culture Digest — November 2, 2026
Donald and Stephen Glover are making a live-action PUBG series for Netflix, with Donald set to star and direct. Netflix's New Stanford Prison Experiment has become the most argued-about show of the month. Plus Disney buys Divine Rivals after Paramount let the rights lapse, Laika's Wildwood opens to $12.2 million, and James Gunn says Batman casting is close.
Donald Glover Is Making a PUBG Series, Which Is Either the Smartest or Funniest Idea in Hollywood
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has no plot. That is not a criticism — it is the entire design. A hundred players drop onto a map, scavenge weapons, and one of them is left standing. Krafton's battle royale has been one of the most played games on earth since 2017, and it has never once needed a story to explain why.
Netflix is now developing a live-action series based on it anyway, with Donald Glover attached to star — and, per Variety, to write and executive produce with his brother Stephen, with Donald also planning to direct. Michael Schaefer of Neon TV executive produces, along with Fam Udeorji for Gilga and Taeseok Jang and Sujin Lee for LV3H, the entertainment arm of Krafton. Plot details are under wraps, which is the most honest sentence in the announcement.
The Glovers are the interesting part. Atlanta was a show that could turn a standalone episode into a horror film and then never mention it again; Swarm was a study of fandom as pathology; Guava Island was a musical that pretended to be a fable. Handing them a game with no protagonist, no dialogue and no third act is less a licensing deal than a provocation. Whatever they build will have to invent the thing the game deliberately refused to provide.
It also slots neatly into Netflix's growing adaptation shelf — an Assassin's Creed series, a Gears of War film, animated Minecraft and Clash of Clans — where the IP is the marketing and the story is the problem to be solved.
Sources: Variety · The Hollywood Reporter
Netflix Turned the Stanford Prison Experiment Into Reality TV, and the Argument Is the Point
The original Stanford prison experiment ran for six days in 1971 before a graduate student talked Philip Zimbardo into shutting it down. Twenty-four male students, fifteen dollars a day, a mock prison in a psychology department basement, and a descent into cruelty that became the textbook case for why some experiments should never be run.
The New Stanford Prison Experiment, which premiered on Netflix on October 21, runs the whole thing again — thirty volunteers, two weeks, a decommissioned wing of a working jail in Cherokee County, Georgia, eight guards and twenty-two prisoners. The executive producers, Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth, told Variety they were "definitely nervous to take on something that has already failed," and that there were moments they thought it would end on day one.
The series frames itself as a corrective: same question, real safeguards, actual oversight. Does power corrupt? But a camera changes the equation. The participants know they are on television, the audience knows it is watching people know it, and the show's real subject quietly becomes voyeurism — the reason we keep returning to this experiment even though it taught us almost nothing scientifically.
The reviews have split exactly along that fault line — TIME went after its gender politics, other critics after its staging — but the more interesting objection is simpler. An experiment that failed its ethics review has been remade as entertainment about ethics, and the entertainment is the part that will be remembered.
Disney Bought Divine Rivals Because Paramount Forgot to Keep It
Here is a small, perfect Hollywood story. In June 2025, Paramount won the film rights to Rebecca Ross's fantasy romance Divine Rivals after a bidding war, with Sofia Alvarez adapting. Then Skydance bought Paramount, the rights lapsed, and this week Disney Live Action picked them up — without inheriting the previous development.
Deadline reports that a new screenwriter is being sought, but the original producers — Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Pouya Shahbazian — remain attached, and Ross will executive produce with Stephen Shafer. The book is the first in the Letters of Enchantment series: two rival journalists fall in love through a magical correspondence while a war among gods closes in.
The numbers explain the swoop. Divine Rivals has sold more than a million copies and spent 104 weeks on the New York Times young adult bestseller list; its sequel, Ruthless Vows, debuted at number one and has sold another 500,000. Ross has moved three million books worldwide, spent 128 weeks on that list, and accumulated 250 million TikTok views. That is not a cult following. That is a pre-sold audience with a release date.
The takeaway is less about Disney than about the pipeline. BookTok has become the most reliable development slate in town — cheap to option, instant to market, and already stress-tested by readers who will tell you exactly which chapter breaks.
Sources: Deadline
Wildwood Cost $100 Million and Opened to $12 Million. Laika Has Heard This Before.
Laika's Wildwood opened to $12.2 million domestically last weekend, plus $2.9 million from a handful of international markets, landing third behind Clayface and You Can See Everything. Against a reported $100 million budget, the arithmetic is grim, and the headline writes itself.
But Laika has been here before, and the studio's history is stranger than the box office chart suggests. Missing Link, its previous film, opened to $5.9 million in 2019 and finished at $17 million domestic. Kubo and the Two Strings opened to similar numbers to Wildwood. Coraline, the studio's 2009 debut, was not a blockbuster either — and then spent the next fifteen years becoming a repertory phenomenon, with anniversary screenings that turned it into a perennial.
Wildwood is Travis Knight's adaptation of Colin Meloy's novel, six years in the making and the studio's first feature in seven. It is stop-motion, which means every blade of grass was placed by a person. That is the whole pitch and the whole problem: the craft is visible, and visible craft is expensive in a way audiences cannot be charged for directly.
The Knight family can absorb it — Phil Knight, Travis's father, is Laika's chairman and its patient money. Most studios cannot. Which is why the interesting question is not whether Wildwood turns a profit, but whether the model that produced Coraline still exists at all.
Sources: IndieWire · Cartoon Brew
James Gunn Says the New Batman Is Close, and He Will Not Be a Movie Star
On a podcast promoting The Suicide Squad: Is It Canon?, James Gunn did the thing studio chiefs rarely do: he addressed the rumours directly. Batman has not been cast. The people insisting he will cameo in this or that are, in Gunn's words, talking "bullshit." And when the casting does happen — which is "not very far away" — it will not be a search for the biggest name available.
"Superman's have always been chosen based on who the best actor for that role is," Gunn said. "And for some reason, Batman's are always chosen as movie stars." He also confirmed the age math: this Batman will be roughly the same age as David Corenswet's Superman, who is 33, because the two are "future best pals, contemporaries."
That rules out a veteran, and it rules out the fan-casting economy that has spent two years assembling shortlists out of whatever actor most recently wore a coat. The Brave and the Bold remains separate from Matt Reeves's Robert Pattinson films, which is its own oddity: two Batmen, two tones, one company. Man of Tomorrow lands July 9.
Sources: Variety
Nuggets
- Sarah J. Maas sold 1.7 million copies in a single day. A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth A Court of Thorns and Roses book, moved that many print and ebook copies on its October 27 release — up 600% on A Court of Silver Flames — with 2,000 midnight launch parties worldwide. Maas has now sold more than 100 million books. Variety
- HBO is remaking The Birds, with Sarah Snook. Tom Spezialy (The Leftovers) is writing a limited series based on Daphne du Maurier's novella, with Snook starring as a mother who moves home after a custody battle and finds a childhood friend missing — and the birds behaving badly. David Heyman executive produces. The Hollywood Reporter
- Carrie is coming back for a second season. Prime Video renewed Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation a fortnight after its October 7 debut, where it hit No. 2 on the service in the US. Deadline
- Jack Lowden is playing Mr. Darcy while the Bond bookies argue about him. Netflix's six-part Pride and Prejudice — Dolly Alderton writing, Euros Lyn directing, Emma Corrin as Elizabeth, Olivia Colman and Rufus Sewell as the parents — arrives December 3. Netflix
- The Bond rumour mill has moved on to Callum Turner. The Sun noticed he resigned a directorship at Twentytwo Films, the company he founded with Dua Lipa, and NME reports he screen-tested at Bray Studios on October 30. No confirmation from Amazon MGM — treat it as a rumour with good staging. NME
- Errol Morris has two hours of Elizabeth Holmes he has never released. The director, who shot Theranos's ads in 2015, told Variety he conducted a two-hour Interrotron interview with Holmes and is considering putting it out now that You Can See Everything has made her a box office attraction again. The documentary took $10.6 million in its third weekend and has $63.9 million domestic. Variety
Sources: Variety · Deadline · The Hollywood Reporter · IndieWire · Netflix · NME · TIME · Forbes
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