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Days after a classicist who translated Homer’s “The Odyssey” in 2017 eviscerated the Christopher Nolan film based on the poem, Joyce Carol Oates has entered the debate.

She’s Team Nolan.

The National Book Award-winning author is known for her (sometimes controversial) hot takes on social media, and on Wednesday, she stepped up to the plate in opposition of translator Emily Wilson’s brutal takedown of Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of “The Odyssey.” Nolan had previously said Wilson’s translation inspired him in making the film. But Wilson wrote that she would be ashamed to have written any part of the script.

“Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said of Wilson’s review in a post on X. “Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.”

Wilson’s biting missive, published in the London Review of Books this week, went so viral that it reportedly crashed the outlet’s website for a few hours Monday. The British American classicist’s take on the film was especially notable because, last fall, Nolan quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said.

Wilson’s version of “The Odyssey” subsequently spiked in sales. A representative for Audible told The Times on Wednesday that, year over year, purchases of Wilson’s “Odyssey” translation were up by more than 600% across Audible’s U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces. Daily global title sales rose nearly sixfold during the week the movie premiered. And in the nine days following wide release, daily global sales averaged around 20 times more than the rate before the premiere, showing sustained demand for Wilson’s translation.

Oates, who penned the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Blonde,” said that, within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.”

“One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is,” Oates wrote.

In separate posts on the social platform, Oates said she highly recommended Nolan’s adaption and that she wasn’t a fan of Wilson’s translation. “What I’d read of Emily Wilson’s translation was not for me,” she wrote, adding that she assumes it was “deliberately written to appeal to an audience comfortable with YA (young adult) directness & spareness of vocabulary — that is, with the intention of being marketable, adopted by high school classes.

“With a more poetic, elevated speech, you are naturally limiting your audience,” continued the author, who further noted that there was nothing wrong with a direct, commercial approach. “Why not profit from a classic work not protected by copyright?”

In the viral review by Wilson, who also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad,” she likened Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones.”

Her sharpest critiques were aimed at Nolan’s rendering of Homer’s female characters, of which she said there were more than in his other films “thanks to the source material” but that, in contrast to the poem, none of them “had much to say.” Wilson said Nolan’s race-neutral casting was essentially a wash as “[m]ost of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”

And don’t get her started on the whole point of the poem — the cost of war — of which Wilson quipped, “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it — a very different point.”

Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” published in 2017 served as inspiration to Christopher Nolan when crafting his blockbuster adaptation of the nearly 2,800-year-old poem, has some thoughts on the film.

In a biting missive for the London Review of Books, the British American classicist dissected Nolan’s work with a scalpel so sharp that he may need to borrow some of Matt Damon’s armor to read it all the way through. Last fall, the acclaimed director quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said. “The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me. He’s not just a soldier. He’s an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”

Wilson, although admittedly “humbled” by the nod from the filmmaker, wrote: “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

A professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad.” In her takedown of the film, she likens Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones” and says that, by the end, she “almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”

Earlier this month, The Times’ film critic, Amy Nicholson, wrote that “Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to serve his own needs, scrapping the character’s prickly personality to Trojan-horse a message about how empires collapse. … Aghast at the ways of men, he’s dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate the tale into a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.”

Wilson appears to share the sentiment.

“Unlike some of Nolan’s other films,” she wrote, “‘The Odyssey’ is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”

When casting was announced for the film, it was no surprise that culture wars broke out over the choice of Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy, with Elon Musk leading the charge.

Nolan responded, telling the Telegraph earlier this month before the film hit theaters, “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”

According to Wilson, Nolan’s race-neutral casting had “nothing progressive about it.”

“Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” she wrote.

Wilson zeroes in on the portrayal of Homer’s female characters in another major critique: “There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the [characterizations] in the poem.”

Where Charlize Theron’s Calypso ought to have been angry, funny, skilled in rhetoric and libidinous, according to Wilson, she’s “an unpaid therapist.” On Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, Wilson writes that the script “gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown.” And Zendaya’s Athena “turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience — not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess.”

And then there’s the human cost of war — the central theme of the film, and one that Wilson says contradicts Homer’s poem.

“The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world,” she writes. “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it — a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar — but Nolan doesn’t.

“The film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing.”

Since Nolan announced “The Odyssey” back in December 2024, various versions of the poem have been in high demand at bookshops and libraries — especially the only English version written by a woman: Wilson’s 2017 translation. Louise Brockett, spokeswoman and head of communications at W.W. Norton, told USA Today that domestic sales of Wilson’s translation surpassed a million copies this year.

Concluding her critique of Nolan’s “Odyssey,” Wilson says the release of the movie is “still an event to celebrate.”

“In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities,’ translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.”

Nolan spent $250 million making “The Odyssey,” and on opening weekend the film brought in a total of $264.1 million worldwide, according to studio estimates.

When Nick Antosca was a kid, he didn’t like having good dreams.

“With good dreams, I’d wake up and think, ‘Well, that didn’t happen’ and be disappointed,’” he recalled in a recent video interview. “But with a nightmare I’d wake up with my pulse racing and think, ‘I’m OK, I survived.’ I loved nightmares.”

Chasing that excitement and “healthy” catharsis in his daily life, Antosca has built a career on telling crime and horror stories: “Channel Zero,” “The Act,” “Brand New Cherry Flavor,” “Candy” and “A Friend of the Family.”

His newest project is a 10-episode remake of “Cape Fear” for Apple TV, starring Javier Bardem as Max Cady along with Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson as Anna and Tom Bowden.

“I think everything I’ve done is kind of a psychological horror story about the characters and their relationships,” he says, noting that this is true of the best horror tales like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining” and “Cape Fear.”

Antosca was a fan of both the original 1962 “Cape Fear” starring Robert Mitchum and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake starring Robert De Niro. But he felt it was time for a modern revision, a Southern Gothic fever dream that reflects the complexities of life today.

“The terror in ‘Cape Fear’ is about the destruction of the family,” he says. The story was originally about Cady, a rapist released from prison stalking Sam Bowden, who had interrupted his crime and testified against him. In Scorsese’s version, Bowden had been Cady’s defense attorney who, knowing Cady was guilty, had hidden evidence about the victim’s promiscuity to ensure a conviction and long sentence.

The original features “an all-American archetype of a virtuous family pitted against a monster,” while Scorsese depicted a “broken and dysfunctional family and the monster is even more extreme, he’s like a swamp creature.”

“The previous versions of ‘Cape Fear’ are pretty cut and dry,” Antosca says.

The Bowdens are portrayed by Amy Adams as Anna, Patrick Wilson as Tom and Lily Collias as daughter Natalie.

(Apple)

The new iteration features a sexting scandal, social media eruptions and drones — “there’s more ways to terrorize a family in 2026 and the world is scarier today than it was before” — but that’s not what makes it feel different.

“In our version the truth is more complicated, the past is more mysterious and both the family and the monster are more complicated,” he says. “The truth is murkier and that feels current.”

In this adaptation, Anna Bowden had been Cady’s defense attorney, and he’s no longer an illiterate rube but a successful restaurateur who was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn son. After the trial, Anna scandalously married Cady’s prosecutor Tom; he became stepfather to her newborn daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) and they later had a son Zack (Joe Anders).

“The foundation of their happiness is Max’s suffering,” he says, adding that while the crime was local in the previous versions, Cady’s conviction had been a national sensation in this one.

On the surface, the Bowdens are a perfect family, but cracks are rippling with increasing intensity just beneath, a fragility that will soon be exploited by Cady.

“In the first episodes, the family is permeable and a threat could be coming from anywhere,” he says. “Even if in your gut you think it’s Max Cady, it feels like it’s seeping into the family from all different directions.”

When Cady is suddenly exonerated and set free, he shows up to insinuate himself in the Bowdens’ life. Anna, ironically, works for a nonprofit that seeks to exonerate the wrongly convicted.

“All the versions ask, ‘What would you do to protect your family?’ but this also asks, ‘If an injustice was done to somebody, then what are they justified doing in return,’” he says. “I don’t want the audience rooting for Max, necessarily, but I want to trick them into having sympathy for somebody they didn’t expect to have sympathy for.”

To pull that off, “Cape Fear” needed a star as charismatic as Mitchum and De Niro.

Antosca always dreamed of Bardem as Cady: “When I’d pitch networks before there was a script, I’d say, ‘Picture Javier Bardem in this role.’” But this time, his dream came to vivid life.

The two developed the character together, everything from the explanation for Cady’s Spanish background to his exposure to Santería and prison and his “mutated version of the real religion” to the tattoos adorning Cady’s body to an early scene with a panther and the idea of the “psychological jungle,” which inspired Bardem to incorporate a panther’s physicality into his movement and his eyes.

Antosca always dreamed of Javier Bardem as Max Cady: “When I’d pitch networks before there was a script, I’d say, ‘Picture Javier Bardem in this role.’”

(Apple)

“Javier also asked questions about Max’s emotional history that was useful in shaping his character,” he says. “We wanted to show a little more authentic vulnerability, which we see very much in the previous versions intentionally.”

To make this series, Antosca first approached Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who had initially developed the 1991 version. “They were incredibly generous and quite involved,” Antosca says. “They encouraged us to forge our own path.”

The one place they urged some fidelity to the past versions was in the score. “They said the Bernard Herrmann score is part of the DNA and feels like a character in both movies,” says Antosca, noting that Elmer Bernstein adapted the original in Scorsese’s version and Jeff Russo used the same starting point this time around.

Scorsese discussed episodes over FaceTime and Zoom, spending time dissecting a vicious fight scene while Antosca was editing it; shot in color but shown in black-and-white, the blood splattering may make you think of “Raging Bull,” but Antosca says the visceral violence was meant to call up “Casino’s” vise scene.

It may be nearly too much to handle, but Antosca is from New Orleans and says he found it easy to exploit the Southern Gothic sensibilities. “Everything is heightened in the Deep South and we were going for that energy, where something is adjacent to the real world but more saturated, sweatier, more feverish,” he says, noting that while the first episode is “cinematically pretty grounded and traditional, when the family gets shocked out of their comfort zone, things get a little crazy.”

That meant handheld cameras, flares, saturated colors, distortions, negative imagery and odd angles to reflect the growing sense of terror. Antosca promises that in the back half of the series, the show will get even wilder and more destabilizing.

“It just feels like there’s violence in the humidity in the South,” he says.

Subconsciously hearkening back to his childhood sleep experiences, he adds, “I wanted this story to feel like a nightmare that just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse.”

Cape Fear,” premiering Friday on Apple TV, is a 10-episode limited series remake of a 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of a 1962 film adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners,” and as in a game of telephone each subsequent version adds new material and moves a little farther from the original. (The credits to the series, created by Nick Antosca, note all previous sources and screenwriters.) Thirty-four years having passed since the last go-round, we are treated to such modern advances as catfishing, drones, deep fakes, social media and pushy true-crime podcasters.

In each iteration, a family is menaced by a recently released ex-con who blames one or more of them for his incarceration. Antosca fills his extra-long take on the material with complications and inventions; though the series is also chock full of borrowings from and allusions to its predecessors — you can hardly call them Easter eggs, lying there as they do in plain sight. (And sound: Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein‘s earlier scores share space with Jeff Russo’s new one.)

In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991. In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years. We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect. “Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.

The objects of Cady’s slow-boiling vengeance — seemingly — are married lawyers Tom (Patrick Wilson) and Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), sharing the position previously represented solely by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte in turn. Anna, who had unsuccessfully represented Cady, ironically works for an Innocence Project-type nonprofit, whose chief, Noa Toussaint (CCH Pounder), is only too delighted to fundraise on the back of Cady’s celebrity. Cady, claiming no hard feelings, insinuates himself into their world, apparently friendly, apparently helpful, so that it’s not always clear what’s sincere and what’s strategy. Is he a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or just a creepy, sometimes violent sheep? (“Killed his wife, didn’t kill his wife,” a minor character will volunteer, “he’s an arrogant bastard either way.”)

There are now two Bowden children in the picture, doubling earlier versions. Natalie (Lily Collias), Anna’s daughter from a previous relationship, is a good girl looking to go just a little bad, who feels unseen by her busy parents. Sad, sullen younger half-brother Zach (Joe Anders), unrecovered from a social media misstep, is acting more strangely than teenage boys usually do.

This is a cat and mouse — or cats and mice — melodrama, with customized stock characters given dark secrets and backstory traumas less as explanation than complication. (Good, bad, whatever, everyone’s got issues.) Cady, who has a prison-acquired brain injury — cue flashback, in black and white, naturally — suffers from headaches and hallucinations, reacting painfully to flashbulbs (a Chekov gun, I wondered?), seeing visions of his dead wife and son, whom he pictures grown. (He is sad about it, whether or not it’s his fault.) And is that masked woman in green he keeps seeing real or imagined?

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s all screwed together tight, even the pieces that stick out at weird angles. (Is there a reason to make Cady an apparently talented chef, other than to demonstrate his knife skills?) The actors fill their parts with feeling. Bardem gets the most, and most extreme attitudes, to play, whether cozying up individually to the Bowdens, threatening a groupie, undergoing a religious conversion, acting normal or being weird. Adams is low-key forceful as his primary opponent. (Tom’s comparatively weak character is underscored by his secret habit of microdosing LSD and a nothingburger flirtation with a colleague.) Collias is impressively real. The dialogue is well-crafted, the Southern atmosphere (Atlanta doubling Savannah, with Savannah here and there standing for itself) suitably oppressive.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to ask whether this story, even with its yards of extra material, could be told in under nine hours? The answer, most assuredly, is yes. And might it be better shorter? It might.

Not that I’ve ever been a fly on the walls of the executive conference or dining or washrooms where such deals are made, but I suspect the length has less to do with artistic necessity than A) the obscure economics of streaming and B) the not unrelated habits of viewers, who, to judge by questions I get asked, abhor a vacuum. A 10-episode series will put off the moment when they have “nothing to watch,” while the streamer gets to keep them in the ecosystem longer. “Cape Fear” is hardly the only series to which this applies. As I imagine the series will do well — mystery with a smattering of horror seems very much what the people want — more may be just the ticket for some people. Still, there’s a sense that the story has expanded to fill the space, with plotlines for all and crazy side trips (snakes! drugs!) in escalating levels of nuttiness.

That might be more feature than bug, but I can’t say I felt much of anything for the characters, or was concerned whether the Bowdens would emerge from their ordeals a stronger family. (Whatever the outcome, I’d say they have work to do.) Having been given only eight of 10 episodes to review, I’m interested, in a disinterested way, how this all will shake out, when the story finally moves to the Cape Fear River, and whatever final twists — that there will be twists, I am certain — an inevitably Action Packed Finale has in store.

The endlessly exploitable Spider-Man is back in “Spider-Noir,” a retro tale set in a recognizable New York in an inconsistent 1933 (to judge by a preponderance of cultural referents). There is a comic-book precedent for this version of the character, called simply the Spider, though research tells me that, costume and superpowers aside, he is different in nearly every respect. I don’t suppose that will be an issue for most of you.

Shot in “authentic” black and white, the eight-episode series, which premieres Monday on MGM+ channel and streams Wednesday on Prime Video, is something of a stunt, but one that offers a reasonable, (imperfectly) period-appropriate approach to the material. (Stylistically, it belongs to a later decade.) An available colorized version, which seems primarily a sop to younger viewers who refuse to watch anything in black and white, works less well, flattening and softening the image, making the special effects look less special, the expressionist photography less expressive and ordinary scenes more artificial. You can probably tell which I’d choose, but you do you.

Nicolas Cage, in his first live-action television role, plays Ben Reilly, a down-at-the-heels private eye, spiking his morning coffee with whiskey helpfully provided by his knowing secretary, Janet (Karen Rodriguez), and barely scraping by on the occasional divorce case. Five years earlier, as the Spider, he was a super-powered guardian of the people; but he gave it up after the love of his life was murdered on the Spider’s account. In this variation, she’s the one who told him that with great power comes great responsibility, that well-worn Marvel homily, quoted in this world as if it were the work of Abraham Lincoln and not Stan Lee. But Reilly, who calls himself a coward and claims to be no hero, regards his mutant abilities as “a part of me I wish never existed. With no power, there’s no responsibility.”

Naturally, in the Spider’s absence, things have gone to pot in Gotham. “The city’s a mess,” says Reilly’s best and only friend, unemployed reporter Joe “Robbie” Robertson (national treasure Lamorne Morris, keeping it real, relatively speaking). “The people could use a hero.”

“Well, I hope they find someone,” says Ben.

Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris) is a journalist and Ben Reilly’s best friend.

(Aaron Epstein/Prime)

Nevertheless, you will not be surprised that, much against his will, Reilly will fall into a web, tee-hee, of intrigue; involving the city’s bootlegging crime boss, Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson, serving a full Irish breakfast), whose superpower is that he has very nice hair; Silvermane’s sort-of mistress, femme fatale nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), a bird in a gilded cage; and Cat’s bodyguard, Flint (Jack Huston), who has gone missing. Nor will it shock you to learn that other super-powered entities will turn up, to give our hero — who soon enough will be swinging through town, somehow never losing the fedora perched atop his masked head — someone his own size to pick on him.

To coin a phrase, some are born super-powered, some become super-powered and some have superpowers thrust upon them, and in every case this comes with a serving of tragedy and trauma, for heroes and villains alike. If there’s a theme to “Spider-Noir,” beyond “make another Spider-Man show,” it’s this, and there’s a spine of sadness that runs through the series, its best and most depressing feature (and, taking “noir” at is word, fitting to the genre).

The photography and production design, achieved through whatever combination of backlot shoots, dressed locations, digital environments and black magic, work better and worse (though never bad) from shot to shot, but Alfred Hitchcock used background projections and model trains, and it’s nice to see Manhattan before those pencil-thin supertowers began polluting the skyline. (It’s the city as King Kong first knew it.)

The pacing can drag at times. The music goes everywhere but the represented period and characters quote lines from movies yet to be released. The writing and the acting boldly flirt with cliche and caricature, which, as the show is about 100% pastiche, drawn from films more than three-quarters of a century old, could scarcely be avoided and isn’t really a problem. (In a way, it’s the point.) You may spot a scene pinched from Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” narrative echoes of “Casablanca,” a line playing off James Cagney’s final words in “White Heat,” just off the top of my head.) But the overall what and why of the story is clever and the conclusion satisfying.

Cage, who voiced a different version of the “Spider-Noir” character in the animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” is a good choice for the weary gumshoe. (The series is about 75% detective story, 25% superhero) Metafictionally, he’ll bust out an Edward G. Robinson imitation, mouth Cagney dialogue sitting alone at the movies. But the main model is Humphrey Bogart, whose looks Cage’s recall more than a little; Bogart played Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the films most associated with those characters, whose mordant humor creator-writer Oren Uziel seeks to replicate here, with fair success. One can forget that Cage, who finds a middle way between doing a bit and playing a person, is a good comic actor, and not merely a weirdo.

Just over three years ago, the U.S. Air Force moved to cancel the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missile. ARRW had been in line to be the U.S. military’s first operational hypersonic weapon. Now, the program has not only reemerged from purgatory, with missiles being ordered for operational use, but a new variant is on the horizon. The “Increment 2” ARRW is set to feature an all-new seeker, which would give it a moving target engagement capability. A version of the AGM-183 able to strike enemy ships at sea could be especially relevant in a future high-end fight against China in the Pacific.

The U.S. Air Force is asking for just over $296 million to support work on the new ARRW variant in its 2027 Fiscal Year budget request. This money would fund “the design, test, and evaluation of Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) Increment 2 with terminal seeker and data link capability and other cost reduction production initiatives into ARRW,” according to official budget documents.

The Air Force’s budget documents also indicate that prior work has already been done that “integrated Air Force and DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] enabled system technologies into a prototype that demonstrated the viability of this concept to be fielded as a long range prompt strike capability.”

Furthermore, the “ARRW [program] designed, developed, manufactured, and tested, [sic] a number of prototype vehicles to inform decisions concerning ARRW acquisition, production, and leave behind capability,” the budget documents add. “ARRW Inc.2 adds enhanced capability.”

“FY27 [Fiscal Year 2027] plans to begin [ARRW] INC 2 technology efforts such as but not limited to integrating pre-planned product improvements, design, trade studies, hardware upgrades, facilitization, affordability initiatives, and testing,” the documents also note.

To take a step back quickly, ARRW is known as a boost-glide vehicle-type hypersonic weapon. Designs of this type use a rocket booster to get an unpowered glide vehicle to an optimal speed and altitude. The glide vehicle then detaches from the rest of the weapon and proceeds to its target along a relatively shallow flight path within the Earth’s atmosphere. The vehicle is also designed to maneuver along the way, sometimes erratically. The combination of speed, flight trajectory, and maneuverability creates particular challenges for opponents when it comes to spotting and tracking incoming glide-vehicles, let alone attempting to intercept them or otherwise reacting to the threat. It is this ability to pierce enemy air defenses and very rapidly strike very high-value targets that makes hypersonic weapons so attractive.

“The Air Force will employ units equipped with ARRW to provide an offensive, high-speed strike capability to destroy high-value, time-sensitive, land-based targets in anti-access/area-denial environments,” according to a report from the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Test and Evaluation that was released in March. “Launched from bomber aircraft, ARRW provides standoff capability to prosecute targets in a timely fashion.”

To date, the Air Force has disclosed plans to integrate ARRW onto its B-52 and B-1 bombers, but other aircraft could potentially carry these weapons, or variants thereof, in the future.

ARRW, in its current guise, is also understood to only be capable of engaging static targets. Adding a terminal seeker would open up the ability to hit targets on the move, including ones at sea. The budget documents do not provide any further details about what kind of seeker the Air Force is looking to add to the Increment 2 variant. Imaging infrared sensors, radars, or passive signal homing seekers – or some combination thereof – could be potential operations.

The extreme heat and physical stress that hypersonic weapons experience in flight, as well as the shape of the glide vehicle, would make integration of any seeker system of these more complex. It is worth noting that ARRW’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, is already developing an anti-ship-optimized version of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) short-range ballistic missile for the U.S. Army. A key element of the new PrSM variant is the addition of a multi-mode seeker system to enable engagement of moving targets. It is possible that some of that technology could be applicable now to work on the new iteration of the AGM-183.

A data link would also allow targeting updates to be sent to Increment 2 ARRWs in flight, helping to get it first to a general area where the enemy is, or at least believed to be, before its seeker takes over. That system would also need to be able to communicate under hypersonic flight conditions. Given the AGM-183A’s range, off-board platforms would be required for initial target detection and tracking. The weapon’s ability to close that distance very quickly does limit the time available for the target to try to leave the area.

The Air Force did demonstrate exactly the kinds of networks that would be required to close this extremely long-range kill chain in a simulated ARRW strike during Exercise Northern Edge 2021. The designated target was 600 nautical miles from the launch platform, a B-52 bomber. In that instance, no weapon was actually released.

Multiple ARRW flight tests have been conducted since then, including the launch of an AGM-183A with a live warhead from a B-52 flying from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam in 2024. As TWZ noted at the time, the Guam test sent clear signals to China. The Air Force has made no secret of how important it views the development and fielding of hypersonic weapons as part of larger preparations for a potential future high-end fight against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Pacific. This is further underscored by the fact that the mention of the “terminal seeker and data link capability” for Increment 2 of ARRW is actually contained in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) section of the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.

In the context of a major conflict in the Pacific, there would also be a very high demand for prompt, long-range anti-ship capability. The ability to conduct those strikes even in the face of dense anti-air defenses would be even more attractive for engaging very high-value vessels, such as China’s growing fleets of aircraft carriers or big deck amphibious assault ships. The PLA Navy’s (PLAN) combat fleets, overall, continue to grow in scale and scope at a prodigious rate, as well. This, in turn, has put additional emphasis on the development and fielding of new and improved anti-ship capabilities that can be air-launched, as well as employed from the maritime and ground domains, across the U.S. military in recent years. Increment 2 ARRWs could also offer another means to strike mobile, high-value targets on land, such as ballistic missile transporter-erector-launchers.

For its part, the PLA has been actively developing and fielding various types of hypersonic weapons, including boost-glide vehicle designs. Its ever-growing arsenal of traditional ballistic missiles now includes several air-launched types, including ones with nuclear and conventional warheads. The latter are widely believed to be capable of being employed against enemy ships, as well as targets on land.

To reiterate, a plan now to develop an Increment 2 version of ARRW is also just an important step forward for the program as a whole. As mentioned, the Air Force had previously moved to cancel work on the AGM-183 in 2023. The announcement followed a number of failed flight tests of what had been expected to be the first operational hypersonic weapon anywhere within the U.S. military. The explicit intent at the time was to shift resources to the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) effort. HACM is an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile that functions in a completely different way from ARRW.

In the years that followed, there were steady signs that the Air Force’s position on ARRW was changing and that it had not actually been axed in the end. Last year, it became clear that the service had rebooted the program when it requested funds to purchase missiles for operational use in its Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget. The Air Force ultimately received $362.15 million for the procurement of ARRWs in the current fiscal year, and is now seeking a little over $452 million to continue doing so in Fiscal Year 2027. How many of the weapons the Air Force has ordered to date, and how many more it plans to buy in the coming years, is currently deemed to be Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) that is not releasable to the general public.

Depending on how ARRW and HACM programs progress, the former could still be the first hypersonic weapon to enter operational U.S. Air Force service, with an Increment 2 version able to hit targets on the move following close behind.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

REALITY star Maura Higgins has asked former Strictly Come Dancing pro Karen Hauer to help her train for the US version of the show.

The Love Islander will start filming for Dancing with the Stars in America in July.

But she has already begun training in London with Karen, 44, who was axed from the BBC1 show this year.

An insider said: “Maura is a complete novice when it comes to dancing so Karen has kindly offered to show her the ropes and teach her the basics.

“Maura is determined not to be the first voted off so is giving it her all.

“She has her sights set on becoming a huge star in America.”

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Earlier this year Maura, 35, lost out in the final of the US version of The Traitors.

We revealed this week how Maura  is walking away from Love Island USA.

She revealed that she’s ready for a fresh start after three years.

Speaking to Vulture about whether fans would see her back on screens this summer, she said: “You won’t. I’ve done it for three years, and they’ll always be family to me, but I think it’s time to try something different.

“I’ve got amazing opportunities coming in the door.

“I think it’s time to say good-bye. But you know what? I won’t say forever.”

NBCUniversal has ordered a TV adaptation of the popular New York Times puzzle Wordle that will be hosted by Savannah Guthrie.

Jimmy Fallon, whose company is co-producing the show, and Guthrie announced the series pick-up Monday on NBC’s “Today.” “Wordle” will begin production later this year and debut on NBC in 2027.

Guthrie filmed the pilot episode for Wordle last fall in Manchester, England, where the series will be made as well. The project from Universal Television Alternative Studio, Fallon’s Electric Hot Dog and The New York Times, has been in development for two and a half years.

Guthrie said she learned the show was picked up in February and was set to shoot episodes in March. But producers delayed the start as Guthrie went on a hiatus for two months after the disappearance of her mother Nancy.

“They just stopped everything and said, ‘we will wait for you, of course,’” Guthrie said. “And Hollywood is a really tough business as you know, and I didn’t expect that.”

Guthrie returned to “Today” on April 6. Law enforcement officials believe Nancy Guthrie was taken against her will from her Catalina Foothills home on Jan. 31. The investigation into her abduction is ongoing.

Guthrie did not mention the situation with her mother’s abduction, but indicated her game show duties will be another step toward normalcy. “I’m just determined to put one foot in front of the other,” she told colleagues.

Wordle asks players to guess a five-letter word in six chances through a process of eliminating letters. An individual player’s performance in the game can be posted online without revealing the answer, as the colored tiles are shown without the letters.

Offered as part of a subscription to a bundle of puzzles on the New York Times web site and app, Wordle has been a major driver of digital revenue for the company. The New York Times said earlier this year that users solved the Wordle puzzle 4.4 billion times in 2025.

Wordle was created by Brooklyn, N.Y.-based software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021. After it became an immediate hit online, the New York Times purchased it for a price reported to be in the low-seven-figure range.