Latest news with #Fallout
Time Out
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
‘Fallout'-themed haunted houses are coming to Universal Studios theme parks
Wasteland horrors are headed straight for Halloween Horror Nights. Universal Studios will transform Prime Video's smash-hit series Fallout into a terrifying haunted house experience for this year's Halloween Horror Nights—dropping guests into a radioactive post-apocalyptic hellscape at both Universal Orlando Resort (starting Friday, August 29) and Universal Studios Hollywood (starting Thursday, September 4). Inspired by the acclaimed 2024 TV series and long-running video game franchise, the new haunted house will give fans a chance to step directly into the scorched ruins of 2296. That means mutated creatures, crumbling Americana and plenty of panic as guests make their way through iconic Fallout locations, including Vault 33, the blood-soaked Super Duper Mart and the monster-filled Wasteland. The experience kicks off underground as visitors follow Lucy MacLean's narrow escape from a violent Vault massacre. But things go from bad to worse fast, with encounters above ground featuring grotesque RAD Roaches, deadly Scavengers and Raiders and a radiation-scarred bounty hunter known as The Ghoul. Oh, and Maximus makes an appearance too—in his gleaming T-60 power armor. Both parks will offer the full Fallout experience as part of their larger Halloween Horror Nights lineups, which include 10 haunted houses, scare zones, live shows and enough scream-inducing moments to satisfy even the most seasoned thrill-seeker. At Universal Orlando, tickets are now on sale for the full event, which runs across 48 nights through November 2. Visitors can opt for one-night tickets, Express Passes, RIP Tours and behind-the-scenes daytime walkthroughs with the Unmasking the Horror Tour. There's even a Premium Scream Night on August 28, for those who want to beat the crowds and be the first to panic. Universal Studios Hollywood also has a full suite of ticket options, from General Admission to Early Access and unlimited-entry passes. A limited-edition Fallout merchandise collection has already dropped in both parks, featuring a haunted house-exclusive tee and tumbler—because nothing says 'nuclear terror' like a souvenir cup. Additional haunted house themes will be announced throughout the summer, but if Fallout is any indication, this year's Halloween Horror Nights will be a radioactive blast.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Emmys 2025: Outstanding Drama Series — Our Dream Nominees!
How's this for an Emmy twist: Only one of 2024's Outstanding Drama Series nominees — a roster that included The Crown, Fallout, The Gilded Age, The Morning Show, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Slow Horses, 3 Body Problem and eventual winner Shōgun — is even in the running this year. (We're looking at you, Slow Horses.) In other words, the 2025 Drama Series contest is guaranteed to feature a mostly-fresh crop of nominees. However, that does not mean the race is wide open. Far from it. Two series — Apple TV+'s Severance, coming off a near-perfect sophomore season, and Max's freshman medical phenom The Pitt — have emerged as early frontrunners to take home the Emmys' top drama prize in September. More from TVLine BET Awards 2025: How to Watch Tonight's Ceremony Online Ratings: Tony Awards Surge 38% to Biggest Audience Since 2019 Emmys Twist: Dept. Q Enters Drama Series Race at 11th Hour, Potentially Upending 2025 Contest (Exclusive) Both shows have already cleared one hurdle en route to Emmy glory: They have secured two of the eight slots on TVLine's coveted Dream Emmy lineup. Scroll down to check outof our Dream Nominees (remember, these aren't ; they're ) and then tell us if our picks warrant a 'Hell, yes!,' 'Um, no' or 'How could you leave off such-and-such?!' For the record, 2025 Emmy nominations will be voted on from June 12-23, and unveiled on July 15. The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony is scheduled to air on Sunday, Sept. 14, on CBS. WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: More than just the best live-action Star Wars show we've gotten, it is one of TV's greatest series ever — a superlative cinched by an incredible second and final season brimming with action, spycraft, intricate interpersonal dynamics, tragedy and heartbreak. The cast was wall-to-wall stellar, the Volume-less sets were richly detailed and tactile, and the final build-up to the events of the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was as meticulous as it was satisfying. — Matt Webb Mitovich WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: Imagine if Dr. Gregory House were a detective working on the Island of Misfit Toys, and you essentially have Dept. Q, Netflix's outwardly grumpy, stealthily joyous thriller from Queen's Gambit auteur Scott Frank. Matthew Goode deftly channels his inner Hugh Laurie as a perpetually agitated detective attempting to solve a cold case involving an equally cranky, possibly dead prosecutor. The mystery is edge-of-your-seat riveting, the performances across-the-board revelatory and the payoffs so satisfying that you'll no doubt be relieved to find Dept. Q competing as a drama vs. limited series. — Michael Ausiello WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: What The Diplomat's sophomore slump-defying second season lacked in volume (just six episodes?!), the Netflix political thriller more than made up for in propulsive storytelling and breathtaking performances. Led by the one-two punch of Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, who together have given birth to one of TV's most entertainingly complicated and nuanced couples, the show upped the prestige ante in Season 2 with the addition of Allison Janney as VP Grace Penn, then stuck the landing with one of the year's most jaw-dropping cliffhangers. — M.A. WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: How would we describe the financial drama's third season? To borrow a word from Eric Tao: Relentless. Leads Myha'la and Ken Leung continued serving raw performances and cutthroat takedowns, while newcomers Sarah Goldberg and Kit Harington raised the stakes as the foundations of Pierpoint began to crack. While professional turmoil was once again off the charts, we basked in the season's soapier elements, too. From Yasmin's wicked yacht reveal to Robert's heartbreaking romantic blindside, Industry was a powerhouse we simply couldn't get enough of. — Nick Caruso WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: The heartbreaking, take-no-prisoners second season of AMC's Interview With the Vampire thrust viewers deeper into the complex, intertwined struggles of our fanged (and not-yet-fanged) favorites, this time against the sumptuous backdrop of 1940s Paris. Drenched in themes of love, loss and betrayal, the Anne Rice adaptation spun an intoxicating narrative, one anchored and elevated by otherworldly performances from Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid — whose palpable chemistry is among the best on TV today — as well as Assad Zaman and Eric Bogosian, who brought considerable gravity to some of the series' most explosive reveals. Delainey Hayles was also a revelation as Claudia 2.0, the rare example of a seamless TV recast. — Andy Swift WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: There was a 'Broadcast TV is back!' chant last fall, fueled in large part by the success of this freshman hit — aka the second-most-watched series of the TV season. After rebuffing the 'Who needs a Matlock reboot?' critics by revealing itself to be anything but, the twisty, Kathy Bates-led drama kept us tuned in week after week to see how 'Matty' might slowly but surely avenge her daughter's death. Throw in fantastic work by Skye P. Marshall, a perfect scene partner for Bates, and the verdict is unanimous: Matlock is great TV. — M.W.M. WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: ER was the gold standard… that was, until Noah Wyle, R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells reunited to deliver the most medically accurate TV drama of all time. Sure, The Pitt's attention to detail may compel you to watch certain scenes through the cracks of your fingers, but the effort must be commended, as should its commitment to elegant world-building. While it takes place almost entirely in the fluorescent-lit confines of a woefully underfunded hospital, it still manages to deliver captivating characters and interpersonal dynamics, buoyed not only by Wyle's performance, but by its entire ensemble. There's not a weak link in the bunch. — Ryan Schwartz WHY IT DESERVES A NOD: We had to wait three years for it, but Apple TV+'s surreal sci-fi thriller went right back to work in Season 2, crafting an absolute knockout of a sophomore run. Yes, we got some answers about what's really going on at Lumon, but we got some fascinating new questions, too, along with a deeper emotional resonance. The cast stepped their game up, as well, with Adam Scott, Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman all hitting new highs. We'd be more than happy to clock in on Emmy night and see this show get the promotion it deserves. — Dave Nemetz Best of TVLine Young Sheldon Easter Eggs: Every Nod to The Big Bang Theory (and Every Future Reveal) Across 7 Seasons Weirdest TV Crossovers: Always Sunny Meets Abbott, Family Guy vs. Simpsons, Nine-Nine Recruits New Girl and More ER Turns 30: See the Original County General Crew, Then and Now
UPI
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
Jason Voorhees set for Universal's Halloween Horror Nights
Promotional poster for the "Jason Universe" haunted house that is coming to Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. Image courtesy of Universal Studios June 13 (UPI) -- Universal Studios has announced that slasher movie icon Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame is coming to Halloween Horror Nights. Jason will be featured in a new haunted house titled Jason Universe, the company announced Friday. Jason Universe will take fans through Camp Crystal Lake where the killer's story began. The haunted house will feature recreations of Jason's cabin, the decaying main lodge and the camp's eerie forest. Universal Studios released a teaser trailer for the haunted house that features a Camp Crystal Lake cabin with Jason's signature hockey mask hanging on the wall. Jason Universe is coming to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando Resort on Aug. 29 and Universal Studios Hollywood on Sept. 4. Halloween Horror Nights will also be featuring a haunted house based on the video game and television series Fallout.
The Age
12-06-2025
- Business
- The Age
Is this the beginning of the end for white-collar jobs?
The scale of the job loss was such that the host of the Game Developers Choice Awards, the industry's annual awards show, complained about 'record lay-offs' during her opening monologue in 2024. That same year, a unionisation trend that had begun with lower-paid quality assurance testers spread to better-paid workers like game producers, designers and engineers at companies that make the hit games Fallout and World of Warcraft. At Bethesda Game Studios, which is owned by Microsoft and makes Fallout, workers said they unionised partly because they were alarmed by rounds of lay-offs at the company in 2023 and 2024 and felt that a union would give them leverage in a softening labour market. 'It was the first time that Bethesda had experienced lay-offs in a very, very long time,' said Taylor Welling, a producer at the studio, who holds a master's degree in interactive entertainment. 'That sort of scared a lot of people.' Microsoft declined to comment. Unemployment in finance and related industries, while still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, as rising interest rates slowed demand for mortgages and companies sought to become leaner. On an earnings call last northern summer, the chief executive of Wells Fargo noted that the company's 'efficiency initiatives' had pruned its workforce for 16 straight quarters, including a nearly 50 per cent reduction of workers in its home lending division since 2023. Loading Then in autumn, Wells Fargo laid off about one-quarter of the roughly 45 employees on its conduct management intake team, which reviews accusations of company misconduct against customers and employees. Heather Rolfes, a lawyer who was let go, said that she believed the company was seeking to save money by shrinking its US workforce and that she and her colleagues were a tempting target because they had recently sought to unionise. A Wells Fargo spokesperson said in a statement that the lay-offs had nothing to do with the union and that 'we regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions.' He noted that two managers on the team had also lost their jobs. Atif Rafiq, the author of a book on corporate strategy who has held senior positions at McDonald's and Amazon, said many companies were seeking to emulate Amazon's model of building cross-functional teams that reduce barriers between workers with different expertise, like coding and marketing. In the process, they may discover redundancies and undertake lay-offs. In a memo announcing the job losses at Starbucks last month, chief executive Brian Niccol cited a goal of 'removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams.' Nissan offered a similar rationale for management cuts announced this month. Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows the unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30 per cent since bottoming out in September 2022 (to 2.6 per cent from 2 per cent), versus about 18 per cent for all workers (to 4 per cent from 3.4 per cent). An analysis by Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, shows that unemployment has been most elevated among those with bachelor's degrees or some college but no degree, while it has been steady or falling at the very top and bottom of the education ladder – for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma. Hiring rates have slowed more for jobs requiring a college degree than for other jobs, according to ADP Research, which studies the labour market. Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own. Lawrence Katz, a labour economist at Harvard University, noted that the uptick in unemployment for college-educated workers was only modestly larger than the increase in unemployment overall and that unemployment for both groups remained low by historical measures. Katz argued that slower growth in wages for upper-middle-class workers could simply reflect a discount that these workers effectively accepted in return for being able to work from home. Data from the liberal Economic Policy Institute shows that wages for workers in the 70th and 80th percentiles of income distribution have grown more slowly than those of any other group since 2019. But there are other signs that the returns on a college degree may have shifted over a longer period. The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980 but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high. The flattening may partly reflect the fact that there are more college-educated workers for employers to choose from, as college attendance has increased. But some economists argue that it reflects employers' reduced need for college graduates – for example, fewer jobs like bookkeeping as information technology has become more sophisticated. Loading Such jobs don't necessarily require a college degree but were often attractive to graduates because they once paid a relatively high wage. And artificial intelligence could reduce that need further by increasing the automation of white-collar jobs. A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an AI coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25 per cent and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggested that adopting AI could reduce the wage premium enjoyed by more experienced coders, since it would erode their productivity advantages over novices. Mert Demirer, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who was a co-author of the paper, said in an interview that a software developer's job could change over the longer term so that the human coder became a kind of project manager overseeing multiple AI assistants. In that case, wages could rise as the human became more productive. And AI could end up expanding employment among coders if cheaper software led to even greater demand. Still, at least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see AI as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an AI assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2.9 per cent in 2022 to 4.4 per cent in 2024.
Sydney Morning Herald
12-06-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Is this the beginning of the end for white-collar jobs?
The scale of the job loss was such that the host of the Game Developers Choice Awards, the industry's annual awards show, complained about 'record lay-offs' during her opening monologue in 2024. That same year, a unionisation trend that had begun with lower-paid quality assurance testers spread to better-paid workers like game producers, designers and engineers at companies that make the hit games Fallout and World of Warcraft. At Bethesda Game Studios, which is owned by Microsoft and makes Fallout, workers said they unionised partly because they were alarmed by rounds of lay-offs at the company in 2023 and 2024 and felt that a union would give them leverage in a softening labour market. 'It was the first time that Bethesda had experienced lay-offs in a very, very long time,' said Taylor Welling, a producer at the studio, who holds a master's degree in interactive entertainment. 'That sort of scared a lot of people.' Microsoft declined to comment. Unemployment in finance and related industries, while still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, as rising interest rates slowed demand for mortgages and companies sought to become leaner. On an earnings call last northern summer, the chief executive of Wells Fargo noted that the company's 'efficiency initiatives' had pruned its workforce for 16 straight quarters, including a nearly 50 per cent reduction of workers in its home lending division since 2023. Loading Then in autumn, Wells Fargo laid off about one-quarter of the roughly 45 employees on its conduct management intake team, which reviews accusations of company misconduct against customers and employees. Heather Rolfes, a lawyer who was let go, said that she believed the company was seeking to save money by shrinking its US workforce and that she and her colleagues were a tempting target because they had recently sought to unionise. A Wells Fargo spokesperson said in a statement that the lay-offs had nothing to do with the union and that 'we regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions.' He noted that two managers on the team had also lost their jobs. Atif Rafiq, the author of a book on corporate strategy who has held senior positions at McDonald's and Amazon, said many companies were seeking to emulate Amazon's model of building cross-functional teams that reduce barriers between workers with different expertise, like coding and marketing. In the process, they may discover redundancies and undertake lay-offs. In a memo announcing the job losses at Starbucks last month, chief executive Brian Niccol cited a goal of 'removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams.' Nissan offered a similar rationale for management cuts announced this month. Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows the unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30 per cent since bottoming out in September 2022 (to 2.6 per cent from 2 per cent), versus about 18 per cent for all workers (to 4 per cent from 3.4 per cent). An analysis by Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, shows that unemployment has been most elevated among those with bachelor's degrees or some college but no degree, while it has been steady or falling at the very top and bottom of the education ladder – for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma. Hiring rates have slowed more for jobs requiring a college degree than for other jobs, according to ADP Research, which studies the labour market. Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own. Lawrence Katz, a labour economist at Harvard University, noted that the uptick in unemployment for college-educated workers was only modestly larger than the increase in unemployment overall and that unemployment for both groups remained low by historical measures. Katz argued that slower growth in wages for upper-middle-class workers could simply reflect a discount that these workers effectively accepted in return for being able to work from home. Data from the liberal Economic Policy Institute shows that wages for workers in the 70th and 80th percentiles of income distribution have grown more slowly than those of any other group since 2019. But there are other signs that the returns on a college degree may have shifted over a longer period. The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980 but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high. The flattening may partly reflect the fact that there are more college-educated workers for employers to choose from, as college attendance has increased. But some economists argue that it reflects employers' reduced need for college graduates – for example, fewer jobs like bookkeeping as information technology has become more sophisticated. Loading Such jobs don't necessarily require a college degree but were often attractive to graduates because they once paid a relatively high wage. And artificial intelligence could reduce that need further by increasing the automation of white-collar jobs. A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an AI coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25 per cent and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggested that adopting AI could reduce the wage premium enjoyed by more experienced coders, since it would erode their productivity advantages over novices. Mert Demirer, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who was a co-author of the paper, said in an interview that a software developer's job could change over the longer term so that the human coder became a kind of project manager overseeing multiple AI assistants. In that case, wages could rise as the human became more productive. And AI could end up expanding employment among coders if cheaper software led to even greater demand. Still, at least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see AI as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an AI assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2.9 per cent in 2022 to 4.4 per cent in 2024.
