Bandwagon Nerds News Report (9/26/2026): Mary Poppins Goes Dark, Nintendo Killed Ganondorf & Endgame Returns

Mary Poppins heads to TV, Nintendo reportedly killed a Ganondorf-led Zelda spinoff and Avengers: Endgame returns to theaters.

Friday brought an unusual combination of abandoned ideas, old properties finding new lives and one enormous superhero movie heading back to theaters.

Nintendo reportedly turned down a Ubisoft-developed Zelda spinoff that would have placed Ganondorf in the starring role, while Mary Poppins is being developed for television with an approach that intends to dig deeper into the darker material from P.L. Travers’ original books. Marvel also returned Avengers: Endgame to theaters, where the re-release immediately showed there is still considerable interest in revisiting the conclusion of the Infinity Saga.

It’s the Bandwagon Nerds News Report for September 26, 2026!

Mary Poppins Is Being Developed as a Darker TV Series

A new Mary Poppins television series is in development, but the project reportedly will not simply stretch Disney’s famous movie into episodic television. The new adaptation is expected to draw more directly from P.L. Travers’ original novels and lean into darker elements of the source material that were softened considerably in the Disney versions.

That creates a surprisingly interesting path for a character almost entirely associated with brightly colored Disney musicals. Travers wrote multiple Mary Poppins books, meaning there is considerably more material available than the stories most audiences know through Julie Andrews and Emily Blunt.

The word “darker” can become an easy marketing tool whenever an older property is revived, but Mary Poppins may actually be a case where it makes sense. The books contain stranger and occasionally harsher material than the movies, so a television adaptation could distinguish itself simply by returning to ideas that have been sitting in the original stories for decades.

Nintendo Reportedly Rejected a Zelda Game Starring Ganondorf

Ubisoft Milan reportedly spent much of 2023 developing a prototype for a Legend of Zelda spinoff internally called Goliath. According to Insider Gaming, the project originally featured a new protagonist before Nintendo suggested replacing that character with Ganondorf, only to reject the finished prototype in November 2023 for reasons that remain unclear.

The project grew out of discussions between Nintendo and the Ubisoft Milan team behind Mario + Rabbids following Sparks of Hope. Creative director Davide Soliani and a small group developed the concept, but after Goliath was rejected, discussions about another Nintendo collaboration reportedly broke down and several members of the Milan team eventually departed Ubisoft.

A Ganondorf game is the kind of canceled project that immediately creates a thousand questions. Nintendo has allowed outside developers to work with Zelda before, but giving another studio a standalone game built around the franchise’s defining villain would have been a much different level of experimentation.

The especially fascinating detail is that Ganondorf reportedly came from Nintendo rather than Ubisoft. That suggests Nintendo was at least willing to explore the idea before ultimately deciding the prototype was not something it wanted to move forward with.

Avengers: Endgame Comes Back Swinging at the Box Office

Avengers: Endgame returned to theaters this weekend with its Encore release and earned approximately $3.8 million from Thursday previews. The re-release immediately placed the six-year-old Marvel blockbuster back into the weekend box-office conversation alongside newly released films.

Endgame already became one of the highest-grossing movies ever made during its original 2019 run, so nobody needed proof that people liked it. What makes the preview number interesting is that audiences are paying theatrical prices again for a movie that has been widely available at home for years.

Marvel also benefits from the timing. The MCU has spent much of the post-Endgame era trying to establish its next long-term direction, and putting the Infinity Saga’s biggest payoff back on giant screens provides a reminder of just how powerful the shared-universe concept became when everything was moving toward the same destination.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Begins Its Next Steel Ball Run Stage

Netflix began streaming the second stage of Steel Ball Run: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on Friday. The second and third stages will contain 11 episodes combined, with Netflix moving the series to a weekly Friday release schedule rather than releasing the entire batch at once.

The continuing story follows Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli through the cross-country horse race at the center of Steel Ball Run. Netflix confirmed that new episodes from the second and third stages will arrive weekly for subscribers around the world.

Weekly releases make particular sense for JoJo because this is the kind of franchise that benefits from people having time to process whatever bizarre thing just happened before the next episode arrives. Netflix has experimented with several anime release strategies over the years, and moving a major property like Steel Ball Run into a traditional weekly rhythm should give each episode more room to breathe.

Mercenaries Grace Continues the Strategy RPG Series

RideonJapan announced Mercenaries Grace: Black Feather and the Golden Right Arm, the newest entry in the long-running Mercenaries Saga strategy RPG series. The game is scheduled for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC in Japan this November, while the developer has also confirmed that an English release is being prepared.

Mercenaries Grace will continue using grid-based tactical battles, but its turn structure alternates individual allied and enemy units instead of allowing players to move an entire team before the opposition responds. That changes the usual tactical-RPG rhythm because every action can potentially be answered immediately.

The Mercenaries games have never occupied the same space as Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, but they have built a dependable niche by delivering relatively straightforward tactical RPGs without trying to reinvent the genre every time. An English version already being planned also means this announcement matters beyond the Japanese launch.

The Traitors: New Blood Finds a Much Bigger Streaming Audience

The premiere of The Traitors: New Blood reached approximately six million viewers across platforms over its first three days. The audience expanded considerably once streaming viewing was included, giving the latest version of the franchise a much stronger total than its initial traditional television performance suggested.

That gap between the initial broadcast number and the three-day audience is becoming increasingly important when evaluating television. A show can look relatively modest during its first airing and then change dramatically once delayed and streaming consumption are added.

The Traitors is particularly suited to that behavior because the format encourages catching up before spoilers spread across social media. Six million viewers also gives Peacock another indication that the franchise has grown well beyond being an interesting reality experiment and has become one of the platform’s recognizable television brands.

Mary Poppins is reaching further back toward the original books, Marvel is putting Endgame back onto theater screens and Netflix is allowing Steel Ball Run to unfold weekly. Even Mercenaries Grace represents another iteration of a formula its developers have spent years refining.

Then there is the Zelda game that never happened. A Ganondorf-led adventure developed by the Mario + Rabbids team sounds like exactly the kind of strange alternate-history project people will spend years wondering about, particularly because Nintendo apparently entertained the idea long enough for Ubisoft Milan to actually build a prototype.

This report includes information from: Deadline.com, Insider-Gaming.com, TheHollywoodReporter.com, Netflix.com and Gematsu.com.