WIRE Buzz: Chris Rock’s Saw fast tracked; Discovery seeks Contact with aliens; more

Our torturous wait for the next Saw movie won’t be so long after all. The studio behind Chris Rock’s fresh take on the horror franchise has reportedly cut (pun intended) the timeline for the new installment to appear in theaters, meaning we’ll be getting to see the movie half a year sooner.

Deadline reports that Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures have moved the premiere for the still-untitled film — the ninth in the long-running Saw series — from Oct. 23 of next year all the way up to May 15. That means we’re now less than a year away from seeing what the creative team means when they describe Rock’s all-new take on the franchise as “Saw on steroids.”

At last check, details on the film were still sparse, but it features a pretty killer cast (the puns just don’t stop) — including Samuel L. Jackson (Spider-Man: Far From Home), Max Minghella (The Handmaid's Tale), Marisol Nichols (Riverdale), and Rock himself. Veteran Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman is directing once more, from a script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, based on an original story conceived by Rock.

He'll reportedly play a police detective who, alongside his partner (Minghella), investigates a series of grisly murders, while Nichols will play their boss, Captain Angie Garza. Jackson will play the father of Rock’s character in a horror pairing that’s definitely got us … buzzing. 

The Discovery Channel is getting ready to make contact — or, at least, to get really serious about searching for it.

The channel has just lined up a new alien investigation series that, according to The Hollywood Reporter, will shadow an alien-hunting team “as they look for evidence needed to prove that extra-terrestrials have made contact with the human world.”

Simply titled Contact (with no overt relation to the Jodie Foster movie of the same name), the new show is reportedly being pitched as a "radical, new, and comprehensive approach” in the quest to spot offworld visitors by “bringing together millions of data points, credible eye-witness accounts, and declassified government reports.”

Staffed by a team of experienced academics, ex-government researchers, and journalists, the six-member group will follow former CIA targeting officer Myke Cole and conflict analyst Dr. Michael Livingston while compiling "declassified footage of fast-moving objects, patterns in social media sightings that coincide with seismic activity, or eyewitness accounts that connect to evidence from the past,” via THR.

Contact is slated to arrive on Discovery beginning Aug. 7, at 10 p.m. ET, with a second airing on Science Channel on Aug. 13 at 9 p.m. You can also check out the new series via the Discovery GO app.

It’s almost time (last pun, we promise) for Mark Millar’s next installment in the Chrononauts comics series, and Millar has just revealed that the new four-book batch of tales in his ongoing creative collaboration with Netflix will bend the rules of the calendar by dropping all of the issues on the same day.

Millar tweeted out the time-twisting news that Chrononauts: Futureshock will arrive all at once on his Twitter account — along with looks at all four covers:

Published by Image Comics, the new series will be illustrated by Eric Canete (Aeon Flux, Teen Titans Go!), with Pasqual Ferry (Heroes for Hire) handling the cover art.

Via The Hollywood Reporter, the idea of an all-in-one release is to do for comics what Netflix already is doing for TV: invite fans to binge by making everything available at the same time. The follow-up to Millar’s first four-issue Chrononauts series from 2015, Futureshock reportedly will “expand on the time-travel concept of the original as Corbin Quinn and Danny Reilly switch from investigating the past to traveling into the future — or, at least, trying to, because someone or something is preventing them from doing so,” THR reports.

Get your Chrononauts comics binge on starting this Oct. 30, when Chrononauts: Futureshock warps onto store shelves nationwide.