Bandwagon Nerds News Report (10/12/2026): Artemis Fowl Gets Another Shot, Other Mommy Wins & Wildwood Stuns

Artemis Fowl returns as an animated series, Other Mommy wins the box office and Laika’s Wildwood earns raves at its world premiere.

New York Comic Con wrapped Sunday with Disney giving one familiar fantasy franchise another chance to get things right.

Artemis Fowl is returning as an animated series with creator Eoin Colfer directly involved, while ABC used the convention to lock down the future of The Rookie and its new North spinoff. At the movies, Other Mommy easily won the weekend despite brutal audience scores, while Laika’s enormously ambitious Wildwood emerged from the London Film Festival with some of the strongest early reviews of the fall. Gaming also got another dose of Marvel and Arc System Works with three more fighters joining MARVEL Tōkon.

It’s the Bandwagon Nerds News Report for October 12, 2026!

Artemis Fowl Gets Another Chance at Disney

Disney has officially greenlit an animated Artemis Fowl series for Disney Channel and Disney+, with author Eoin Colfer serving as an executive producer.

The series returns to the beginning of Colfer’s books, following 13-year-old criminal genius Artemis as he discovers a technologically advanced underground fairy civilization and sets out to capture one of its members. Ben Juwono and Colleen Evanson will executive produce alongside Colfer, while Disney has not yet announced a voice cast, episode count or premiere date.

That description already sounds considerably closer to the books than Disney’s much-maligned 2020 live-action movie. The biggest mistake that film made was sanding away many of the qualities that made Artemis interesting in the first place, including the fact that he begins the story much closer to a villain than a conventional young hero.

Animation also feels like the natural home for this world. The books mix elaborate fairy technology, fantasy creatures, underground civilizations and a protagonist whose morality evolves gradually across multiple stories. Television gives Disney enough room to let that development happen instead of trying to compress an entire mythology into one feature.

Most importantly, Colfer is actually involved this time. After one adaptation failed to capture what readers loved about Artemis Fowl, letting the person who created him help shape the next one seems like a useful place to start.

Other Mommy Wins the Weekend Despite Terrible Audience Scores

Blumhouse and Atomic Monster’s Other Mommy won the domestic box office with approximately $27.5 million, giving the Jessica Chastain horror film a solid opening against a reported $19 million production budget.

International audiences added another $17.6 million, putting the movie around $45 million worldwide after its first weekend. That is the good news. The considerably less encouraging number is its D+ CinemaScore, one of the lowest audience grades for a major studio release in recent years.

The Social Reckoning had the opposite problem: audiences barely showed up in the first place. Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network opened to only about $5.5 million domestically, dramatically below the $22.6 million opening of the original film back in 2010.

Other Mommy has therefore won the first battle, but the second weekend will tell us considerably more. Horror movies can survive mediocre reviews when the premise and marketing are strong enough, but genuinely bad word of mouth tends to show up very quickly once the initial curiosity audience has been exhausted.

The Social Reckoning faces an even harder problem. Prestige, recognizable subject matter and a connection to an acclaimed movie are not enough if audiences decide the story feels more appropriate for streaming than a trip to the theater.

Wildwood Makes an Enormous First Impression

Laika’s Wildwood premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and immediately generated extremely enthusiastic reactions for the sheer scale of its stop-motion animation.

Directed by Travis Knight and adapted from the novel by Colin Meloy, Wildwood follows Prue, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, after her baby brother is carried into the mysterious wilderness outside Portland by a flock of crows. Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan and an extensive voice cast populate a fantasy world filled with talking animals, strange communities and large-scale battles.

The ambition is the story here. Laika has built its identity around doing things through stop-motion animation that appear almost unreasonable to attempt by hand, and Wildwood reportedly pushes that philosophy considerably further than Coraline, ParaNorman or Kubo and the Two Strings.

That matters even more in 2026, when so much entertainment conversation is centered around artificial intelligence and automated creation. Wildwood is effectively a monument to doing things the difficult way because the difficulty itself produces something distinctive.

A beautiful animated movie is one thing. A movie where audiences can almost feel the enormous amount of physical craftsmanship behind every frame becomes something else entirely.

The Rookie and The Rookie: North Will Launch Together

ABC announced at New York Comic Con that The Rookie Season 9 and new spinoff The Rookie: North will premiere together on January 6, 2027.

North stars Jay Ellis as Alex Holland, a man who responds to a violent home invasion by finally committing to a new direction in his life and joining the Pierce County Police Department. Nathan Fillion, Melissa O’Neil and Eric Winter are all expected to cross over from the original series.

The main show is getting additions of its own. Troian Bellisario, Dulé Hill and Molly Kunz are joining Season 9, with Bellisario playing a new LAPD rookie being mentored by John Nolan.

Putting both shows together on the same night is the clearest indication yet that ABC wants The Rookie to become a genuine franchise rather than simply spinning off another show and hoping audiences find it.

North also has a setting that can actually change the formula. Moving from Los Angeles into Washington gives the new series room to handle policing across urban, suburban and rural environments instead of feeling like another group of characters operating a few blocks away from Nolan.

If the crossover strategy works, ABC suddenly has something television networks value enormously: a dependable programming block built around one recognizable world.

MARVEL Tōkon Adds Jane Foster, Venom and Jubilee

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Arc System Works announced three more downloadable fighters for MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls.

Thor’s Jane Foster incarnation will arrive during winter 2027, Venom joins alongside a Klyntar stage in spring 2027 and Jubilee follows during summer 2027. All three are included in the game’s Year One Characters & Stage Pass, while Phoenix Cyclops arrives first on November 2.

The lineup demonstrates how much freedom Arc System Works has when building the roster. Jane Foster brings another variation on Thor mythology, Venom adds one of Marvel’s most recognizable antiheroes and Jubilee provides an X-Men character whose powers should translate beautifully into an exaggerated fighting-game visual style.

That last part remains Tōkon’s biggest advantage. Marvel has appeared in fighting games for decades, but Arc System Works specializes in turning powers into enormous animated spectacles that look like comic-book panels exploding across the screen.

Adding characters after launch is expected. Choosing characters who can meaningfully change what the game looks and feels like is considerably more important.

R.L. Stine’s The Babysitter Is Coming to Tubi

Tubi is developing an adaptation of R.L. Stine’s The Babysitter for 2027, continuing the streamer’s increasingly deep relationship with the author’s horror catalog.

The original series began in 1989 and follows teenage babysitter Jenny as threatening phone calls, local attacks and increasingly suspicious people around her turn an ordinary job into something much more dangerous. The books eventually expanded into four installments.

Jem Garrard, who worked on Tubi’s Pumpkinhead movies, is involved in the new adaptation alongside writer Trevor Calverley.

The Babysitter is a particularly good Stine property to revive because it belongs to the stretch of his career before Goosebumps completely defined his public identity. These books leaned more heavily into teenage suspense and slasher-style danger rather than monsters and supernatural creatures.

Tubi has clearly realized there is value in treating Stine as more than the guy who created Slappy the Dummy. Pumpkinhead, Afraid of Clowns and now The Babysitter give the service an opportunity to build a whole collection of accessible horror around one of the most recognizable names the genre has ever produced.

Roger Jr. Returns to Tekken 8

Bandai Namco confirmed that Roger Jr. will join Tekken 8 on November 11 for Season 3 Character Pass owners before becoming available to everyone on November 16.

The boxing kangaroo returns after a long absence from the main series, bringing back one of Tekken’s most ridiculous character concepts at a point when the franchise has increasingly leaned into its ability to mix serious fighting-game competition with absolute nonsense.

That contradiction has always been part of Tekken’s charm. A story can involve demonic bloodlines, corporate warfare and fathers throwing sons into volcanoes, and then a genetically engineered kangaroo wearing boxing gloves walks into the tournament.

Roger Jr. does not need to make sense because Tekken stopped requiring that decades ago.

His return also continues a broader trend across fighting games right now. Developers are increasingly discovering that bringing back weird legacy characters can generate just as much excitement as adding a crossover guest from another franchise.

Sunday closed out a Comic Con weekend that offered plenty of franchise announcements, but Artemis Fowl may be the most interesting because Disney is effectively admitting one failed adaptation does not mean the underlying material was the problem.

That lesson extends beyond one series.

Laika keeps betting that audiences will recognize the value of physical craftsmanship. Tubi keeps finding different corners of R.L. Stine’s catalog worth adapting. The Rookie is expanding because ABC believes a familiar structure can support another setting and another cast.

Sometimes a property needs reinvention. Sometimes it simply needs somebody to identify what worked in the first place before trying again.

This report includes information from: DisneyPlus.com, TheWrap.com, EntertainmentWeekly.com, Gematsu.com, Deadline.com and Tubi-related reporting.