WIRE Buzz: Sally Ride movie cleared for takeoff; Ruby Rose dials back Batwoman stunt work; more

An American who pioneered beyond just the space frontier is set to get a feature film biography. A new movie will explore the life and career of Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first female U.S. astronaut (as well as the youngest U.S. astronaut ever) to leave Earth’s orbit.

Collider reports that Emmy-winning Transparent creator Jill Soloway, who’s also adapting the upcoming Red Sonja movie, has signed on to direct the new film, simply titled Ride, for Lionsgate. Cassie Pappas (CBS’ Hostages, MTV’s Awkward) is writing the script, with Soloway, Cruella producer Kristin Burr, and independent film producer Andrea Sperling co-producing.

Ride’s NASA career was filled with milestones: Not only was she the first American woman in space (aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger); she also was the youngest, at age 32, as well as the third woman in world history (after the USSR’s Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya) to take on a space mission.

Ride passed away in 2012, leaving a pioneering legacy for NASA, which only this week revealed the new logo for Artemis — its upcoming female-focused lunar mission program. There’s no early word on a release date, nor on who’ll play Ride’s iconic part, but the film will “explore the life of astronaut Sally Ride and the legendary mission that led her to become the first American woman in space,” according to the report.

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In the wake of a serious stunt mishap on the set of Batwoman that required surgery to prevent possible paralysis, star Ruby Rose says that she’s “earned her stripes” when it comes to high-impact action scenes, and may be a bit pickier about which stunts she’ll tackle when The CW ramps up for the show’s second season. 

Speaking with Variety at the Australians in Film Awards Gala this week, Rose suggested she’ll be more selective in the future about finding the right moments to put her body on the line for the sake of art.

“Maybe I don’t have to do everything. You know — maybe there’s some that I can do, like, once or twice, and then … I think I’ve earned my stripes already; I’ve done so many stunts in so many projects that I know that I have to relinquish the control sometimes …”

Rose revealed earlier this month that she’d sustained on-set injuries while filming the first episodes of Batwoman, which is currently in its premiere season at The CW. We’ve already seen in the first three episodes how intense Kate Kane’s action scenes can get, and we’re just getting started: You can catch new episodes of Batwoman every Sunday at 8 p.m. ET at The CW.

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Google isn’t just getting into the gaming hardware business; it’s also diving head first into first-party games development for its soon-to-debut Stadia platform.

The tech giant revealed in a blog post that it’s opening its first-ever in-house games development studio in Montreal, with an emphasis on creating “exclusive, original content across a diverse portfolio of games in all your favorite genres,” adding that the goal is to complement the Stadia’s console-free approach by changing “the way games are made.”

Via Gamesindustry.biz, the Montreal studio is just the first in what Google intends to be a multi-studio development strategy, one that eventually will roll out more creative centers, presumably to give Google the kid of first-party gaming brands that Sony currently enjoys with titles like God of War, Uncharted, The Last of Us, and Horizon Zero Dawn, and Microsoft with Halo and Gears of War. “We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners,” Jade Raymond, VP and head of Stadia Games & Entertainment at Google, told the website.

So far, details are thin on what new gaming goodies Google plans to create in-house, but hopefully we won’t have to wait long to find out. Google will officially make its first foray into the gaming sphere when Stadia launches on Nov. 19.