Stranger Things season 4 is the first English language series to hit over a billion hours of viewing time.

According to Netflix and Hollywood Reporter, with Stranger Things season 4's final two episodes out, the latest season of The Duffer Brothers' popular horror series has surpassed the billion-hour viewing mark.

Why is the show's viewership recorded in hours? That's because it's Netflix's preferred viewership metric.

Stranger Things' newest season recorded 1.15 billion hours of viewing in its first 28 days. The only show on Netflix with a bigger viewing time is Squid Game which recorded 1.65 billion hours of viewing time in the same period. As Squid Game is a South Korean language production, the distinction of being the first English language series to hit a similar milestone goes to Stranger Things season 4.

Viewing hours in the first 28 days isn't a typical metric shows track versus more conventional metrics like viewership. But this is Netflix's preferred metric and the one it regularly shares with the public. So while it's not an exact viewership estimate, it does showcase that Stranger Things is still a hugely popular series and one that is devoured by subscribers when a new season premieres.

This is especially impressive given that the final two episodes of Stranger Things season 4 were released only days ago. Though, we should note that each episode is an hour-plus in length, making Squid Game's achievements stand out even more given their episodes were half the length at times.

Still, with Stranger Things still going strong it's no wonder Netflix and the Duffer Brothers are exploring spinoffs. For more, check out IGN's Stranger Things season 4 review for our take on the latest trip to the Upside Down.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Videos of a world-record speedrun of the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance DLC has been taken down by GDQ after it was revealed the speedrunner misrepresented their run.

Summer Games Done Quick is an annual video game speedrunning event where participants speedrun through games while raising money for charity. One game showcased was the DLC for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Speedrunner Mekarazium set a new world record for the Blade Wolf DLC during the event. However, a video replay of the run was later removed from the official GDQ YouTube channel and it was confirmed that it was due to forgery.

“Yesterday, we were made aware that Mekarzarium played a segmented video for his DLC run at Summer Games Done Quick 2022. Mekazarium has since admitted to this, both to some members of the community as well as directly to GDQ staff.”

Typically SGDQ is an in-person event hosted in Minneapolis. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the event switched to a remote format. This year there was a hybrid format where the event returned in-person, but still played remote runs from players who were not able to fly out.

Mekazarium was one such runner who participated remotely. But while runners are expected to perform live, Mekazarium instead ran a pre-recorded gameplay video of Metal Gear Rising and pretended to play the game during his stream as if it were in real-time.

According to GDQ, Mekazarium contacted the staff “with a document detailing that he had planned this over a month, demonstrating this was planned and intentional. This was made possible because of the remote nature of this particular run in the marathon.”

GDQ announced that Mekazarium will not be permitted to run for the event in the future.

While this is an unfortunate event that undermines the talent that is typically showcased during SGDQ, the organization once again hosted a fairly successful event, raising $3 million for Doctors Without Borders.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

The next Avatar film, Avatar: The Way Of Water, is only a few months away and its follow up is set for 2024, and director James Cameron already has big plans for the next two. Unfortunately, he might not be the one who directs them.

Speaking to Empire, Cameron says, “The Avatar films themselves are kind of all-consuming. I’ve got some other things I’m developing as well that are exciting. I think eventually over time – I don’t know if that’s after three or after four – I’ll want to pass the baton to a director that I trust to take over, so I can go do some other stuff that I’m also interested in. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

Cameron’s passion for the films and the worlds he has created is undeniable. “Everything I need to say about family, about sustainability, about climate, about the natural world, the themes that are important to me in real life and in my cinematic life, I can say on this canvas,” Cameron continues. “I got more excited as I went along. Movie four is a corker. It’s a motherf**ker. I actually hope I get to make it.”

Only time will tell if Cameron will dedicate even more of his time to the world he’s so lovingly crafted. His dedication has been felt through both the story and on the technical side of things where he’s mastered the challenge of underwater motion capture.

Despite the length of time that’s passed since the first movie was released, fans seem eager for part two. The trailer that was released in May had more views in 24 hours than all the most recent Star Wars films.

Avatar: The Way Of Water releases 13 years after the original on December 16, 2022. It follows Jake Sully and Ney'tiri who have formed a family they’ll do anything to keep together. Gamers also have Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a first-person open-world action-adventure video game adaptation from Ubisoft, to look forward to.

Casey is a freelance writer for IGN. You can usually find him talking about JRPGs on Twitter at @caseydavidmt.

On July 8, Thor: Love and Thunder will become the 29th MCU film and the fourth Thor solo movie – a record for Marvel’s heroes. Clearly, working together across both the Thor movies, Marvel’s team-up films, and other projects has led to Thor’s stars becoming very close, and they tell IGN it's their real-life friendships that will make this story even stronger.

Natalie Portman’s return as Jane Foster is one of the most exciting parts of Thor: Love and Thunder as she is set to wield Mjolnir and become Mighty Thor before our eyes. While Portman wasn’t a part of Thor: Ragnarok, she did star as Foster in the first two Thor films. Furthermore, her legendary career has led her to cross paths with Valkryie actor Tessa Thompson in Annihilation and Gorr the God Butcher actor Christian Bale in Knight of Cups.

“It was so incredible getting to work again with so many of the actors that I had previously worked with,” Portman said. “I really appreciated getting another opportunity with Chris and with Tessa, who is also a great friend. It was just really fun to get to play again and also to come on set feeling comfortable already.”

“Also, it’s been wonderful to get to work with Tessa in this way and explore our friendship a little bit in the film. It's been nice to have a variety of female characters that I think kids can relate to and see different possibilities for women, personalities and superpowers and all that. Whenever I've had the opportunity to work with other actresses, it's always much more fun and much more powerful and meaningful I think.”

Thompson echoed Portman’s words and talked about how working with her friend meant so much more than simply making it easier to get into character together. It was, as she puts it, inspiring.

“Natalie is such an incredible actor who has been working for a long time now. And I feel really inspired when I see someone that has been doing it for a long time and they're still trying to reach new heights and do things that challenge them,” Thompson said. “It's very seldom, especially as a woman, that you're asked to actually expand yourself, to get bigger, to get as big as you can get. Typically, you're asked to get smaller in all sorts of ways. So watching her do that and take up that challenge was wonderful.

“And then she and I, outside of Annihilation, have also just had the opportunity to work together as colleagues in thinking about how to make this business more equitable and safer for women and girls. And so to me, she's actually just a real-life superhero in a lot of ways. And so to get to play with her in this space as one is also just fun.”

Hemsworth also spoke of playing alongside Portman’s Jane Foster once more and how their reuniting after being in such different places made this new story even more fun.

“I think so much of the change of who Thor was has a lot to do with the people he's interacting with. And so to interact again with Jane Foster after they were both in very different places made it so much fun,” Hemsworth said. “I started this journey with Natalie Portman 10 years ago, so to sort of reunite this many years later was just really exciting. When we had the prospect of doing this film in front of us, we were both talking about it a lot prior to shooting and throwing around ideas of how we'd interact or how the characters would interact and how it would be familiar, but also different to what we'd seen before.”

Thor: Love and Thunder will be released in theaters on July 8, 2022. In our review, we said that it "is held back by a cookie-cutter plot and a mishandling of supporting characters, but it succeeds as the MCU's first romantic comedy thanks to Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman's chemistry."

For more, read on as to why Chris Hemsworth calls Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher one of his favorite Marvel villains and as these stars talk about acting in the MCU and the mighty return of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster.

Francesca Rivera is Video Producer at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @fbrivera.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

A Stranger Things spinoff might be coming down the line, but it won’t come from the Duffer Brothers.

In an interview with the duo on the Happy Sad Podcast Matt Duffer says, "The idea, ultimately, is to pass the baton to someone else, someone who's hopefully really talented and passionate. Even the idea of Ross and I, say, doing a pilot and leaving it, it just feels silly to me. You really need to be there from the beginning to end. I think we need to find a partner to help us with that."

Stranger Things' fourth season just concluded, and while there are many established characters the show could follow in the spinoff, the Duffer Brothers say to expect something a bit different.

“I’ve read these rumors that there’s gonna be an Eleven spinoff, that there’s gonna be a Steve and Dustin spinoff or that it’s another number. That’s not interesting to me because we’ve done all that. We’ve spent I don’t know how many hours exploring all of that. So it’s very different.”

While the creators are tight-lipped, they did tease that the spinoff, hinted at last September by Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos, will feature some “connective tissue” with their signature “storytelling sensibility.”

If you don’t wanna leave the Upside Down just yet, be sure to check out our ode to one of the best characters from season 4 and why the Duffer Brothers think Season 5 will be shorter than Season 4. If you’re all caught up, be sure to check out our review of Season 4 Part 2 which we called Stranger Things at its “most emotional, action-packed, and tension-filled.”

Casey is a freelance writer for IGN. You can usually find him talking about JRPGs on Twitter at @caseydavidmt.

A group of more than 1,400 singers have come together to sing Final Fantasy 14's iconic Close in the Distance track, with video game cover artist Alex Moukala at the helm of the project.

Shared on his Twitter, the song's arrangement is also by Moukala alongside fellow cover artist Husky by the Geek, while the singers include a number of special guests including Final Fantasy vocal artists Susan Calloway, Amanda Achen, and Paolo Andrea di Pietro.

YouTubers (and musicians) Studio Nicktendo, Enochian Tori, and Lollia Rose also take part, alongside a handful of others. The truly impressive part comes towards the end of the song, however, as 1,400 more members of the Final Fantasy 14 community appear on screen, all singing along too.

FINAL FANTASY XIV - Close In The Distance
(with 1000 singers from the FFXIV community) pic.twitter.com/mw0dHhYMn0

— Alex Moukala (@alex_moukala) July 5, 2022

"I can't stress enough how much of a difference you all made here," Moukala said In follow-up tweets. "The 1,000 of you who sent us beautiful submissions and the superb soloists who lent us their voices for this love letter."

Upon thanking each other contributor, Moukala added: "It's safe to say this game has changed so many lives. It wouldn't have been possible without you all.

While he's most known online for the legendary 30-person Wii jam session, Moukala is an orchestral composer whose music has appeared in several film trailers including Avengers: Endgame. He recently covered the Elden Ring main theme in 15 different styles, from Spanish guitar to trap and traditional Japanese.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Final Fantasy 7 fans have been clamoring for more details after last month’s announcement of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, a remaster of 2007’s Crisis Core, and today Square Enix’s Twitter gave us a tiny taste of what we can expect to see in the full game.

According to Square, the Zack Fair-centric game will differ from the original in several ways including an improved camera and character models.

In last month’s trailer, we got a glimpse at the fast and frantic combat as well as the much-improved character models. The game is using the new designs for Aerith and Zack from Final Fantasy 7 Remake as well as improving other character models.

Players will also get an optimized UI as well as a new menu-based battle system. While details on the battle system haven’t been revealed yet, the glimpses we’ve gotten of the battle system don't appear to be too far off from the original and still include the slot-machine-like DMW system.

The Final Fantasy 7 compilation has always included some great music, and the Crisis Core remaster will include new background music arrangements by Takeharu Ishimoto. The remaster will also feature voiceovers in scenes that were previously text only.

Crisis Core originally released back in 2007 on the PSP. It serves as a prequel to Final Fantasy 7 and follows Zack Fair on his journey to find missing SOLDIER Genesis Rhapsodos. In our original review we gave it an 8.5/10 and said, “Crisis Core is a great PSP game -- no question. It honors Final Fantasy VII's legacy."

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion will release this winter and is now available for preorder.

Casey is a freelance writer for IGN. You can usually find him talking about JRPGs on Twitter at @caseydavidmt.

Rockstar Games reportedly shelved planned remakes, including Red Dead Redemption and GTA 4, to focus on the upcoming GTA 6. This is after Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition was released to negative reviews from critics and fans alike,

According to a prominent leaker and reported by Kotaku. Both Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4 remasters were "on the table a few years ago, but Rockstar chose not to proceed with the projects in mind."

However, according to Kotaku, these projects weren't fully canceled and could possibly see a return to development after GTA 6 releases.

As per a reliable source with clear accuracy on Rockstar plans, remasters of GTA IV & RDR1 were on the table a few years ago, but Rockstar chose not to proceed with the projects in mind.

The poor reception of the Trilogy DE might be a reason behind that decision.#GTAIV #RDR1

— Tez2 (@TezFunz2) July 4, 2022

Tez attributed the cancellation of these remakes to the especially poor reception of last year's GTA Trilogy remaster, which received a 5 in IGN’s review for its sloppy redesign and "straight-up broken" mechanics.

The studio is now focusing on GTA 6, which was confirmed to be in development earlier this year. Though it's already been announced, fans shouldn't expect a wave of news about the title for a while, as Rockstar plans to reveal details about the game on its own schedule. It's possible that GTA 6 won't come out until 2024 or 2025, and even then, it'll reportedly have a smaller size with plans for post-launch updates to help eliminate crunch.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.

It was reported yesterday that the trademark for the Intellivision Amico had been abandoned, spurring speculation that development on the console has ceased. Now, the company's CEO says work on the system is ongoing and that the trademark is very much alive.

In an email sent to IGN from Intellivision CEO Phil Adam, the company says that it is "still working on the console" and that the United States Patent and Trademark Office "is usually pretty slow in updating."

Adam provided IGN a screenshot of the Intellivision Amico trademark listed as "live" as of this morning, which IGN confirmed. The filing date for the trademark is listed as June 30, 2022.

The Intellivision Amico is a successor to the Intellivision home console from the 1980s. The new system will utilize a remote control style interface with a touchscreen and charging dock. The plan is for the system to feature a library of new, family-friendly games, some of which are developed by teams who created games for the original Intellivision.

However, the console has faced numerous delays since it was announced in 2018, and original CEO Tommy Tallarico stepped down earlier this year with former chief revenue officer Phil Adam taking over the position.

But for now, at least according to the company, the Intellivision Amico is still in the works.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Additional reporting by Joe Skrebels.

Ubisoft has been a bit quiet this summer, but the company plans to return to the spotlight when it debuts a Skull and Bones Ubisoft Forward in July followed by another showcase in September with new reveals and updates on several games its studios have been working on.

In a blog post, Ubisoft announced that on July 7 there will be a Skull and Bones spotlight with in-depth look at the upcoming open-world pirate game. Then on September 10 at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET, a new Ubisoft Forward "returns in full force, ready to reveal updates and news on multiple games and projects from Ubisoft teams around the world."

While Ubisoft has been ramping up the launch of Skull and Bones, we know there are still several franchises and games we haven't heard from in a while, including Assassin's Creed. The latest reports suggest Ubisoft is working on creating a live-service, evolving Assassin's Creed game.

There are also other franchises like Far Cry, Watchdogs, Rainbow Six, and more that we could potentially hear from at the event, as well as the delayed-again Prince of Persia Remake.

Ubisoft already revealed the next Mario + Rabbids at the latest Nintendo Direct. For everything else announced over the summer, check out IGN's Summer of Gaming hub.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.