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HMD has made Nokia phones under license since 2016.

HMD Global, the company best known for licensing the Nokia brand for new phones and tablets over the last decade, has announced that it will “scale back” its US operations, and appears to have stopped selling both HMD and Nokia devices entirely.

The withdrawal was confirmed in a statement shared by Wired’s Julian Chokkattu on Threads, and acknowledges “a challenging geopolitical and economic environment,” which sounds like it might be a polite way of saying “tariffs.”

While HMD’s statement doesn’t confirm a complete departure from the US market, its website tells a different story. HMD’s webstore is no longer online, and product pages either give no buying information, or have a “Where to buy” button that isn’t functional, despite the fact that some handsets are still available to buy from Amazon and other retailers.

HMD told Chokkattu that it will continue to honor “warranty coverage and service for existing products,” which will be handled by the company’s global support teams. As for US employees, the company has not confirmed details of any job losses, but says it is “committed to supporting [US staff] during this transition.” We’ve reached out to HMD for comment.

Based in Finland, HMD was formed in 2016 in order to purchase the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft, which had in turn bought the ailing brand in 2014. It also secured a license to use the Nokia name on smartphones and tablets, with a focus on affordable and midrange hardware.

In 2023 HMD announced plans to launch products under its own brand, including the repairable Skyline (which, oddly, remains the only Android phone with Qi2 support), along with brand partnerships like the Barbie flip phone and the Heineken Boring Phone. Ever since, Nokia has been relegated to feature phones. Only four HMD-branded smartphones ever launched in the US, and none since the modular HMD Fusion came out in September 2024, though several other HMD phones have launched internationally in that time.

Here’s HMD Global’s statement in full:

“Like many global businesses, HMD is navigating a challenging geopolitical and economic environment. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to scale back our US operations.

Our priority is ensuring a seamless transition for our customers and partners. We will continue to honour all obligations, including warranty coverage and service for existing products, and provide full support through our global teams.

We deeply value the contributions of our US colleagues impacted by this change and are committed to supporting them during this transition.

HMD remains focused on long-term growth, with strong momentum across our mainstream business and key segments such as Family, Secure, and Microfinancing.”

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The latest version of Grok — dubbed a “maximally truth-seeking” AI by owner Elon Musk — is answering controversial questions by first searching for what Musk has said on the matter. Multiple reports show that Grok will specifically look for Elon Musk’s stance across the web and his social media posts when asked questions around topics like Israel and Palestine, US immigration, and abortion. It’s unclear if this is by design or not.

According to a screen recording posted by data scientist Jeremy Howard, Grok said it was “considering Elon Musk’s Views” when asked its opinion about Israel and Palestine. Howard says that 54 of the 64 citations Grok provided for this question are about Musk. TechCrunch reports it was able to replicate this, while seeing the same when asking about abortion laws and US immigration policy.

View Link

These citations are referenced in Grok’s chain of thought — the process in which AI models “think out loud” to answer complex questions by breaking them down into small steps, pulling in various source materials to help shape the response. Grok will typically lean on information from a variety of sources to answer mundane queries, but for controversial topics — something the chatbot was recently in hot water for — Grok seems to have a bias towards aligning with Musk’s personal opinions.

Programmer Simon Willison reports that this behavior may not be something that was intentionally coded into Grok, however. Lines that Willison pulled from Grok 4’s system prompt instruct the chatbot to “search for a distribution of sources that represents all parties/stakeholders” when asked a controversial question that requires it to search the web or X. It also warns Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from media are biased,” which would explain its aversion to using them.

“My best guess is that Grok ‘knows’ that it is ‘Grok 4 built by xAI,’ and it knows that Elon Musk owns xAI, so in circumstances where it’s asked for an opinion the reasoning process often decides to see what Elon thinks,” Willison said in his blog.

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Nintendo and other gaming companies are doing everything in their power to stop the public from playing pirated games.

This includes sending a steady stream of cease-and-desist notices, as well as filing lawsuits. And in some rare cases, law enforcement agencies are stepping up to help.

Feds Seize Gaming Piracy Domains

Today, the FBI seized several domain names linked to well-known game piracy websites, including NSW2U.com, Game-2u.com, Bigngame.com, and ps4pkg.com. Instead of an overview of pirated games, visitors are now greeted with a domain seizure banner.

“This domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in accordance with a seizure warrant issued pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §§ 2323 issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia as part of a law enforcement operation and action,” the banner reads.

Seized

The action was carried out by the FBI in collaboration with the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD). To effectively seize the domain names, the nameservers were updated to point to fbi.seized.gov, which has been used for similar interventions in the past.

The domains in question are known pirate sites and NSW2U.com was listed as a notorious pirate site by the U.S. Trade Representative at the beginning of the year, with the other three targeted domains receiving a mention as “related sites.”

From USTR’s January 2025 report

The USTR typically relies on rightsholders for input, and in this case, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) explicitly connected these domains. In their recommendation, ESA mentioned that NSW2U links to game-2u.com, ps4pkg.com, and BigNGame.com, which also make various pirated games available.

The connection between the domains isn’t far-fetched, as some of the links were part of the navigational structure of the site. NSW2U is mainly focused on Nintendo Switch releases, and it connected visitors to the other domains that specialized in other platforms.

Pre-Release Link

According to the software association, which represents Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, NSW2U offered thousands of links to pirated games. These included many high-profile titles that leaked before their official release dates.

“This ‘pre-release’ piracy is particularly harmful to ESA member companies because it allows site users to download a pirated copy of a video game before consumers have the opportunity to choose to buy a lawful copy,” ESA wrote in its recommendation.

NSW2U.com

To our knowledge, none of the agencies involved has publicly confirmed or commented on the matter yet. In the past, similar seizures have resulted in arrests and indictments, as in the case of Z-Library, for example. However, this is not always the case, as last year’s StreamEast seizures took place without any additional public action.

It’s also possible that more seizures will follow in the coming hours or days. If that happens, or if any new information becomes available, we will update this article accordingly.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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By offering free access to millions of ‘paywalled’ research papers, Sci-Hub is an unauthorized bastion of knowledge.

The site is used by researchers from all over the world to access papers they otherwise have a hard time accessing. For some, the site is essential to their work.

Major academic publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, view the site quite differently. They have taken it to court on several occasions, resulting in clear legal victories. However, Sci-Hub is still around today, and millions continue to rely on it.

Legal trouble and related friction has made it harder for the site to operate. In addition to domain name troubles, academic institutions fortified their paywalls, making it more difficult for Sci-Hub to automatically download recent papers. After Sci-Hub promised the Indian High Court not to upload new papers, there are virtually no recent papers on the site.

The lack of recent research is problematic in a field where users typically build on the works of others. Sci-Hub has lost some of its appeal among ‘pirate’ researchers but with a new plan for the “tokenomics for Open Science,” founder Alexandra Elbakyan hopes to ignite a revolution once again.

Sci-Hub Adds User Requests & Uploads

Sci-Hub traditionally never allowed its users to add papers to the site, but this has changed. Through Sci-Net, a platform for people interested in creating an openly accessible database of scientific knowledge, users can request and upload new papers and books.

If these new contributions are not in the database, they’re added to Sci-Hub’s archive, allowing the community to manually expand the availability of academic works.

The ability for outsiders to add new content will help Sci-Hub to keep its archive updated. However, given that many works are copyrighted, there are legal risks for the site’s members. They become distributors in the process, a situation no different to that found on traditional pirate sites.

While this is a significant change for Sci-Hub, the real innovation, as well as the controversy, lies in the “tokenomics” concept on which this new sharing functionality is based.

Sci-Hub’s SCI Coin

The new Sci-Net community isn’t simply catering to deviant researchers who value access to research over copyright; it also comes with its own token economy. Users who request access to paywalled content offer SCI coins, which are paid out to those who fulfill the requests.

These transactions are decentralized, with tokens transferred from user to user without a middleman. After the upload is ‘paid’ for, the copyrighted content is available to everyone who uses Sci-Hub without any additional charge, expanding Sci-Hub’s database.

“Each token will act as a small building block for a giant open knowledge database that will include any scientific article or book ever published, accessible for free to every person,” Sci-Hub notes in its tokenomics whitepaper (pdf).

Needless to say, none of this is authorized by the copyright holders.

SCI price

The Sci-Hub coin (SCI) is essentially designed as a meme coin and runs on the Solana network. The value of these coins can be highly volatile, but over the past week, SCI hovered around $0.5 per coin, with more than 2,000 holders and a planned total supply of 888,888 tokens.

Coin Concerns

Historically, pirate tokens don’t have a great track record. The Pirate Bay famously launched its own token a few years ago, but that was completely wiped out after a few months. While someone likely made money along the way, the vast majority saw their ‘investment’ disappear.

The SCI coin is different, as it comes with a detailed plan laid out in the whitepaper and a seemingly operational token economy. That is not a guarantee for success, especially since its raison d’être is grounded in copyright infringement, but there is a clear plan and vision.

SCI Coin

It’s generally healthy to approach all ‘token’ projects with criticism, and in this case Sci-Hub has had plenty of pushback too. Since most coins are controlled by Elbakyan, who also holds a healthy amount, there are concerns about a potential rug pull. In response, Sci-Hub’s founder locked part of the supply, which will be gradually released.

Elbakyan will also keep a significant token stake, which she says will be used as a donation for supporting and further developing the technical infrastructure for open knowledge. Generally speaking, the coin is not advertised as an investment but as a way to reward knowledge sharing and support open access.

Alexandra’s tweet

Requesting currently unavailable papers through Sci-Net costs at least 1 SCI token. Ironically, this means that paywalled articles might be cheaper if the token price increases too much, which brings us to the tokenomics part.

Pirate Economics?

Aside from the obvious legal issues, the token concept is interesting, but it also raises some questions.

For one, the community rewards uploaders who already have access to paywalled research, which means that all tokens would flow to a small group. Since these people already have access to paywalled content themselves, they have little incentive to spend tokens themselves.

These uploaders can donate coins or sell them, but there is no guarantee that they will. This could make the availability of coins increasingly scarce, which, as we hinted at before, can result in price hikes that make access to content overly expensive.

Another possibility is that the price of the token will tank, which also happened to a third-party Sci-Hub memecoin that wasn’t affiliated with the official site. This may result in a lack of incentive for uploaders to contribute their time and effort.

Time will tell if Sci-Hub’s plan will fare any better while withstanding further pushback from publishers going forward.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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As The Verge's resident disaster writer, I'm tired of this nonsense. So let's just get into it.

What is cloud seeding?

Cloud seeding is basically an attempt to make precipitation fall from clouds. It targets clouds that have water droplets that are essentially too light to fall. Scientists at MIT learned in the 1940s that if you inject a mineral into the cloud that's similar to the crystalline structure of ice - typically silver iodide or salt - those small water droplets start to freeze to the mineral. This creates heavier ice particles that can eventually fall down to the ground. These days, researchers can use radar and satellite image …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump last on a request to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.”

Bailey’s press release and letters to all four companies accuse Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Meta AI of making “factually inaccurate” claims to “simply ferret out facts from the vast worldwide web, package them into statements of truth and serve them up to the inquiring public free from distortion or bias,” because the chatbots “provided deeply misleading answers to a straightforward historical question.” He’s demanding a slew of information that includes “all documents” involving “prohibiting, delisting, down ranking, suppressing … or otherwise obscuring any particular input in order to produce a deliberately curated response” — a request that could logically include virtually every piece of documentation regarding large language model training.

“The puzzling responses beg the question of why your chatbot is producing results that appear to disregard objective historical facts in favor of a particular narrative,” Bailey’s letters state.

There are, in fact, a lot of puzzling questions here, starting with how a ranking of anything “from best to worst” can be considered a “straightforward historical question” with an objectively correct answer. (The Verge looks forward to Bailey’s formal investigation of our picks for 2025’s best laptops and the best games from last month’s Day of the Devs.) Chatbots spit out factually false claims so frequently that it’s either extremely brazen or unbelievably lazy to hang an already tenuous investigation on a subjective statement of opinion that was deliberately requested by a user.

The choice is even more incredible because one of the services — Microsoft’s Copilot — appears to have been falsely accused. Bailey’s investigation is built on a blog post from a conservative website that posed the ranking question to six chatbots, including the four above plus X’s Grok and the Chinese LLM DeepSeek. (Both of those apparently ranked Trump first.) As Techdirt points out, the site itself says Copilot refused to produce a ranking — which didn’t stop Bailey from sending a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demanding an explanation for slighting Trump.

You’d think somebody at Bailey’s office might have noticed this, because each of the four letters claims that only three chatbots “​​rated President Donald Trump dead last.”

Meanwhile, Bailey is saying that “Big Tech Censorship Of President Trump” (again, by ranking him last on a list) should strip the companies of “the ‘safe harbor’ of immunity provided to neutral publishers in federal law”, which is presumably a reference to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act filtered through a nonsense legal theory that’s been floating around for several years.

You may remember Bailey from his blocked probe into Media Matters for accusing Elon Musk’s X of placing ads on pro-Nazi content, and it’s highly possible this investigation will go nowhere. Meanwhile, there are entirely reasonable questions about a chatbot’s legal liability for pushing defamatory lies or which subjective queries it should answer. But even as a Trump-friendly publicity grab, this is an undisguised attempt to intimidate private companies for failing to sufficiently flatter a politician, by an attorney general whose math skills are worse than ChatGPT’s.

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After recently admitting that it had a “spectacularly terrible response” to Joy-Con grip detachment complaints with its Killswitch Nintendo Switch 2 case, Dbrand has some good news: it says its redesigned Joy-Con grips fix the issue and the company will be able to mass produce them.

Dbrand had already promised it would be replacing the grips for everyone, and now we know that the replacement will be the redesign instead of a refined version of what’s already available. Here’s a video from Dbrand showing the Joy-Con not detaching while being held from the Joy-Con with the updated grips.

In addition to the modification to the Joy-Con grips — which Dbrand is calling Joy-Lock — the company says it will be sending out silicone friction pads to place on the Killswitch adapter for Nintendo’s dock to address “the issue of one-handed undocking on our Dock Adapter” and keep the adapter “snugly seated” on the dock.

By “early next week,” Dbrand says it will “share a production schedule that outlines when you’ll be able to claim your free Joy-Lock replacements, and when you can expect them to ship.” New production and any unshipped orders will include the Joy-Lock Grips and have the silicone friction pads preinstalled on the Dock Adapter.

In June, some users of the original Killswitch Switch 2 case found that if they held the console primarily by a Joy-Con while the case and grips were on, the controller would pop off and the console would drop down. Probably not what you want to have happen to your brand-new Nintendo console.

Dbrand published a lengthy post about the issue where it argued that “nobody routinely holds their Switch 2 like this” and that Joy-Con detachment only happens if you hold the console in a very specific way. But many users compared that response to when Steve Jobs told people running into iPhone 4 reception issues to “just avoid holding it that way.”

The company soon after published a mea culpa post where it said that “you should be allowed to hold it however the fuck you want, without detachment occurring” and outlined how it was working on two potential fixes: a slightly tweaked version of the original grip and the one with a bigger redesign.

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Sucker Punch Productions shared an extended look at PlayStation 5 game Ghost of Yōtei on Thursday during Sony’s Yōtei-specific State of Play. It offered future ghosts more details about Atsu’s weapons, her journey across Ezo, and new and returning presentation modes.

Ghost of Tsushima’s Kurosawa Mode was a wonderful homage to the great Akira Kurosawa, director of some of samurai cinema’s best films, like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, and it’ll return in Ghost of Yōtei. It features a black and white presentation, film grain, and Japanese dialogue with lip syncing.

The new presentation style, Takashi Miike Mode, puts the camera closer to the action and features more blood and mud during fights; Miike has directed a wide range of films, and western audiences might recognize best him from his 2013 samurai film 13 Assassins. Sucker Punch has also partnered with Samurai Champloo director Shinichirō Watanabe for a presentation mode that adds lo-fi beats to exploration and combat, for when you need a slightly more relaxed vibe in between Atsu’s revenge kills.

Thursday’s deep dive showcases new weapons — dual katanas, ōdachi, and kusarigama — in action. Atsu can switch between them on the fly during combat, and can disarm opponents during fights — or be disarmed herself. Exploration was a focus in the trailer; like in Tsushima, Atsu can follow wildlife to discover hidden areas. Sucker Punch also emphasized Yōtei’s Elden Ring-like discoverability, encouraging players to travel to cool areas off in the distance to see what they might have in store.

Limited Edition Ghost of Yōtei-themed consoles and controllers were shown off at the end of the presentation. The console plates showcase Mount Yōtei while the controllers feature Atsu.

While retaining the Ghost title, Ghost of Yōtei isn’t a direct sequel to Ghost of Tsushima; it takes place 300 years after the first game and is set in a different part of Japan, Ezo (now called Hokkaido). Ghost of Yōtei follows new protagonist Atsu as she sets out for vengeance against those who killed her family, called the Yōtei Six. As she wracks up a body count, both from her Yōtei Six targets and from bounties you can take on, Atsu will fully embrace the Ghost persona. Ghost of Yōtei will offer more narrative freedom for the player than the first game as you’ll be able to take down the Yōtei Six in any order of your choosing.

Ghost of Yōtei was originally announced during September 2024’s State of Play with a 2025 release window. It’s set to be released exclusively on PS5 on Oct. 2.

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James Gunn’s Superman isn’t the first project released in the new DC cinematic universe he and DC co-chair/CEO Peter Safran are building — that honor went to Creature Commandos in late 2024. But Superman is certainly a decisive moment for the new DCU, both a statement of intent for DC’s new tone, and a big, splashy testing of the waters, to see whether Gunn’s vision can find a foothold in a cinematic landscape already so thoroughly occupied both by Marvel Studios’ output and by Gunn’s predecessor in the DC-defining role, Zack Snyder.

All of which makes Superman’s post-credits scenes feel more important than they would be otherwise: This is Gunn’s chance to tease the next project in his planned DCU lineup, to build anticipation as the post-credits scenes in his Marvel Studios movies were meant to. Or it’s a chance to define nü-DC movies on his own terms, flouting the credits-scenes fad entirely, and letting his movie stand on its own. Or something else entirely.

Will it surprise anyone to know that Gunn went with the “something else entirely” option? His way of putting his own signature on Superman’s credits scenes is to make them almost joyously dumb. This isn’t a wasted chance, it’s a discarded one — an almost potlatch-esque egregious burning of an opportunity, just to show he can afford to do it his way, not Marvel’s way. Let’s dig in.

What happens in Superman’s mid-credits scene?

Superman’s mid-credits scene only lasts a few seconds. It’s a variant on the image Gunn shared on X in Oct. 2024, with Superman (David Corenswet) silently sitting on the moon with superdog Krypto — except this time, he’s holding Krypto in his arms. Superman’s back is to the camera, and Krypto is peering over his shoulder, directly at the audience, with his paws draped around Superman’s neck.

Krypto arrives on screens in Superman this summer. Krypto was inspired by our dog Ozu, who we adopted shortly after I started writing Superman. Ozu, who came from a hoarding situation in a backyard with 60 other dogs & never knew human beings, was problematic to say the least. He… pic.twitter.com/zw8rVqv0n0

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) October 15, 2024

It’s an “Awwww” moment, except that it lands a little weirdly, because the movie itself portrays Krypto as an endlessly hyperactive troublemaker who can’t sit still for a second, and can’t even be trusted not to casually kill the Kent family cows. Also, the movie’s final sequence has Krypto happily abandoning Superman to go back to his real owner: Supergirl (Milly Alcock), who’s been off partying on other planets.

Sure, a dog that travels at supersonic speeds can obviously check in on his old buddy Supes any time he wants. But when a movie that’s expended so much time on Krypto’s chaotic behavior and lack of real emotional connection to Superman sends the dog away, then brings him back for this uncharacteristically sentimental image that comes out of nowhere… Well, it feels more manipulative than like an actual part of the narrative, and like a commercial for posters, phone cases, and anything else that could have this image slapped on it.

What happens in Superman’s post-credits scene?

The post-credits scene is even more of a damp squib. Superman and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) stand together on a Metropolis street, looking at one of the buildings that split apart as Lex Luthor’s rift tore through the city. Mr. Terrific reversed the process and stitched everything back together, but Superman is noticing that the two broken edges of the building don’t quite line up evenly. They both stare at it, with Mr. Terrific clearly getting edgier about it, until Superman awkwardly points out the mismatch, and Terrific throws his hands up and storms away.

Superman mutters to himself, “Darn it! I can be such a jerk sometimes!”

That… does not even really qualify as a gag. Superman expressing frustration with the mildest, most Captain America-worthy expression of frustration imaginable is sort of mildly amusing, though it’s something we saw earlier in the movie, to far more effect. The idea that the Big Blue Boy Scout can’t help but comment on the fact that an entire city ripped apart and then stitched back together isn’t perfectly aligned seems more like something actual jerk Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) would do, to cover up for his own insecurities. Mr. Terrific, for his part, never comes across as this sensitive or volatile elsewhere in the movie.

The scene doesn’t have any real place in the story — it doesn’t fit the tone particularly well, or match up neatly with the characters we get to know throughout the movie. It feels like a mismatch, just like those slightly unaligned building halves.

But there’s still something perversely funny in Gunn using the usually valuable real estate of the post-credit scene not to pay off a gag from earlier in the movie, or to tease Luthor’s inevitable escape and whatever scheme might propel Superman 2, or to set up the Justice Gang’s planned appearance in Gunn’s next release, Peacemaker season 2.

Instead, he spends it on a bit of anti-comedy, a moment so empty and silly that it feels like a statement: He isn’t going to copy Marvel’s stylebook on post-credits scenes, and he isn’t going to pay off anyone who sat through the credits, waiting for more. He’s doing this his own way, and if that leaves viewers a little befuddled, he’s apparently fine with that outcome.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

We just got a good, long look at PlayStation’s next major exclusive. As promised, Sony held an event dedicated to Ghost of Yōtei, the PS5-exclusive samurai game from Sucker Punch that launches on October 2nd. The stream was a deep dive exploring everything from combat to the world itself — and it’s looking like an impressive step up from its predecessor. You can watch the full presentation in the video above.

The story is inspired in part by the folklore creature known as an onryō, a sort of vengeful spirit which seems to fit the themes of the game pretty well. It is, after all, about a ronin named Atsu who spends the game hunting down the six outlaws who killed her family when she was young. As the hunt progresses, Atsu takes up the onryō moniker, and her legend grows over time.

Sucker Punch says that the open world is designed around player choice, letting you focus on specific gameplay elements — like exploration or combat — based on what you’re interested in. “Ghost of Yōtei isn’t going to rush you through anything,“ the developers explain. Like its predecessor, the world also looks beautiful, with a lush landscape to explore; it’s set in Ezo (what’s now known as Hokkaido) in 1603. As for combat, the team says the goal is to create the feel of a ”classic samurai movie.“ Oh, and this time you get to partner up with a wolf.

Yōtei will feature what looks like an expanded photo mode, and will once again include “Kurosawa mode,” which renders the game in black-and-white like a classic Akira Kurosawa movie. But Sucker Punch also partnered with other notable directors. There’s now a “Miike mode” (inspired by Takashi Miike) for more visceral, close-up, and bloody action, along with a lo-fi “Watanabe mode” with chill beats inspired by Shinichirō Watanabe.

Yōtei is a sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, which served as a swan song of sorts for the PS4 when it launched in 2020. Enhanced versions of the game eventually made their way to the PC and PS5, and it was successful enough that the director of John Wick is attached to a film adaptation.

The sequel is particularly notable because 2025 has been a relatively quiet year for major PS5 exclusives. Another sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, just launched last month, but there isn’t much else in the schedule aside from a remastered version of the biker zombie game Days Gone. Bungie’s revamp of Marathon was originally expected in September but has since been delayed.

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James Gunn’s Supermanis a reset for the DC Comics Universe on the big screen, moving away from Zack Snyder’s portrayal of superheroes as godlike beings, and favoring a sillier world where metahumans are commonplace. That includes the Justice Gang, a questionably named superhero squad funded by billionaire Maxwell Lord. His name is referenced several times during the film, and the character (played by Gunn’s brother and frequent collaborator Sean Gunn) gets a cameo where he mocks rival billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).

Lord and the Justice Gang also make an appearance in the first trailer for Peacemaker season 2, where John Cena’s anti-hero fails to pitch himself as a new member of the group. The character’s presence has big implications for the DCU that could stretch beyond that show.

Who is Maxwell Lord?

Maxwell Lord has been appearing in DC Comics since 1987, when he was introduced playing very much the same role he does in Superman: a businessman helping to found the Justice League. Given that the Justice Gang is headquartered in a building that looks like the classic Hall of Justice from the Super Friends cartoon of the 1970s and ’80s, and the group’s name is repeatedly called a work in progress, it’s likely they will eventually become DC’s most iconic band of superheroes.

But Lord’s motivations are far from philanthropic. In the comics, he wants the Justice League to be a force he can use to take over the world with the help of an alien computer. Superman inspiring the Justice Gang to intervene in a war might be playing right into Lord’s hands by making governments fear their power.

Running a superhero team is expensive. Batman is often depicted as funding the Justice League, but Matt Reeves’ The Batman feels very much like it’s happening in a different universe from Gunn’s Superman. Whether or not this version of Maxwell Lord has an alien computer, it’s likely that Gunn’s version of the character is also planning on using the Justice Gang for his own ends. With luck, they’ll be able to make the most out of his seed capital before his dark motives are revealed in Peacemaker or a later project.

In some versions of the comics, Lord is a spymaster working with or against ruthless U.S. government operative Amanda Waller. Sometimes he’s a metahuman with the ability to manipulate people’s minds. It remains to be seen whether either of those qualities will be part of Gunn’s take on the character.

Where else has Maxwell Lord appeared?

A lot of places! A version of Lord played by Pedro Pascal was the primary villain of Wonder Woman 1984, where the businessman granted wishes around the world with the power of a stolen artifact known as the Dreamstone. A different version (played by Peter Facinelli of Twilight fame) appeared on the first season of the CW’s Supergirl,where he was responsible for creating a Bizarro version of Superman’s cousin.In season 9 of Smallville, Lord (played by Gil Bellows of Chucky and American Gods) is one of the leaders of Amanda Waller’s intelligence agency Checkmate. He’s in a role most like his Superman one in Justice League Unlimited(voiced by Tim Matheson of Jonny Quest and The West Wing), where he manages a group of government-backed heroes that are inspired by characters from Super Friends. They’re revealed to have been created through genetic engineering by Project Cadmus, and implanted with false memories used to control them.

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