There's no escaping this hot entertainment trend coming to The Colony: Called The Escape Game, it's the biggest escape room outfit in the U.S., and it's about to become a little bigger with a new location opening in The Colony at Grandscape in January 2023.
The Escape Game was founded in 2014 and currently has 29 locations everywhere from vacation destinations like Orlando and Las Vegas to high-end retail locations like Westfield Century City in Los Angeles and Madison Ave in New York.
The company creates highly-produced sets and multi-room experiences, and participants engage in hour-long missions, where they're given clues to uncover and puzzles to solve -- designed by a team at The Escape Game’s headquarters in Nashville.
In Texas, they have locations in Austin, Houston, and Grapevine, which opened in 2017, arriving in the thick of the escape room trend in Dallas which has seen arrivals (and some departures) such as Escapology, Escape the Room, Dallas Panic Room, and Ultimate Escape Game.
More than $2 million has been invested in the Grandscape location, a 6,760-square-foot facility which will host five escape rooms with the following themes:
Prison Break
Playground
Gold Rush
The Depths
Special Ops: Mysterious Market
Grandscape, the 433-acre center in The Colony anchored by Nebraska Furniture Mart, keeps adding to its collection of entertainment options which include Andretti Indoor Karting & Games, Gamebox, an outdoor amphitheater, and a location of Cosm, an interactive venue set to open in 2024.
“We knew we wanted to be in a place that both locals and visitors loved spending time and we think we found it at Grandscape.," says Jonathan Murrell, co-founder and CMO of The Escape Game.
Hannah John-Kamen, Lewis Pullman, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Florence Pugh, and Sebastian Stan in Thunderbolts*.
For the longest time, keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe felt essential for movie lovers, even if not every movie lived up to expectations. But since the end of the MCU’s Phase 3 in 2019 and the ramping up of related TV shows on Disney+, the quality of the films and the disparate nature of the storytelling has vastly brought down how important each new movie felt.
That disposable nature is on full display in the new Thunderbolts*(the asterisk makes sense by the end), which tries to make hay with a bunch of characters who’ve only been seen briefly before. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Ava Starr, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) are each mercenaries who work for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Caught up in a scandal, de Fontaine attempts to have them eliminate each other, a scheme that results in them teaming up together.
Plans for revenge, which grow to include Yelena’s father Alexei, aka Red Guardian (David Harbour), and now-Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), are waylaid by the presence of Bob (Lewis Pullman), who shows up mysteriously during the main trio’s escape attempt. It’s the powers that Bob displays that become the main thrust of the film, with de Fontaine trying to harness them for her own good and the others joining forces to prevent him from doing too much harm.
Directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, Thunderbolts* does what most recent MCU movies have done: intrigue for a while before devolving into a confusing mess of CGI and poor storytelling. The filmmakers try for a light tone, especially through the comedic character of Alexei, but they never seem to find the right wavelength. The film takes a dark turn in its final hour, an interesting development that never reaches its full potential and comes to an abrupt end.
The collection of characters is as random as they come, with Yelena and Alexei last seen together in 2021’s Black Widow, John Walker last seen in the 2021 TV show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ghost last seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018. Bucky, aka The Winter Soldier, is seemingly meant to be the main connective tissue that casual fans will know and enjoy, but his storyline fails to make sense, especially when he shows up out of nowhere at a crucial point in the film.
Ultimately, the film never makes a case for audiences to care about anything that happens. They throw a bone toward relating it to Captain America: Brave New World, and, of course, hint at upcoming movies, but Phase 5 of the MCU (which started with 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) has been so disjointed that it feels like the majority of it will never be spoken of again. If it doesn’t matter to those making the films, why should the audience invest in anything the characters are doing?
Despite the subpar nature of the film, it’s cast very well. Pugh is a great actor who far outshines anything she’s asked to do. Harbour hams it up amiably, and Russell finds a way to make the most of his character. John-Kamen doesn’t get as much to do as others, but she has a nice presence to her. Pullman (who, weirdly, played another funnily-named Bob in Top Gun: Maverick) has a tricky role, but he makes it work. And Louis-Dreyfus understands how to toe the line between corrupt and wholly evil.
If the next phase of the MCU (which starts with the upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps) works, then the movies of the past few years will likely fade into oblivion. In the case of Thunderbolts*, it won’t be a big loss, as it showcases characters paired together for no discernible reason with forgettable results.
