Blumhouse and Atomic Monster Developing Film Adaptation of Paranormal Game PHASMOPHIBIA — GeekTyrant
Blumhouse is ready to bring the ghost-hunting chaos of Phasmophobia to theaters. Announced during their first-ever The Business of Fear event in Hollywood, the horror production company revealed that it's officially adapting the massively popular indie horror game into a feature film alongside James Wan's Atomic Monster and in partnership with the game's original creators, Kinetic Games.
Phasmophobia has become a breakout title in the multiplayer horror space since its 2020 launch. Developed by British studio Kinetic Games, the first-person co-op ghost-hunting game has sold over 23 million copies globally and carved out a unique lane in horror gaming by focusing less on killing and more on surviving and communicating under pressure.
While details on casting or a release window are still under wraps, this marks another step in Blumhouse's mission to turn horror games into full-fledged moviegoing experiences, after the success of Five Nights at Freddy's .
The announcement came during a broader discussion about horror's evolution. Jason Blum (CEO/Founder of Blumhouse), Abhijay Prakash (President of Blumhouse), James Wan (CEO/Founder of Atomic Monster), and horror analyst/author Stephen Follows all took the stage to break down the genre's future.
They say that horror is thriving because of its diversity. According to Blumhouse's own genre survey conducted in July 2024, paranormal horror is one of the most in-demand subgenres today, standing alongside slasher, survival, and psychological thrillers.
Blumhouse already has a slate packed with genre-heavy hitters and it includes the upcoming M3GAN 2.0 , Black Phone 2 , and Five Nights at Freddy's 2 . Adding Phasmophobia to the mix gives them another interactive horror icon to mine for scares.
It will be interesting to see the creative talent that they bring on board to adapt the film and how they will go about telling the story.
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Meta Risks Regulatory Scrutiny in Pursuit of Scale AI
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One of Major League Baseball's charming modern-day wrinkles is the social media video of the latest kid who's been called up to The Show. It's a sort of 'Candid Camera Meets the Minor Leagues,' with the unsuspecting prospect being called into the manager's office for some vague reason. The grizzled skipper makes a little speech and then delivers a variation of, 'You're going to the big leagues.' Advertisement The first of these videos I remember seeing — and still the best — was when Adley Rutschman was told by his manager at Triple-A Norfolk, Buck Britton, he was heading to Camden Yards to play for the Baltimore Orioles. What makes the video sizzle is when some of Rutschman's clued-in teammates rush into the room and commence with a fierce jumping-up-and-down celebration, as though Rutschman had just hit a walk-off home run. A more recent example came a few weeks ago when Marcelo Mayer of the Triple-A Worcester Red Sox learned he was being promoted to the big-league Boston Red Sox. 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Boggs' recollection is that after a Grapefruit League game against the Cincinnati Reds in Tampa — Boggs' hometown — trainer Charlie Moss said Red Sox manager Ralph Houk wanted to see him. 'Boggsie, you've had a really good spring, and you've opened up a lot of eyes,' Houk said, according to Boggs. 'I started to think I was going back to Pawtucket if he's starting like that,' Boggs told me. Houk then talked about Boggs' improved play at third base, followed by: 'You're going north with us.' 'At that, my whole world had completely stopped,' Boggs said. First phone call: There was no first call to make, as Boggs' entire family was outside the clubhouse, with the game having been played in Tampa. 'My dad and mom; my wife, Debbie; and basically everybody,' Boggs said. 'They were all congratulating me. They all knew before I did. I was the last to know.' Boggs says the family had been tipped off by George Digby, the Red Sox scout who had scouted him during his days at H.B. Plant High in Tampa. Debut: April 10, 1982; Memorial Stadium, Baltimore. The result: Batting ninth and playing first base, Boggs went 0-for-4, with three of his at-bats coming against Orioles starter Dennis Martinez. Advertisement 'Not very eventful,' Boggs said. He collected his first hit off Chicago White Sox right-hander Richard Dotson on April 26 at Comiskey Park. 'Now that was eventful,' Boggs said. Teammate Jerry Remy said to him, 'Well, kid, all you need now is 2,999 more.' 'I took that to heart, because you can't get 3,000 unless you have one,' Boggs said. He became the first player to get his 3,000th hit with a home run, a two-run shot against Cleveland's Chris Haney on Aug. 7, 1999. Boggs wound up with 3,010. OTD in 1999 Wade Boggs became the 23rd member of the 3,000-hit club, and he was the first to get there with a home run. @ChickenMan3010 earned election to the @BaseballHall in 2005. — MLB (@MLB) August 7, 2023 Favorite memory: 'We're playing the Reds that day at Al Lopez Field, and I walk up to the plate, and Johnny Bench goes to his knees and says, 'Hey, kid, you got a chance of making this ballclub?' I say, 'I don't know, Mr. Bench,' and he said, 'Don't call me Mr. Bench; call me Johnny.' And I said, 'Well, I don't have enough time in to call you Johnny.' And he said, 'Well, let me be the first to congratulate you if you do (make the team).'' The background: Morgan was a star baseball and hockey player at Boston College, but the Walpole, Mass., native knew baseball was going to be his best chance to play professionally. Plus, he had both of Boston's big-league ballclubs — the Red Sox and Braves — interested in him. It was the Braves who won out, this after Morgan, 21 at the time, underwent a tryout on a warm, late-spring afternoon at Braves Field in 1952. Morgan eventually made it to the big leagues. But by the time he got there — after two seasons in the minors, followed by two years in the Army, followed by three more years in the minors — the Braves were based in Milwaukee. There would be no opportunity for Morgan's family to make the 18-mile trip from Walpole to Braves Field to see him play. Advertisement The call-up: Spring training, 1959; McKechnie Field, Bradenton, Fla. Morgan was a lefty-hitting infielder on a team in dire need of a lefty-hitting outfielder. Braves manager Fred Haney had an idea: Why not use Morgan in the outfield? 'He looks like he can handle the job all right,' Haney said, according to an Associated Press dispatch. 'We've got eight infielders anyway, so we can afford to use Morgan in the outfield if an emergency comes up.' In the last days of spring training, Morgan, 28 at the time, was out on a practice field when he was approached by a teammate. 'He said, 'Hey, Joe, Fred Haney wants to see you,' said Morgan, now 94. 'I had a pretty good spring, and I thought this might be it. So in I go, and he says, 'Congratulations, you made the team.' As simple as that.' First phone call: 'I got on the phone with my parents,' Morgan said, 'but as a matter of fact, some of my family were with me in Bradenton when I got the good news. One of my brothers, I think. It was so long ago.' Debut: April 14, 1959; County Stadium, Milwaukee. The result: 'They had me pinch hit for one of the greatest left-handers in baseball history,' Morgan said. 'That's a fact, and that's what I tell people.' It is indeed a fact. 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Advertisement 'Nomar gave me the joke about, oh, how he had to get hurt in order to get me up here,' Merloni said. 'He said he did it on purpose just to get me to the big leagues.' Favorite memory: 'The fact that my whole family was right there when I got the news was special,' Merloni said. 'But nothing beats what happened a few days later at Fenway.' On May 15, five days after making his major-league debut, the Red Sox played the Royals at Fenway Park. Rosado was back on the mound for the Royals. Merloni was in the Boston lineup at second base. Facing Rosado in the second inning, and with his parents in the stands, Merloni walloped a three-run homer over the Green Monster. In doing so, he became the third Italian-American member of the Red Sox raised in the Boston area to hit a home run in his first Fenway Park at-bat, joining Eddie Pellagrini (1946) and Tony Conigliaro (1964). 'It was my parents' 33rd wedding anniversary, and I hired a limo to bring them to Fenway Park,' Merloni said. 'It was Tek (Jason Varitek) and Mike Benjamin greeting me at the plate — they were on base — and I tried to look up to the stands to see my parents. I practically passed out when I got to the dugout and realized what had just happened.' The background: Though drafted in the 57th round of the amateur draft by the Detroit Tigers in 1995 out of Moorpark College in California, Kapler made a steady rise through the Tigers' farm system. Playing the entire 1998 season for the Double-A Jacksonville Suns of the Southern League, Kapler registered a .322/.393/.583 slash line with 28 home runs and 146 RBIs. The call-up: On Sept. 18, 1998, after the Suns suffered a 2-1 loss to the Mobile Bay Bears in the Southern League championship game, Kapler and teammate Robert Fick received September call-ups by the Tigers, hopscotching right past Triple-A Toledo. 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'The locker was a wire-mesh thing, nothing fancy. But just seeing my jersey, with the Old English D on front and with my name on the back, that's something that's etched into my brain forever.' (Photo of Marcelo Mayer, left, during the national anthem before making his major-league debut on May 24: Maddie Malhotra / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)
New York Times
34 minutes ago
- New York Times
Ranking the best and worst Club World Cup home kits: Divorcee flair, pixel madness and flawless Tunisian flair
The revamped Club World Cup is effectively a brand new tournament and with a fresh competition comes a selection of mostly new kits. For this summer's 32-team extravaganza in the United States, teams are allowed to play in new looks, whether that be special-edition tournament-only strips or what they'll be strutting their stuff in for the entirety of the 2025-26 season. Or, should they wish, they can carry on wearing the same shirts as they have done already this year. Whatever the approach of each of these Club World Cup competitors, nothing can spare them from the critical eye of The Athletic's Nick Miller, who has ranked all 32 home strips from worst to best. If you've ever been on holiday to a place where English football is popular but isn't necessarily touched by stringent copyright laws, you might be familiar with this sort of merchandise. Essentially, this looks like a very unofficial Chelsea shirt, designed by someone who knows two things: that they play in royal blue and that Chelsea is in London, and so has produced something that you might expect to see on a roadside stall somewhere, hanging next to a top that says: "MY MUM WENT TO LONDON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT" on it. It might as well have a British bulldog, Big Ben and a picture of the Queen on it. Oh. What is…oh. The first instinct is that this looks like the pixels from a not-especially-good 1980s computer game, which…well, that could be a compliment but it's not intended as one here. Having looked a little closer, what the two vertical flashes coming up from the bottom resemble is a person doing a double-bird flip, a pair of middle fingers raised high in the sky, but filmed with one of those heat-sensitive cameras. Not for me, this one. We'll have to get used to not patronising Auckland City, which would be an easy thing to do considering they're actual part-timers off to play against some of the greatest footballers on Earth. And so it is with their kit. You could just pat them on the head and say, "Isn't this nice? Bless them taking time off work to come all this way and wear their little shirt"…but that would be disingenuous, so it's best to just say this one isn't great. It feels like the checkerboard design is something you need to go all-in on: the strength is the contrast, not this 'blue and slightly lighter blue' combination. Sorry, guys. What's going on here? Clubs that have a traditional, set format for their shirt who then try to 'mix it up a bit' can go one of two ways: either their bold gamble pays off and they actually create something nice and original, or they just look rather too try-hard, like a recent divorcee trying to jazz up his bachelor pad with some decor that makes him seem younger. It's fine: you're middle-aged, you're set in your ways, lots of people like that sort of thing. Inter: stop mucking around with your stripes, you look ridiculous. There's something just slightly off with this. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, though. Are there too many elements stacked on top of each other for the central badge/kitmaker logo/sponsor's name placing to work? Is it that there's not enough contrast, that it's too red? Is it that the collar is quite unusual but doesn't really pop because it's the same colour as the main body of the shirt? Am I overthinking this entirely because, after all, it's just a football kit? All of the above are possible. Good lord, no. While it's to be admired that Juventus keep offering nods to their original colours of pink, which they wore until 1905, when an Englishman brought a shipment of old black and white striped Notts County shirts to Italy, this isn't a good way of doing that. There's too much happening: if you're going to bring in a striking detail like a pink trim, you need to keep the rest of the shirt pretty simple, which they could have done by using basic, block stripes. As it is, the stripes are asymmetrical and fuzzy, making the whole thing look a bit of a mess. This is the first - and, as you'll be able to discern from its position in our rankings, the worst - of Puma's special edition kits for the Club World Cup, it's all a collaboration with New York designer KidSuper who, because I am 41 years old, I had never heard of before starting work on this article. Having revealed my age, the following will inevitably read like the thoughts of a middle-aged man who doesn't understand young-people things, but... what's happening here? The blurb from Puma claims the daubs in the bottom half are a depiction of the mountains that form the backdrop to Monterrey's home stadium in Mexico, but they look more like a Rorschach test. After staring into the patterns for a while, I can see…that I should stop being such an old duffer. This shirt, part of the same Puma/KidSuper collection, isn't far behind the Monterrey one in the 'it's no good' stakes. This seems like a classic example of a decent core idea that has been executed quite badly: the stripes, the crescent-moon motif, the colours - all nice, but it would have been even nicer had they not let a child in elementary art class actually put it together. It sort of looks like a still-wet painting that has been stood upright and the colours have thus run down the shirt. From an English perspective, it's quite strange seeing Umbro's name and logo on a shirt from Brazil. It's a brand that you generally associate with English clubs - and England; in the 1990s, with affordable boots when you were a kid; with a particular sort of basic training wear that has migrated onto east London fashionistas. This feels like a shirt designed for kids: very bold and thick blocks, the sort of football shirt Fisher Price might design. Which isn't to say it's bad, it's just…well, you might feel like a toddler while wearing it. One danger with having a repeated template, apart from just making yourself look quite unimaginative, is that you end up with a team who look like they are wearing another club's shirt - as if they've showed up for an away game and the kit man has clean forgotten to bring their gear, so the opposition have to lend them something. Take this Al Ahly jersey, which looks a lot like Benfica's from a few years ago. Which, again, is not to say it's bad, it's just that a team's aesthetic can form a big part of their broader identity, so when two sides look so similar, that is eroded. Hmmm. Tricky one. It is very basic. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But it is very basic. Which can be a virtue. But it is very basic. I can't quite make up my mind whether this is too basic, or just a nice, clean, simple, uncomplicated…hang on, these are all just synonyms for basic, aren't they? It is very basic… Similar vibes here. This is clearly a nice shirt. Good clean lines, nothing too complicated, a little detail down the sides but nothing too much to really get excited about. And yet I've been staring at it for five minutes and I can't think of a single thing to really say about it. It's like meeting a very attractive but quite vacant person. The line between simple and boring is about the width of a spider's silk, to the point that judging which side of it football shirts fall is essentially arbitrary, but for me this lands on the wrong side. A marker of your advancing years is when you see a football shirt with a 'retro' look, one that gives a nod to a kit from the way, way, way distant past, and you realise you were around for the design being referenced when it was new. This jersey thus inspires strong flashbacks of Ruud van Nistelrooy, of Fernando Gago, or Fabio Cannavaro, of Madrid players from a very specific time. But forget this old man's contemplation of his mortality: is it nice? Well…yes…sort of… but that slightly strange meshy, honeycomb background design does spoil it a little, as does the grey detailing under the arms. You don't get many purple football kits, do you? Is it because they generally look like something a referee in an under-15s Sunday league match should be wearing? Or, arguably even worse than that, a third-choice goalkeeper's jersey? Possibly. There is actually quite an interesting story behind this one: Al Ain started life in the United Arab Emirates wearing green and white halves, then changed to red after merging with another club, then in 1977, they played purple-sporting Belgian side Anderlecht in a friendly and thought their colours looked quite smart, so they switched. Interesting, no? You'll notice I haven't actually written anything about this design which is because it's…well, it's fine, isn't it? Not much more than that. Yeah, this is perfectly clean, and manages to not look boring despite only being black and white with a few grey dabs here and there. It's just beautifully ordered: the stripes are the same size, the collar is strong, and the cuffs are, too. You don't see many Reebok kits these days and on this evidence, that's a bit of a shame, because it could teach a few other companies some much-needed lessons about the virtues of 'less is more'. Adidas seems really big on pinstripes this year. This is by no means a criticism because in general, they tend to look pretty good, but the danger is that its shirts can start to look pretty formulaic. As is the case with this Ulsan one, which is nice but very much in cookie-cutter territory: as more Western teams' shirts are released throughout the summer, you'll be seeing plenty more of this design, just in slightly different colours. That said, the South Korean side have very nice colours. Palmeiras have also got a special design from Puma for the Club World Cup, but as far as we can tell, at the time of writing, that will be their away shirt, and the home jersey they use in the tournament will be the same one they've been wearing in their ongoing 2025 season back in Brazil. That shirt is pretty nice and, from a distance, could pass as something from the 1950s (meant as a compliment), but peer a little closer and you can see an assortment of background designs, incorporating various crests. It's a pretty good way of introducing a little variety into a fairly straightforward, classic design, even if that variety could be quite easy to miss. Manchester City have joined the other Puma clubs in having a special-edition kit for the Club World Cup but perhaps rather shrewdly, theirs is the away kit. The home shirt they will be wearing in the U.S. is next season's jersey, which is pretty nice. If you're a sash fundamentalist, you could argue that it should be left to those who commit to it - your River Plates, your Perus, at-a-push your Crystal Palaces - rather than just dipping in for one season, but this works quite nicely, even if it does look a bit like it's been applied by a half-hearted painter-and-decorator. It's also exactly the right shade of blue for City, which is crucial. It's almost certainly too grand to describe a kit design as a 'reset' but if you can do that, then this is one to do it for. Atletico have mixed things up in recent years, with all sorts of blue flashes and shoulder details and waving stripes acting as variations on the standard form, but this is a back-to-basics, straight up and down, red and white-striped shirt. Maybe you do need the context of previous years' experiments to properly appreciate that, which most people probably won't have, but it is a pretty lovely thing. Earlier, we mentioned that Al Ahly's shirt looks like it belongs to Benfica: well, the good news is that Adidas has given the Lisbon side themselves one that is different enough that they're not going to just look exactly the same. This is a lovely number, striking the sometimes difficult balance between incorporating a lot of elements - the two-tone collar, the under-arm detail, the three stripes along the shoulders - without making the overall shirt look cluttered. This is how you do clean and classic without being boring. It's a shame in some ways that the Sounders won't be wearing their away shirt more, if only because it looks like a fleece. But the good news is that their home jersey is a peach of a thing, although it does fall into that 'shouldn't really work but it does' category. 'Green background with thin darker green and turquoise stripes? Have you lost your mind?'. Well, maybe, but sometimes things that shouldn't go together really do go together. The heart wants what it wants. A black football shirt can be extremely difficult to get right, partly because when they get wet through sweat, rain or whatever, they can quite easily start to resemble those PVC trousers that look good on a maximum of three people worldwide. This is a pretty good version, broadly because it has one - and only one - strong contrast colour, in this case gold, which is used relatively judiciously. The pinstripes work nicely, the trim is good, the club and manufacturer's badges are in keeping with the rest of the shirt - yes, good. Well done, indeed. PSG are a legitimately brilliant team these days, so it's a bit more difficult to be sniffy about them being more of a brand than a football club. But they are very keen to remind you they're from... PARIS!, while saying the Saint-Germain part rather more quietly, aren't they? They've had much less subtle nods to the Eiffel Tower in their shirts before, most notably the away jersey from a few seasons ago when the monument was daubed right across the middle of it. The lattice pattern down the middle of this new effort, a nod to the steel construction of the tower, is at least slightly more artful, and furthermore is pretty visually pleasing. Although don't stare at it for too long: you'll go cross-eyed. A quick glance through Pachuca's kit history reveals a lot of chopping and changing and some pretty eccentric choices. They've bounced between hoops, halves and stripes, with a weird T-shaped design one season and some truly hideous sponsor's logos. But happily they seem to have calmed down and settled on a pretty solid 'stripes with block colours on the sleeves' approach here. This is one of those shirts that you could picture a team sporting at pretty much any time since football clubs started taking kit design seriously: which is to say, it's good. The classics never go out of style. The good thing about choosing pink as the colour of your home jersey is that you don't have to work especially hard, in terms of kit design, to be distinctive. And, happily, Adidas hasn't fallen into that trap for the 2025 Inter Miami shirt, which they've been wearing for the opening months of the ongoing MLS season: just a simple two-tone in thick stripes, with the equally straightforward but distinctive contrast of the black trim and logos. No need to overcomplicate things. Should Miami be playing in this tournament? From a meritocratic standpoint, definitely not. But at least they're going to look good for as long as they are in it. Do you ever feel completely taken in by some obvious corporate nonsense? There's a big sign outside the Nike store in central London at the moment, promoting their running range, which says 'Hate every second, love every mile'. Clearly utter guff, but you can imagine if you were running a marathon, that sort of thing would inspire you. Anyway, Puma claims this design blends 'warm, sunlit tones with cooler shades to reflect the club's signature style' which 'captures the rhythm, energy, and joy of Sundowns football'. Also complete tosh, but you know what? I like this shirt, so I don't really care. As it turns out, I am quite the dupe for the marketing blurb on these Puma special editions. 'Alpine beauty with a New York edge', begins its description of the Red Bull Salzburg kit, which 'reimagines the iconic Edelweiss flower with sweeping strokes of ivory, lemon, and baby blue'. And I'm swallowing it whole, because…well, it's just a really nice shirt, isn't it? We could get very 'proper football man' and say flowers don't have a place on kits, but come on, let's have a slightly more progressive interpretation of masculinity, shall we? The delicate balance of having a kit with an iconic design and not wanting to spoil that but equally ensuring every new version is a bit different and stands out must be a delicate needle to thread. But Adidas has managed that with this River Plate kit, simply by flipping the positioning of the company's own iconic design, the three stripes, to wrap around the sleeves rather than run vertically down them. It works perfectly, not interfering with the traditional elements of the River shirt while at the same time making this particular one distinctive. Yes, please. This is the best of the Puma special-edition kits, at least in part because it genuinely looks like a Dortmund shirt, incorporating the more flashy 'fashion' elements more naturally than the others. Maybe this is because Dortmund often do mix up the designs on their home shirts, so this sort of departure doesn't feel quite as jarring. I couldn't really tell you what is going on with the pattern across the chest, shoulders and sleeves, other than it looking like a child's potato print, but I can tell you that it looks really good. It's the piping that does it. Well-placed piping can make a football shirt, particularly when in a well-selected colour which pops enough on its own that you don't have to use too much of it. Less (piping) is more. Without it, this would be a perfectly fine, clean design, but those subtle lines running from the collar down towards the armpits just add a little something extra. Top class, as you might expect from Boca. Proper stuff, this. You often read stories about how, when newly-formed clubs were figuring out what colours to wear, they chose something they thought would intimidate the opposition. Maybe I'm just being duped (again), because all of the announcement photos for this kit have the players mocked up as being taller than 30-storey buildings, but this does feel quite intimidating. Bold lines, bright red colours, tight cuffs: this lot from Morocco look like they mean business. You don't get that many Kappa kits these days, and when you see what they're capable of, you realise what a shame that is. Especially when... Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You'll have to excuse my Meg Ryan impression, but this shirt is simply magnificent. A stunner, a beauty, you feel like applauding - which would be weird, but still. The red and yellow complement each other, but are brilliantly offset by the black trim, which itself is judiciously used. The background pattern is wonderful too: a traditional Tunisian design that jazzes the shirt up just so, and for extra brilliance, it's repeated on their second and third kits. A wonderfully thought-through Kappa design, perfectly executed. Almost flawless. (Top photos: Bayern Munich and Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)
