Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Regent Opens America’s First Seaglider Factory

October 1 was a big day in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Regent Craft cut the ribbon on its 255,000-square-foot Seaglider Manufacturing Facility at Quonset Business Park — in front of roughly 600 investors, customers, and officials — and then put its 12-passenger electric Viceroy seaglider through a live float-foil-fly demonstration over Narragansett Bay.

The demo had drama. The first takeoff attempt was aborted — a 2-to-4-knot tailwind, the crew decided, wasn’t worth it. They waited about 15 minutes, tried again, and the Viceroy flew. It was the vehicle’s fifth test flight overall.

An aborted first attempt followed by a successful second is, honestly, the best possible advertisement. It showed a crew that respects weather minimums and a machine that flies when conditions are right. For a vehicle meant to carry paying passengers over water, that discipline is the product.

The physics trick

A seaglider isn’t quite a plane and isn’t quite a boat. It floats on its hull, rises onto hydrofoils, and then lifts off to cruise — but it never climbs high. It flies exclusively in ground effect, the cushion of air that forms between a wing and a surface. Ground effect is free lift, essentially: the same wing produces far more lift close to the water than it does at altitude.

The payoff is range. Regent targets 180 miles (290 km) at 180 mph (290 km/h) for the Viceroy — roughly double what a comparable battery-electric aircraft could manage. Batteries are heavy and energy-poor compared to jet fuel; ground effect is how you make the math work without waiting for a battery breakthrough that may never come.

This is a different answer to the electric-aviation problem than Heart Aerospace’s X1, the world’s largest battery-powered aircraft, which just completed its historic 27-minute test flight. Heart is building a conventional airplane with better batteries. Regent is redesigning the vehicle around the physics. Both approaches are legitimate. Only one of them gets double the range for free.

The maritime shortcut

Here’s the part investors should underline. The Viceroy is certified as an IMO Type A maritime vessel — it falls under U.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction, not the FAA’s.

That is a very big deal. Aircraft certification is a decade-long, billion-dollar gauntlet. Maritime certification for a wing-in-ground-effect craft is a known, navigable path. Regent didn’t just find a physics advantage; it found a regulatory one. The company can iterate like a boatbuilder while its electric-aircraft competitors queue up for FAA type certificates.

The production targets reflect that confidence: 75 Viceroy vessels and 300 Squire drone variants per year out of the new factory. Rhode Island has committed up to $13M in incentives tied to 300 jobs. And Regent claims an order book north of $10B across six continents — a number that deserves the usual skepticism about order books, but still.

The Marines are watching

On September 30, the day before the ribbon-cutting, Regent announced a $5M Phase IV contract from the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. That brings the defense partnership to $19.25M total, covering operational testing in real sea states and real mission profiles.

Military interest makes sense. A fast, quiet, electric craft that skims the waves has obvious logistics appeal for island-hopping operations — no runway, no refueling infrastructure, minimal acoustic signature. And defense contracts fund testing that would otherwise burn venture money.

The order-book question

Let’s talk about that $10B figure. Order books at pre-revenue transportation companies deserve scrutiny — they typically mix firm orders, options, MOUs, and letters of intent into one impressive number. Regent’s spans six continents, which tells you the interest is real and global. What it doesn’t tell you is how much is refundable-deposit firm versus handshake-soft.

The number to watch is conversion: how many of those orders turn into deposits, then into delivered vessels. The Squire — the smaller uncrewed drone variant, with 300 units a year targeted — may actually be the nearer-term revenue story. Drone variants face fewer passenger-safety hurdles and can start generating cash while the Viceroy works through its operational proving.

None of this diminishes the factory. A 255,000-square-foot building full of tooling is a commitment you can’t fake with a press release. But factories consume cash, and cash comes from customers. The next twelve months will show whether the order book is a pipeline or a wishlist.

What it means

For coastal travelers: imagine Boston to New York, or Miami to the Bahamas, in a quiet electric craft that boards at a dock and cruises at 180 mph. No airport security theater, no runway delays. That’s the Viceroy’s promise — coastal routes too short for airlines to serve well and too long for ferries to serve fast.

For cities: seagliders need docks, not airports. A waterfront terminal is dramatically cheaper and faster to permit than a new runway. Coastal metro areas with congested corridors — the Northeast, Southern California, the Gulf — are the natural first markets.

For investors: the $10B order book is the headline, but the certification path is the story. A vehicle that reaches the market years before its FAA-bound competitors doesn’t need the best physics. It needs to be selling tickets while everyone else is still in testing.

Regent just opened the factory. The next milestone is the one that matters most: passengers, paying, over open water. The tailwind that day was 2 to 4 knots. The headwind — certification, production, competition — is stronger. But for the first time, there’s a building in Rhode Island where the answer gets built.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: ISEE and Holman to Scale Driverless Yard Trucks

The yard — that fenced-in world of trailers, containers, and beeping forklifts behind every distribution center — is having a moment. On October 2, ISEE and Holman announced a strategic partnership to scale autonomous yard trucks across North America, aiming at thousands of vehicles in the coming years.

ISEE, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, builds AI-powered autonomous yard operations. Holman is a global automotive fleet-services organization. The pairing is deliberate: ISEE brings the autonomy stack, Holman brings fleet leasing, upfitting, and management — the unglamorous machinery that turns a technology into a product a logistics manager can actually buy.

How the deal works

Customers will be able to deploy ISEE’s autonomy in three ways: on their own trucks, on trucks leased through Holman, or on autonomous-ready vehicles supplied by ISEE. Vehicles get retrofitted and integrated before delivery, so they arrive yard-ready rather than as a science project for the customer’s maintenance team.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Fleet operators don’t want to become robotics companies. They want trucks that show up, work, and get serviced. Holman’s role — leasing, upfitting, ongoing management — is what makes this a commercial offering instead of a pilot.

ISEE says the partnership is a response to customer demand for autonomy systems across thousands of vehicles in the coming years. “Thousands” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s a claim about pipeline, not deployment. But it signals where the company thinks the market is headed.

Why yards, not highways

This is the second big yard-automation story this week. Venti Technologies just unveiled plans for the first driverless truck fleet at a U.S. intermodal rail yard, with 130+ trucks across 8 sites by 2027. Venti and ISEE are attacking the same insight from different angles: the yard is where autonomy pays off first.

Think about it. A yard is a bounded, private, low-speed environment. The routes are repetitive. The traffic is mostly your own equipment. There are no pedestrians darting into crosswalks, no highway merges at 65 mph. And the economics are brutal in exactly the way autonomy fixes: yards run 24/7, drivers are expensive and scarce, and every minute a trailer sits waiting is money burned.

Long-haul autonomy — Kodiak’s driverless IKEA freight runs on Texas I-45 are the latest example — gets the headlines. But yard automation might get the revenue first. The technical problem is narrower, the safety case is simpler, and the customer is a logistics operator with a spreadsheet, not a regulator with a rulebook.

The fleet-services angle

Holman’s involvement is the genuinely new piece here. Most autonomy startups sell to early adopters and hope the market follows. Partnering with an established fleet-services organization flips that: it plugs autonomy into existing procurement channels, existing service networks, existing relationships.

Upfitting deserves a mention. Converting a conventional yard truck into an autonomous one isn’t a software update — it’s sensors, compute, wiring harnesses, and integration work that has to be done right, at scale, before the vehicle reaches the customer. Doing that inside Holman’s existing upfit operations is how you get from dozens of retrofitted trucks to thousands.

The competition is heating up

ISEE isn’t entering an empty field. Venti’s rail-yard announcement this week targets the same thesis — bounded environments, 24/7 economics — with 130+ trucks planned across 8 sites by 2027. The port and terminal automation market was estimated at $4.4B in 2026, heading toward $11.4B by 2036. That’s the prize everyone is circling.

The interesting split is between intermodal yards (Venti’s turf: rail, cranes, containers) and distribution-center yards (ISEE’s turf: trailers, docks, warehouses). Different equipment, different workflows, different buyers — but the same pitch: your yard never sleeps, so why should your trucks?

Expect the long-haul players to look sideways at this market too. Kodiak, Aurora, and the rest have spent years perfecting highway autonomy. Yards are the adjacent opportunity with faster payback and simpler safety cases. The next two years will sort out whether the market supports multiple winners or consolidates around whoever scales first. Partnerships like ISEE-Holman — tech plus distribution — are how you scale first.

What it means

For logistics operators: the yard-automation vendor landscape is consolidating around real commercial offerings. If you’re running a distribution center with a yard-truck fleet, the “wait and see” window is closing. Your competitors are about to run 24/7.

For investors: watch the partnership model. Autonomy companies that bolt themselves onto fleet-services incumbents may scale faster than those trying to build go-to-market from scratch. The technology is necessary; distribution is sufficient.

For everyone else: the trucks moving your packages around the warehouse yard are quietly going driverless. You won’t see it happen. Your delivery will just arrive on time, at 3 a.m., in the rain.

That’s the thing about yard automation. It’s not a spectacle. It’s a spreadsheet — and the numbers are starting to work.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Madrid Mapped for Spain’s First Robotaxi Service

If you’ve spotted a black van bristling with sensors crawling through northern Madrid lately, you haven’t imagined it. Twenty of them are out mapping about 25 square kilometers of the Spanish capital’s streets — and they’re laying the groundwork for Spain’s first robotaxi service.

The vans are WeRide GXR vehicles, operated by Uber, WeRide, and Avomo — the autonomous-vehicle arm of fleet operator Moove Cars Group. They’re working the neighborhoods of Alcobendas and Hortaleza in the city’s north, recording road signs, traffic flow, and driving habits. The goal: high-precision maps accurate enough for driverless cars to navigate them.

Mapping is the unglamorous phase of every robotaxi launch. Nobody writes headlines about lidar point clouds. But nothing rolls without them. The fact that twenty vans are out there now tells you everything about where this project sits on the timeline.

Spain wrote the rulebook first

Here’s what makes this more than a mapping exercise. On September 10, 2026, Spain’s Directorate General of Traffic (DGT) issued the country’s first national permit for Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicles under the ES-AV framework. It was also the first EU-wide approval of WeRide’s GXR platform.

That permit window runs through September 2028 — a generous two-year runway. And the partners’ target is ambitious: commercial robotaxi service on the Uber app before the end of 2026, with the first rides in the same northern neighborhoods the vans are mapping now.

For now, each mapping van still carries a trained in-car specialist. Full driverless operation awaits further approvals. That’s the standard sequence: map, test with a human aboard, then — only then — remove the human. Madrid is following it by the book.

Why Madrid, why now

Spain has been quietly positioning itself as Europe’s autonomy-friendly jurisdiction. The ES-AV framework gives companies a national-level permit path instead of the patchwork of local approvals that slow things down elsewhere. For a continent that has watched American and Chinese robotaxis from the sidelines, a clear regulatory lane is a competitive advantage.

The Uber connection matters commercially. Uber’s $1.25B robotaxi bet with Rivian targets American cities in 2028, but the Madrid project could put Uber’s first robotaxi rides on European roads years earlier. And WeRide is becoming the common thread in Europe’s autonomy story: its technology powers Switzerland’s first public robotaxi, which just started carrying passengers near Zurich. Different markets, same platform.

For travelers, the practical upside is straightforward. Madrid’s northern business districts and residential zones get a new mobility option integrated into the app millions already use. No new download, no new account — just a robotaxi option where a regular Uber would be.

Avomo and the fleet question

One name in this story deserves more attention: Avomo. As the autonomous-vehicle arm of Moove Cars Group, Avomo is the fleet operator — the company that will actually own, maintain, charge, and clean the vehicles. That’s the least glamorous job in the robotaxi stack and arguably the most important one.

The division of labor here is the emerging template for robotaxi launches. WeRide supplies the autonomy. Uber supplies the demand — millions of riders who already have the app. Avomo supplies the metal and the maintenance bays. Nobody has to be good at everything. Each partner does the thing it already knows how to do, which is how you get from a mapping fleet to a commercial service in months rather than years.

Fleet operations are also where robotaxi economics get decided. Vehicle utilization, charging costs, cleaning turnaround, minor repairs — the unsexy line items determine whether a fare in Madrid undercuts human drivers the way Iamo undercuts Zurich cabs. Avomo’s bet is that running driverless fleets is a business in itself, not just a support function. If Madrid works, expect fleet operators to become the most sought-after partners in every new market.

What happens between mapping and launch

The unglamorous work continues. The vans are building maps now. Next comes supervised testing with the in-car specialists, then regulatory sign-off for driverless operation, then the first commercial rides. Each step has its own paperwork, and Spanish regulators will be watching closely — this is the first national Level 4 passenger permit, which makes Madrid the test case everyone in Brussels will cite.

Cities should watch too. Alcobendas and Hortaleza are getting mapped because they’re the launch zone, but the permit is national. If the model works in northern Madrid, there’s nothing structurally stopping it from spreading to Barcelona, Valencia, or Seville.

The bigger picture

Two European robotaxi stories broke within days of each other: a live public service in a Swiss valley and a mapping fleet in Madrid’s north. Momenta’s European expansion plans add a third data point. Europe’s robotaxi map is filling in fast — and it’s being drawn first in sensor data, one black van at a time.

Keep an eye on those vans. In a few months, some of them won’t have drivers.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Switzerland’s First Robotaxi Now Takes Passengers

The Furttal valley, a string of commuter towns northwest of Zurich, got a new kind of taxi this week. It is called Iamo — short for “intelligent automated mobility” — and it is Switzerland’s first robotaxi service open to the public.

The service has been carrying paying passengers since September 28, and the news of its launch made the rounds on October 2. Three electric self-driving cars now serve roughly 100 designated stops across four municipalities: Boppelsen, Dänikon, Hüttikon, and Otelfingen. Riders book through the Iamo app. Each car seats up to three passengers and runs daily from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Four hours a day isn’t much. But for a country that regulates autonomous vehicles with a Swiss watchmaker’s caution, it’s a milestone worth marking.

The price is the real story

The fare structure is what caught my attention. Iamo charges a CHF 4.70 base fare plus CHF 0.38 per kilometer. That puts a 10-kilometer ride at roughly CHF 8.50. A conventional taxi covering the same distance around Zurich? Closer to CHF 44.

Read that again. The robotaxi costs about a fifth of a regular cab.

That’s not just a pilot project flex. That’s the economic argument for autonomy, stated plainly in Swiss francs. The economics of a vehicle that never sleeps, never tips, and never sits empty in a queue are fundamentally different. Switzerland is one of the most expensive places on Earth to catch a taxi, so it’s also one of the places where autonomy’s price advantage shows up fastest.

For travelers, the math is simple. If you’re staying anywhere in the Furttal valley — and that’s mostly residents, not tourists, for now — your airport-adjacent hop just got cheap. For cities, the math is bigger: predictable, low-cost autonomous shuttles could reshape what “served by transit” means in lower-density areas where running a bus every 20 minutes never penciled out.

Who’s behind it

Iamo is a joint effort by Swiss Transit Lab, the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, and Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). That last name matters. When the national railway co-runs your pilot, the goal isn’t a tech demo — it’s figuring out how driverless cars fit into a transit network that already runs on time to the minute.

The underlying technology comes from WeRide, which holds Switzerland’s first driverless robotaxi permit, issued in November 2025. WeRide has been quietly collecting European firsts; as we recently covered, American partnerships like Uber’s $1.25B Rivian deal get the headlines, but the Chinese autonomy firms are the ones actually deploying on European roads right now.

For now, a safety driver still sits behind the wheel of each Iamo car — standard practice for a public pilot in a country that doesn’t rush things. The roadmap goes further. Organizers plan remotely supervised automated minibuses next, pending approval from the Federal Roads Office (Astra). Minibuses, not sedans: that’s a transit-first mindset, and it’s telling.

The European robotaxi race is on

Zoom out and a pattern emerges. Momenta is plotting thousands of robotaxis for Dubai and Europe. EHang is expanding its pilotless air taxis into Vietnam. Now Switzerland has a public service and Spain is mapping Madrid for its own launch. Europe spent years as autonomy’s cautious latecomer. That era is ending.

Why does Switzerland matter specifically? Because Swiss regulators are famously deliberate. A public robotaxi clearing Swiss approval signals to every other European regulator that this is manageable technology, not science fiction. One small valley’s pilot could do more for European autonomy policy than a hundred closed-course demos.

Why a valley, not a city

The choice of the Furttal valley is smarter than it looks. This isn’t downtown Zurich — it’s commuter belt: villages where the train station is a bus ride away and the bus runs on a schedule written for someone else’s convenience. That’s exactly the gap autonomous shuttles fill best. Not replacing transit, but feeding it.

With SBB as a partner, the logic clicks into place. A hundred designated stops across four municipalities is dense coverage for a valley this size. The robotaxi becomes the first-and-last-mile layer for the national rail network — the thing that makes living car-free in Boppelsen actually workable. Swiss transit culture is built on connections that line up to the minute. If Iamo can slot into that choreography, it stops being a pilot and starts being infrastructure.

The 1-to-5-p.m. window is the giveaway that this is still early. Commuters need 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Expanding the hours is the real test — and probably the next announcement.

What to watch next

Three cars, four hours a day, ~100 stops. Those are pilot numbers, and Iamo’s team will need to grow all three before anyone calls this a service. The interesting milestones: whether Astra approves the remotely supervised minibuses, whether operating hours expand past the afternoon window, and whether the CHF 8.50 ride stays CHF 8.50 once the novelty wears off.

If it does, Zurich’s taxi drivers might want to start reading the fine print. The robots are already cheaper. They’re about to be everywhere.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Fun Things to Do in NYC This Weekend, Oct. 3–4: Food Festivals, Live Music and Rooftop Parties

New York doesn’t do quiet weekends. If you’re still figuring out Saturday and Sunday, here’s a lineup worth stealing: coffee and cider festivals, a pow wow in Prospect Park, a street festival taking over Atlantic Avenue, and a couple of rooftop parties to close out the night.

Saturday is already underway, and plenty is still on the schedule.

Saturday, October 3rd

The day kicks off early with the NYC Coffee Festival in Brooklyn at 9AM — coffee people, this is your morning. At 10AM, the Lenape Nations Pow Wow brings drums, dancing, and tradition to Prospect Park.

By noon you’ve got options: the Latin Food Fest uptown and Cider Feast at Industry City. Tacos or cider — or honestly, why not both if you plan it right.

Afternoon looks good too: NYC Day of Flow at Brooklyn Bridge Park at 2PM, the Creole Food Fest at Pier 3 at 3PM, and the Village Trip Concert in the Meatpacking District at 4PM.

Then the evening splits between two solid picks: the Perreito Rooftop Party at Elsewhere at 6PM, and Tootsie’s Video Vault at Littlefield at 7:30PM.

Sunday, October 4th

Sunday opens with the second day of the Lenape Nations Pow Wow in Prospect Park at 10AM — a genuine cultural experience and a great way to start the day.

At noon, two classics: the Harvest Festival on Randall’s Island and the Atlantic Antic on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, the massive street festival that draws crowds every year.

Afternoon keeps it going with Greenpoint StoopFest at 1PM in Greenpoint, then a pair of 3PM picks: Mister Sunday at Nowadays and Hot Honey Sundays at McCarren Park. At 4PM, Disco Tehran takes over Elsewhere.

Close out the weekend with laughs: Comedy + Music at Littlefield at 8PM Sunday night. A perfect landing spot before Monday does its thing.

For more ideas, check out our picks for last weekend’s festival-heavy lineup, the best happy hours in the city for a pre-game drink, and Oktoberfest events still running through the month.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: White Sox Sweep Astros for First Playoff Win Since 2005

The young core arrives

Rookie San Antonacci drove in two runs in Game 1. Colson Montgomery homered in his postseason debut — because of course he did. And Chase Meidroth's homer sealed Game 2 and the series. Five of Chicago's starters were rookies, and across both teams, eight rookies took part — a postseason record.

Think about that. The biggest stage, the brightest lights, the franchise's first real October moment in two decades, and the heroes were players who hadn't been born the last time the White Sox won a playoff series. (The 2005 championship team's youngest fans are now in their twenties.) There is something deeply satisfying about a rebuild that pays off all at once, in front of everyone.

The Astros, for their part, are no pushovers — a seasoned October program that has been in this position many times. Sweeping them, in two games, with rookies carrying the load, turns this from a nice story into a statement. The White Sox didn't sneak through. They announced themselves.

A wild-card round for the ages

The White Sox were the best story of the wild-card round, but they weren't the only one. The Yankees swept the Red Sox with an 18-2 run differential, a record for the current format. The Padres swept the Cubs. The Braves took down the Phillies in three, winning Game 3 6-2 on October 2.

Now the division series begin, all on October 3: White Sox vs. Guardians, Yankees vs. Rays, Padres vs. Brewers. Three ALDS/NLDS matchups, all starting the same day, with the White Sox-Guardians series carrying the freshest storyline in the bracket. Chicago's kids get no rest — but then, rest is for veterans. Rookies don't know they're supposed to be tired.

Records are falling everywhere this fall

It's worth pausing on what kind of sports autumn this is becoming. Arike Ogunbowale just dropped 45 points to smash the WNBA playoff scoring record, proving the record books are being rewritten across leagues. The White Sox join that trend: a 21-year postseason drought snapped by the youngest roster in the field.

And here's a thought for Chicago fans making October plans: between the baseball and the season's celebrations, the city — and New York too, with Oktoberfest season in full swing — is in full fall-sports-and-festivals mode. This is the good part of the year. Savor it.

What makes this one special

Baseball droughts are a special kind of suffering. They pass from parent to child like heirlooms. The 2005 White Sox championship is old enough now that an entire generation of fans has grown up on stories about it without ever seeing a sequel. That is what made this sweep land so hard: it wasn't just two wins. It was permission to believe again.

The rookie factor amplifies everything. When a veteran team wins, it's validation. When rookies win, it's a beginning. San Antonacci, Montgomery, Meidroth — these are names Chicago will be chanting for a decade if this core holds together. The front office bet on youth, and in the first October test, youth delivered.

There's also the matter of how they won. Two games, both decisive, against a franchise that knows October better than almost anyone. The 6-3 and 7-3 finals weren't flukes or squeakers. The White Sox outplayed the Astros in every phase across two nights, and the scores flattered nobody.

The practical takeaway for fans

If you're a White Sox fan, the only advice is: don't take any of this for granted, and don't let anyone tell you to "wait until" something. Twenty-one-year droughts end exactly like this — suddenly, all at once, with kids leading the charge. Enjoy the ALDS against the Guardians starting today. October baseball is the best television there is, and your team is in it.

If you're not a White Sox fan, there's still a reason to watch. Baseball is at its best when young talent explodes onto the national stage in real time, and this roster is doing exactly that. The Guardians will be a real test — the division series is where Cinderella stories go to be verified. Either way, it's appointment viewing.

What comes next

The Guardians await, and the ALDS is a different animal than the wild-card round — longer series, deeper rotations, less room for a hot two games to carry you. But the White Sox have already done the hardest thing: they proved the moment isn't too big for them. Twice.

Twenty-one years of waiting ended in two games. The kids did it. And somewhere in Chicago tonight, a father is telling his kid about the sweep the way his father told him about 2005 — only this time, the story isn't history. It's the present.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Sam Raimi’s Every House is Haunted Gets a New Studio

A Horror Project Finds Its Home

Some movies spend years wandering the development wilderness before finding the right studio. Every House is Haunted has been one of those projects — until this week. Deadline reported that 20th Century Studios has acquired the supernatural thriller from Netflix, ending roughly five years in development limbo at the streamer. Netflix picked up the original script back in 2021, and the film has been waiting for its moment ever since.

Now it has one. And the talent lining up behind it suggests this could be worth the wait.

The Raimi Factor

Producing is Sam Raimi, via Raimi Productions alongside Zainab Azizi. Raimi's name on a horror project still carries genuine weight — the man practically invented the modern horror playbook, and his instincts for supernatural material are unmatched. This move comes on the heels of his team's 20th Century Studios hit Send Help, so the studio-producer relationship is already proven.

Joining the producing ranks: Roy Lee, the veteran horror producer behind Weapons, and Andrew Childs (The Long Walk) for Vertigo Entertainment. Ian Rogers, the author of the source material, executive produces alongside Starlight Media. That's a production bench with serious genre credibility on every chair.

The Source Material Is a Gem

The film is based on Ian Rogers' acclaimed short story "The House on Ashley Avenue," from his Every House is Haunted collection. The premise, per Deadline: an insurance investigator tries to debunk claims that a couple's death was caused by a haunted house — until a psychic and the mysterious occurrences he witnesses with his own eyes challenge his skepticism.

That's a beautiful setup. The skeptic-protagonist is horror's most reliable engine, because the audience gets to be converted along with the character. An insurance investigator — a professional debunker, a man whose entire job is finding the mundane explanation — forced to confront the unexplainable is the kind of premise that writes its own tension. And grounding it in a single house, the Ashley Avenue house, gives it the contained, escalating dread that the best haunted-house films share.

New Directors, New Energy

Directing are Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, the duo behind Netflix's 2024 hit Don't Move — a film that topped the streamer's movie charts for two weeks. They replace previously attached director Corin Hardy and will revise the screenplay (the original script was by Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman).

This is a smart handoff. Schindler and Netto proved with Don't Move that they can build sustained, suffocating tension from a simple premise. A haunted-house thriller is exactly the kind of assignment that plays to their strengths: atmosphere, escalation, and the kind of scares that come from what you don't see.

Why the Studio Move Matters

Netflix's loss is theaters' gain

The project languished at Netflix for five years. At 20th Century Studios, it's a theatrical horror film — and theatrical horror is having a moment. Genre fans turn out for well-made supernatural thrillers on the big screen, and the studio clearly sees this as a theatrical play. That ambition alone changes the project's trajectory.

The horror ecosystem is thriving

October is proving it right now. Clayface arrives as DC's horror-tinged offering, and the seasonal appetite for scares extends well beyond Halloween — haunted-house attractions like Bayville Scream Park, returning with five haunted houses, show how deep the cultural hunger for a good fright runs. A well-crafted haunted-house movie with Raimi producing slots directly into that appetite.

Every House is Haunted has franchise bones

The title isn't just a film title — it's a short-story collection, a whole universe of haunted houses. If the first film lands, the material is sitting right there. Studios think in universes now, and Rogers' collection is a ready-made one.

What's Still to Come

Let's be honest about where things stand: no cast has been announced, no release date is set, and the project is in active development with a new studio — not yet in production. Industry talk will now turn to casting, and with Raimi's name attached, expect the announcement to draw real names. The film is officially on the move, and in this business, that's the hardest part.

Five years in limbo would have killed a lesser project. Every House is Haunted survived — and it survived by landing with better backers, sharper directors, and one of horror's defining producers. The release date is still TBA, but the haunting has officially begun. Keep the lights on.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Prime Intellect Launches AI Inference for Open Models

Who Controls the Pipes Wins

Announced October 3, 2026 — the freshest launch in this week's AI news cycle — Prime Intellect publicly launched Prime Inference, a serving platform for frontier open-source models. It is the serving layer of the company's open training stack, sitting alongside post-training tools like prime-rl, verifiers, and sandboxes.

The pitch is straightforward: two modes of serving. Serverless endpoints for variable demand, reserved capacity for sustained workloads. Both run on Prime's own GPUs across multiple datacenters — NVIDIA Blackwell hardware today, with Vera Rubin listed as coming soon.

But the launch metrics are what make this announcement land. Before going public, Prime Intellect says it processed nearly a trillion tokens per day internally — across RL rollouts, synthetic data generation, evaluations, and coding agents — with a near-zero tool-call error rate and 100% uptime since launch. Its GLM-5.3 endpoint is reported among the fastest on OpenRouter. This is not a pitch deck; it's a load-tested system being opened to the public.

The New Moat Isn't the Model

The 2026 AI story is quietly shifting. For years the industry fixated on who builds the best model. But there's a growing realization that the real leverage sits one layer down: who controls the pipes between models and users.

Prime Intellect's thesis is that teams should be able to train, evaluate, and serve their own models on their own stack — "own their intelligence" rather than depend on frontier providers. The technical details show what that takes in practice: an OpenAI-compatible API (point any OpenAI SDK at https://api.pinference.ai/api/v1), automatic failover across datacenters, cache-aware routing that uses host DRAM as a secondary KV tier for large prompts, and targets around 100 tokens per second. Wisevoter's launch coverage notes the platform serves GLM-5.3 on GB200 NVL72 hardware with OpenAI-compatible SDKs.

That last part matters. Inference optimization — cache-aware routing, dedicated Blackwell capacity — is where AI economics are being won right now, not just in model benchmarks. Every percentage point of serving efficiency is a percentage point of margin, and at trillion-token scale, those points are worth real money.

The Closed Loop

The deeper idea here is the closed loop. Prime Intellect isn't just selling inference; it's building an integrated compute, training, inference, and sandbox stack where production traces feed back into training. Serve the model, watch how it's used, fold the data back into the next training run. That's the flywheel that compounds — and it's the same pattern driving the industry's rush to squeeze more compute from existing power and the massive data center buildouts feeding the open-model ecosystem.

There's also a community angle that shouldn't be overlooked. Prime Intellect is backed by Founders Fund, Radical, NVIDIA, Intel, and AI researchers including Andrej Karpathy and John Schulman. In the open-source AI world, credibility is currency, and those names spend. The open-model community has been waiting for production-grade serving infrastructure that isn't controlled by the frontier labs — Prime Inference is a serious answer to that wait.

Why Tool-Call Reliability Is the Real Spec

Buried in the launch metrics is the number that matters most for where AI is heading: a near-zero tool-call error rate. That spec isn't about chatbots. It's about agents.

Coding agents, RL rollouts, synthetic data generation — the workloads Prime Intellect ran before launch — all depend on models that can call tools reliably, thousands of times in a row, without a malformed call breaking the chain. One failed tool call in a hundred might be fine for a demo. At a trillion tokens a day, it's a catastrophe. The fact that Prime load-tested on exactly these workloads suggests the platform was built for the agentic era from day one, not retrofitted for it.

The target of around 100 tokens per second is the other number worth pausing on. For interactive use, that puts it in the territory where an open model served on Prime's stack feels roughly as responsive as a closed API. And because the API is OpenAI-compatible, switching costs are low: point an existing SDK at a new URL and you're running. That's how you win developers — not with a migration guide, but with a one-line config change.

What to Watch

The open question is scale economics. Running dedicated Blackwell capacity across multiple datacenters is expensive, and the inference market is brutally competitive. Prime's advantage is vertical integration: the same stack that serves models also trains them, which means optimizations can flow in both directions. If the closed loop works — production traces genuinely improving the next model generation — that integration becomes a moat that pure serving providers can't easily copy.

For teams building on open models, though, the practical takeaway is simpler. A fast, reliable, OpenAI-compatible serving layer for frontier open models lowers the cost of independence. You don't have to choose between the convenience of a closed API and the freedom of an open model anymore. The pipes are getting built, and they're getting cheaper.

The Takeaway

The 2026 AI battle is moving from models to infrastructure — and inference is the new front line. Prime Intellect's near-trillion-token launch track record gives Prime Inference instant credibility, and its closed-loop stack points at where the industry's economics are heading. Own the pipes, and the models follow.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Broadway Flea Market Raises $1.49M for Charity

40 years of turning fandom into funding

This is not a new story. It is a very old one that keeps getting better. Since 1987, the Broadway Flea Market has raised more than $21 million. And the organization it benefits, Broadway Cares, has granted more than $300 million since 1988 to support people living with HIV/AIDS and other critical illnesses.

Those numbers are almost too big to feel. So think about what they buy: meals, medication, housing, emergency assistance — the practical scaffolding that keeps vulnerable people afloat. Every signed poster and vintage Playbill sold at those 63 market tables converts directly into that kind of help. Eighteen Broadway and Off-Broadway productions showed up this year — Hadestown, The Outsiders, Oh, Mary!, Wicked, and more — turning the event into a reunion of the people who make New York's stages run.

The indoor pivot deserves its own applause. Moving a street-scale event into a ballroom on short notice is the kind of logistical nightmare that usually ends in disappointment. Instead, it became part of the story: the theatre world, famous for the show-must-go-on ethos, simply put on the show. Inside the Hammerstein, warm and dry, the storm outside almost felt like a dare the event accepted.

A city that knows how to gather

New York has always understood the power of showing up. This week alone, the city is gearing up for Oktoberfest celebrations across the five boroughs, and holiday planners are already mapping out the best Christmas events the city will host this season. Add a record-breaking charity flea market to that list, and you get a picture of a city that treats gathering as a civic duty.

And the arts scene keeps delivering. Records are falling everywhere this fall — Arike Ogunbowale just smashed the WNBA playoff scoring record with 45 points. Broadway's fundraising record fits right into that pattern: a cultural community at the top of its game, using its moment to lift others.

What the money actually does

Broadway Cares has been at this since 1988, and its model is worth understanding. The money goes to the Actors Fund's social services and to hundreds of AIDS and family service organizations across all 50 states. It's one of the most efficient entertainment-industry charities in the country — a rare case where the people performing also do the organizing, the fundraising, and the giving.

The "Lost Boys" table record is a small story that tells the big one. A single table — one show's cast and fans — pulled in over $104,000. That is not a wealthy donor writing a check from a penthouse. That is a community pooling what it has, one signed item at a time, until the pile becomes life-changing.

This matters especially because HIV/AIDS fundraising doesn't get the attention it once did. The crisis has receded from the headlines, but the need hasn't receded from people's lives. Events like the Flea Market keep the pipeline of support flowing — quietly, joyfully, year after year, for four decades now.

The practical takeaway

You don't need a $30,000 London theatre adventure to be part of this. Broadway Cares runs fundraising events all year — the Flea Market in the fall, the Easter Bonnet Competition in the spring, and the iconic red buckets at theatre exits year-round. Every dollar lands where it's needed.

If you missed this year's Flea Market, mark the calendar for next fall's 41st. And if you were one of the thousands who squeezed into the Hammerstein Ballroom as the nor'easter raged outside — congratulations. You were part of the best year yet.

A tradition that keeps earning its keep

Forty years in, the Broadway Flea Market could have become a nostalgic routine. Instead, it keeps breaking its own records. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the theatre community treats generosity as part of the job description — and because New Yorkers, faced with a storm and a charity, will always choose the charity.

$1,487,927. Indoors. In a storm. On a Sunday in September. The show went on, and then some.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: 24 Jump Street Lands Dec 2027: Tatum and Hill Return

The Third Jump Street Movie Finally Has a Date

Thirteen years. That's how long it's been since 22 Jump Street hit theaters in 2014, and comedy fans have been waiting for a follow-up with the kind of patience usually reserved for concert presales. This week, Sony Pictures ended the suspense: the third Jump Street film is officially titled 24 Jump Street, and it lands in theaters December 10, 2027.

Skipping 23 entirely is, of course, a franchise running joke. When Neal H. Moritz announced the project in June 2026, the script's title page reportedly read: "It took so long we had to skip one." That's the Jump Street sense of humor in a nutshell — the franchise has always been in on its own joke, and the title is already doing comedy work before a single scene has been shot.

The Gang Is Back Together

The Sony slate announcement settled weeks of talks reporting: Channing Tatum (Jenko), Jonah Hill (Schmidt), and Ice Cube (Captain Dickson) are all confirmed to return. For a comedy built entirely on chemistry, that's the whole ballgame. Tatum and Hill's buddy-cop energy carried two movies; Ice Cube's perpetually furious Captain Dickson stole every scene he touched.

Directing is Rodney Rothman, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who co-wrote 22 Jump Street. Rothman wrote the screenplay with Hill and Meghan Malloy, and having a co-writer from the last film behind the camera suggests the tone will be protected. Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller return as producers alongside Moritz, Tatum, and Hill — the architects staying close to the building they designed.

Why This One Feels Like an Event

Comedy sequels have a bad reputation for good reason. Third installments especially tend to arrive tired. But a few things about 24 Jump Street suggest this could be the exception.

Tatum's endorsement carries weight

Back in a 2024 interview, Tatum called the third-movie script "the best script I've ever read for a third movie." Actors say nice things about their projects; they rarely say that. For a star who's been protective of this franchise — he and Hill produce it themselves — that quote is a genuine signal.

The Rothman factor

Rothman co-wrote 22 Jump Street, which means he was in the room where the franchise found its voice. A sequel directed by someone who helped build the tone is always safer than a hired gun. His Oscar pedigree (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) doesn't hurt either.

Thirteen years of anticipation is an asset

The long gap means something specific here. 22 Jump Street's end credits famously teased absurd possible undercover assignments — medical school, culinary school, space — and fans have spent over a decade imagining what comes next. The franchise's core joke has always been about sequels themselves. A third film arriving after thirteen real-world years of sequel-baiting has more material to play with than any writer could invent. No plot details are confirmed yet, and frankly, the speculation is half the fun.

The Comedy Landscape in 2027

Here's the honest industry context: big-screen studio comedies have had a rough decade. Audiences love comedy; they just stopped going to theaters for it. But the pendulum may be swinging. Franchise comedies with genuine star power and real craft behind them — the kind of event that feels bigger than a streaming night — have a lane again.

December 10, 2027 positions 24 Jump Street as a holiday-season crowd-pleaser, the kind of movie you take a group to between Christmas shopping trips. Counter-programming against the season's heavier fare has worked before, and a broad, silly, quotable comedy is exactly the antidote to prestige-season solemnity.

What We're Not Getting (and That's Fine)

For the record: the once-discussed Men in Black crossover, the famous "MIB 23" project, is dead. It's franchise history, not part of this film, and everyone involved seems happy about that. This is a pure Jump Street movie — Jenko and Schmidt, Captain Dickson, Lord and Miller's fingerprints, and a script its own star calls the best third-movie script he's ever read.

Some franchises should have stopped. This one just made us wait thirteen years and skipped a number. That confidence is earned. 24 Jump Street arrives December 10, 2027. Schmidt and Jenko are going back undercover, and we wouldn't miss it.