Inspired by the super-popular anime and manga series Bleach, Type Soul is a Roblox game where players can roleplay as one of three main character races, each with unique abilities and progression systems. However, while the game offers an amazing experience, its complex game mechanics, races, and weapons can be overwhelming for new players. That’s where the Trello Board comes in.

What Is the Type Soul Trello Link?

The Type Soul official Trello board is your go-to destination for everything about the game. The developers update and revamp the game regularly to keep the experience fresh and fun for players. The Trello board is rich in detailed information, ranging from gameplay mechanics to guides and updates, to help players maximize their experience.

To remain up to date with these changes, the developers created a new Trello board, and it is named “Type Soul Info V2.” This one retains all the new mechanics, features, and strategies in an easily accessible manner to the community. The most amazing thing about this Trello board is that there is no complex verification process to see it.

Inside the Trello Board

The Type Soul Trello V2 board simplifies your gameplay. It provides step-by-step instructions for selecting your class: Soul Reaper, Hollow, or Quincy, and browsing the skill trees and the weapon systems. The board also contains more in-depth info on the game mechanics, which makes it easy for you to master raids, unlock strong Shikai, and get rare Essences.

One of the highlights is its item categorization, which organizes loot boxes and other items by rarity. In addition, the board links to useful game materials, and there is a Q&A section to answer all your questions about Type Souls. With its full-page size, this board is an essential guide for each player.

Also, make sure to redeem the latest Type Soul Codes to enhance your gameplay and gain valuable in-game items.

Type Soul Discord Link

The Type Soul Discord server is your gateway to the game world and its creators. It’s where you can chat with other players, exchange tips, and get the latest news and announcements. It’s also where you can ask questions, exchange tips, or find raid and event groups. Developers also post significant news and updates, so you never miss a step. Don’t miss this handy resource!

The 2026 Winter Olympics come to an end this weekend. This year’s Closing Ceremony theme is “Beauty in Action.” The event will feature appearances from musician and DJ Gabry Ponte, actress Benedetta Porcaroli, and ballet dancer Roberto Bolle. Alfredo Accatino, the ceremony’s artistic director, has promised the ceremony will “begin with lots of colors and end with a party.”

The ceremony will kick off today at 2:30PM ET on NBC and Peacock. An encore broadcast will air on NBC at 9PM Here’s everything you need to know to watch the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics Closing Ceremony. (And as we close out the Winter Games, here’s a look at the final medal count, too.)

How to watch the Closing Ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics

Date: Sunday, Feb. 22

Time: Airs live at 2:30PM ET; primetime re-air at 9PM ET

Location: Verona Arena, Verona, Italy

TV channel: NBC

Streaming: Peacock, DirecTV, NBC.com and more

Olympics Closing Ceremony start time

The ceremony will kick off at 2:30 PM ET on Sunday afternoon. An encore broadcast will also air on NBC at 9PM ET/PT.

How to watch the Closing Ceremony live for free

There are a couple of ways to watch the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 22. You can tune in live Sunday afternoon on NBC or stream live on Peacock, or catch the encore broadcast on NBC, which is available with DirecTV, Hulu + Live TV, and more.

Peacock is the streaming home of the 2026 Olympics.

While a regular Peacock subscription begins at $10.99 for a Premium Plan and goes up to $16.99 for the ad-free Premium Plus plan, you can get an ad-supported subscription for free if you’re a Walmart+ subscriber.

Walmart+ members actually get their choice between Paramount+ or Peacock included in their membership at no additional cost. A monthly subscription to Walmart+ costs $12.99, and an annual plan usually costs $98. But you can try the service out totally free. Beyond free Peacock, Walmart+ has additional perks like five free months of Apple Music, discounts on Cinemark movie theater memberships, free shipping and delivery on Walmart purchases, discounts on gas and much more.

Instacart+ subscribers are able to get an annual Peacock Premium plan (a $109.99 value) for free. After a free 14-day trial, Instacart+ plans cost $99/year, meaning you’ll save more on Peacock simply by subscribing to the delivery service, but you’ll get tons of extras, like free grocery and restaurant delivery and a free subscription to the New York Times Cooking app.

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DirecTV’s Entertainment tier gets you access to loads of channels where you can tune in to college and pro sports, the Winter Olympics and more. Channels include ESPN, TNT, ACC Network, Big Ten Network, CBS Sports Network, and, depending on where you live, local affiliates for ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC.

Whichever package you choose, you’ll get unlimited Cloud DVR storage and access to ESPN+’s new streaming tier, ESPN Unlimited.

DirecTV’s Entertainment tier package is $89.99/month. But you can currently try all this out for free for five days. If you’re interested in trying out a live-TV streaming service for football season but aren’t ready to commit, we recommend starting with DirecTV.

More ways to watch the closing ceremony without cable

You can watch the ceremony live or on demand on Peacock as well as on NBC.com, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC app.

For $11/month, an ad-supported Peacock subscription lets you stream live sports and events airing on NBC, including the 2026 Winter Olympics. Plus, you’ll get access to thousands of hours of shows and movies, including beloved sitcoms such as Parks and Recreation and The Office, every Bravo show and much more.

For $17 monthly, you can upgrade to an ad-free subscription that includes live access to your local NBC affiliate (not just during designated sports and events) and the ability to download select titles to watch offline.

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Who is performing at the Closing Ceremony?

Italian musician and DJ Gabry Ponte is one of the headliners. Other confirmed performers include Italian actress Benedetta Porcaroli and Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle. Expect to see another parade of athletes, the flag handover to the 2030 Olympic hosts from France, and the ceremonial extinguishing of the Olympic flame.

Where is the Closing Ceremony being held?

The 2026 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony will be held at the Verona Arena in Verona, Italy.

The Artemis 2 launch is edging closer as NASA has now set a target date for the 10-day mission to get underway. The agency is aiming to launch as soon as March 6 following a successful wet dress rehearsal on Thursday. The first attempt, which took place in early February, failed due to a hydrogen leak.

During Thursday’s rehearsal, NASA was able to fuel the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with more than 700,000 gallons of liquid propellant and complete two runs of terminal count — the final step of the launch countdown — at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. While there was a hiccup due to a loss of ground communications, NASA was able to move to a backup system before the regular comms channels were back in operation. The agency said engineers pinpointed the equipment that caused the problem.

“Following that successful wet dress yesterday, we’re now targeting March 6 as our earliest launch attempt,” Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA’s Moon to Mars program manager, said at a press conference on Friday. Glaze added that there’s still much that has to be done before launch, including an analysis of the wet dress, a flight-readiness review and work on the launch pad.

The four Artemis 2 astronauts are expected to go into quarantine later on Friday in preparation for the launch, which will mark the Orion spacecraft’s first crewed mission. It will be the first time in more than 50 years that a crew will travel around the Moon and it will be humanity’s furthest-ever journey into space. The astronauts will test Orion’s critical life support systems as a precursor to lunar landings.

Updated February 2026: We’ve added a new section on caring for down and some notes on Outdoor Vital’s Zero Stitch fabric.

What Does Down Fill Power Tell You?

The higher the fill power, the greater the loft. Down puffer jackets and sleeping bags keep you warm by trapping the warmth coming off your body, retaining it in air pockets between the down. A higher down fill power means the down has more loft, which means there are more air pockets, which means that more heat is retained. If everything else is equal, that means that a higher fill power garment will be warmer than one with a lower fill power.

Unfortunately, everything else is never equal. Fill power alone is not enough information to know how warm something will be. There is no direct correspondence between fill power and how warm a product will keep you, because there are many other factors to consider, like how much of that fill is in the product, how well it can expand within the baffles or down chambers, how well does the fabric stop the wind, and so on.

To know how warm a down jacket, sleeping bag, or comforter will be, you need to know at least one other number: the fill weight.

What Is Down Fill Weight?

Photograph: Tatiana/Getty Images

Down fill weight is a simple number. It’s the amount of down in the product, usually measured in ounces or grams. Using down fill weight and down fill power together can give you way to compare two items. For example, the relative ability of a puffer jacket to retain heat can be estimated by multiplying the fill power by the fill weight. This means that a 900 fill power jacket with 2 ounces of fill weight will be able to trap about the same amount of heat as a 600 fill power jacket with 3 ounces of fill weight. The big difference between them, and the reason they are priced differently, is the weight of each and the packed size.

In jackets, the weight difference isn’t huge. This is why some of our favorite puffer jackets are 600 fill power. When it comes to sleeping bags, though, things are different. Since there is a lot more down in a sleeping bag, the weight difference between equivalent amounts of fill power is more significant. Unless your budget is unlimited, you’ll want to pay attention to the warmth-to-weight ratio. How much warmth do you need, and how much weight do you mind carrying?

The one downside to down fill weight is that some manufacturers don’t list this. It sounds great to say your puffer jacket as 900 fill power down, but when you have to list that it only has 2 ounces of it, it sounds less impressive. Less reputable companies often don’t advertise the fill weight. We list fill weight of all the jackets we test.

Other Factors to Consider

Courtesy of REI

While down fill power and down fill weight together give us a way to compare items, there are other things to consider to get an idea of overall warmth. The third major factor is the baffles, the compartments that are built into the product. If you just sewed up a single piece of nylon as a shell and shoved some down inside, gravity and movement would push it all down near the hem in a matter of minutes. To avoid this, garment makers add baffles to keep the down in place. Baffle type and shape play a big part in how warm your jacket, sleeping bag, or comforter ends up being.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a pretty easy one, if you’re a fan of a certain major sporting event that’s been going on this month. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Olympics wrap-up.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Arrivederci, Milano Cortina!

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• DEAL, FLAP, HALT, THEM, GLAM, FADE, FLAM, THEN, THAT, CLAP, DEAR, CLOSE, CLOSED

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• FLAG, FLAME, MEDAL, ANTHEM, PARADE, ATHLETE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is CLOSINGCEREMONY. To find it, start with the C that’s two letters to the right on the top row, and wind around in the shape of a torch.

Advanced monitoring is becoming standard because modern facilities are judged on outcomes—air quality, uptime, safety, energy performance, and documented response—not on whether a checklist was completed last week. Ventilation and indoor air quality expectations are formalised through recognised standards, and newer editions increasingly emphasise controls, performance, and operations, which push organisations toward measurable, continuous data.​

The changing risk profile (visibility is now a liability issue)

Facilities today are dense systems: people, HVAC, access control, OT/IoT, and vendors. The risk surface includes invisible variables (CO₂/ventilation adequacy, particulates, VOCs, temperature/humidity excursions) and failure modes that don’t announce themselves during routine walkthroughs.

ISO 41001 frames facilities management as a management system aimed at the effective and efficient delivery of FM, supporting organisational objectives and consistently meeting stakeholder and applicable requirements—language that aligns naturally with continuous measurement and documented processes.​

Summary: Risk shifted from “obvious hazards” to “system behaviour,” and system behaviour requires instrumentation.​

Real-time data is an operational requirement (not a dashboard hobby)

Real-time monitoring creates a new operating model: detect → triage → respond → document. That shift matters because it reduces the time between anomaly and action, and it creates auditable records of conditions and responses (useful for regulated sectors and insurer scrutiny).

Where standards are explicit about ventilation and IAQ, the operational burden increases. ASHRAE notes that 62.1/62.2 are recognised standards for ventilation and acceptable indoor air quality, and the 2025 edition highlights additional requirements and control sequences (e.g., demand-controlled ventilation control sequences, emergency control requirements, humidity control requirements).​

Summary: Once you’re accountable for continuous conditions, periodic checks no longer scale.​

Hardware built for harsh environments (define “rugged” with specs)

In industrial/institutional settings, monitoring often fails at the edges: vibration, dust, washdown, temperature swings, and physical impact. “Rugged computers” should mean measurable environmental tolerance—especially ingress protection.

IEC 60529 defines IP ratings with two digits: the first (0–6) indicates resistance to solid objects/dust, and the second (0–9) indicates resistance to liquids. In practice, this lets you specify hardware for the environment (e.g., dust-heavy warehouses vs washdown production areas) rather than buying consumer mini-PCs and hoping.​

When NOT to ruggedise: If the device lives in a conditioned IT closet, you may be paying for durability you don’t need; invest instead in redundancy, power protection, and serviceability.

Summary: Reliability is a system property, and edge hardware specs are part of reliability engineering.​

Environmental monitoring beyond compliance (IAQ as performance)

Facilities increasingly monitor more than temperature/humidity: CO₂ as a ventilation proxy, particulates, VOCs, and noise exposure. The point isn’t “more sensors”—it’s closed-loop improvement: correlate excursions with occupancy, HVAC modes, and outcomes (complaints, absenteeism, equipment faults), then adjust operations.

This aligns with how ASHRAE describes 62.1/62.2 as ventilation/IAQ standards and emphasizes updated requirements around filtration, controls, air cleaning, and operations/maintenance—areas where continuous sensing provides feedback rather than guesswork.​

Summary: Environmental data is only valuable when it feeds decisions, not when it fills storage.​

Integration with BMS (monitoring becomes control)

Monitoring is most valuable when integrated with building management systems (BMS) and incident response workflows. Without integration, you get alerts; with integration, you get controlled response: ventilation adjustments, escalations, and unified incident records.

A practical architecture pattern:

• Sensors (IAQ/asset/environment) → edge gateway → secure message bus
• Analytics/rules engine → ticketing/CMMS + BMS actions (where appropriate)
• Audit layer → immutable logs, retention policy, reporting

Summary: Standalone monitoring is reporting; integrated monitoring is operations.

Behavioural monitoring and policy enforcement (high value, high governance)

Behavioural detection (e.g., vape detectors) can reduce blind spots in low-visibility areas, but it introduces governance requirements: clear purpose, minimisation, retention limits, access controls, and documented response rules.

If you deploy behavioural monitoring, treat it like a policy-controlled safety system—not a surveillance toy. The technical bar should include false-positive management, tamper detection, and a defensible incident workflow.

When NOT to deploy: If you can’t articulate “what action follows an alert” and who is authorised to act, you’ll create noise, distrust, and compliance risk.

Summary: Behavioural monitoring is powerful—but only when paired with governance.

Data-driven maintenance (condition-based beats calendar-based)

Predictive maintenance is the economic engine behind monitoring adoption. If you can detect drift (fan performance, vibration anomalies, temperature rise, runtime patterns) you shift maintenance from “fixed schedule” to “based on condition,” reducing unnecessary work and preventing downtime.

Tie maintenance analytics to:

• Asset criticality tiers (what must never fail)
• SLAs (response time, uptime)
• Parts lead time risk

Summary: Monitoring becomes standard when it pays for itself via avoided downtime and targeted labour.

Compliance, documentation, and liability reduction (the audit trail is the product)

Standards-driven environments reward documented control. ISO 41001 emphasises consistently meeting the needs of interested parties and applicable requirements, which is easier to demonstrate when you have objective records of conditions, alerts, and responses.​

The defensible story looks like:

• “Here were the thresholds.”
• “Here were the readings.”
• “Here were the alerts.”
• “Here’s what we did, and when.”

Summary: In modern facilities, data isn’t just insight—it’s proof.

FAQ

What’s the difference between monitoring and a BMS?

Monitoring and alerts: A BMS can control building systems. Value increases when monitoring is integrated into BMS workflows, so data becomes action.

Do we need rugged computers for monitoring?

Only where the environment requires it, IEC 60529 IP ratings define dust/water resistance with two digits, helping you specify equipment for harsh conditions.​

What standards are pushing facilities toward continuous IAQ visibility?

ASHRAE 62.1/62.2 are recognised standards for ventilation and acceptable indoor air quality, and the 2025 edition highlights additional requirements around controls and operations that benefit from continuous data.​

How does ISO 41001 relate to monitoring?

ISO 41001 defines requirements for an FM management system to deliver FM effectively/efficiently and consistently meet stakeholder/applicable requirements, which aligns with measurable monitoring and documented response.​

Key takeaways

• Advanced monitoring is becoming standard because compliance and accountability increasingly require measurable outcomes and documented control.
• Rugged edge hardware should be specified according to environmental standards such as IEC 60529 IP ratings, not by vague marketing claims.​
• The real leap happens when monitoring integrates with operations (BMS + maintenance workflows) and produces audit-ready records.

The generative AI boom minted a startup a minute. But as the dust starts to settle, two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators. 

Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these hooks have their “check engine light” on.

LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup that uses AI to help students study.

“If you’re really just counting on the back-end model to do all the work and you’re almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn’t have a lot of patience for that anymore,” Mowry said on this week’s episode of Equity. 

Wrapping “very thin intellectual property around Gemini or GPT-5” signals you’re not differentiating yourself, Mowry says. 

“You’ve got to have deep, wide moats that are either horizontally differentiated or something really specific to a vertical market” for a startup to “progress and grow,” he said. Examples of the deep-moat LLM wrapper type include Cursor, a GPT-powered coding assistant, or Harvey AI, a legal AI assistant.

In other words, startups can no longer expect to slap a UI on top of a GPT and get traction on their product like they could, perhaps, in mid-2024 when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT store. The challenge now is to build sustainable product value. 

AI aggregators are a subset of wrappers — they’re startups that aggregate multiple LLMs into one interface or API layer to route queries across models and give users access to multiple models. These companies typically provide an orchestration layer that includes monitoring, governance, or eval tooling. Think: AI search startup Perplexity or developer platform OpenRouter, which provides access to multiple AI models via a single API. 

While many of these platforms have gained ground, Mowry’s message is clear to incoming startups: “Stay out of the aggregator business.”

Generally speaking, aggregators aren’t seeing much growth or progression these days because, he says, users want “some intellectual property built in” to ensure they’re routed to the right model at the right time based on their needs — not because of behind-the-scenes compute or access constraints.

Mowry has been in the cloud game for decades, cutting his teeth at AWS and Microsoft before setting up shop at Google Cloud, and he’s seen how this plays out. He said the situation today mirrors the early days of cloud computing in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Amazon’s cloud business started taking off.

At that time, a crop of startups sprang up to resell AWS infrastructure, marketing themselves as easier entry points that provided tooling, billing consolidation, and support. But when Amazon built its own enterprise tools and customers learned to manage cloud services directly, most of those startups were squeezed out. The only survivors were the ones that added real services, like security, migration, or DevOps consulting. 

AI aggregators today face similar margin pressure as model providers expand into enterprise features themselves, potentially sidelining middlemen. 

For his part, Mowry is bullish on vibe coding and developer platforms, which had a record-breaking year in 2025 with startups like Replit, Lovable, and Cursor (all Google Cloud customers, per Mowry) attracting major investment and customer traction.

Mowry also expects strong growth in direct-to-consumer tech, in companies that put some of these powerful AI tools into the hands of customers. He pointed to the opportunity for film and TV students to use Google’s AI video generator Veo to bring stories to life.

Beyond AI, Mowry also thinks biotech and climate tech are having a moment — both in terms of venture investment going into the two industries and the “incredible amounts of data” startups can access to create real value “in ways we would never have been able to before.”

Arrow Video has unleashed Excalibur and Westworld in new Limited Edition 4K releases. Are these restorations worthy of Camelot and Delos, or are we about to discover that even legends and lifelike androids can misfire in Ultra HD?

Excalibur

A lifelong passion project for the filmmaker John Boorman, Excalibur favors the legend of King Arthur over historical fact, drawing as much from the distinguished filmmaker’s aborted adaptation of The Lord of the Rings as from Thomas Malory’s sweeping 15th-century Le Morte d’Arthur. The results remain unique to this day, a beautiful and often bizarre triumph of production design and notoriously complex costumes, filled with earnest thespians early in their careers, among them Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson.

Taken as either fact or fantasy, it’s one hell of a story: The illegitimate child Arthur, raised humbly, reveals his true identity and divine right to rule by pulling the magical sword Excalibur from the stone. As king, he unites his people and defeats countless enemies, before treachery and betrayal brings his glorious monarchy to a bittersweet end.

A reasonable hit in theaters, the movie has only grown in popularity, largely for its sweeping adventure as captured in its hypnotic visuals. It’s long been a tough title to properly represent on video, with its heavy green mists and the specular highlights bouncing off hand-beaten suits of aluminum armor often reduced to a blocky mess. Arrow’s native 4K scan of the original camera negative is properly framed here at its proper 5:3 aspect ratio for the first time, bringing a newfound stability to the image while the Dolby Vision pass maintains the moody green and red filter effect that cinematographer Alex Thomson intended without blooming into the surrounding forest shadows. While the scenery might be bleak at times, the wide color gamut makes the most of what was shot, notably the lush greens.

The disc defaults to a lossless true mono audio track, and the best I can say here is that it gets the job done, conveying the necessary elements–dialogue, the clinking of swords, the gist of the music–but with no flex whatsoever. Significantly more engaging is the 5.1-channel remix, putting the action all around us without ever trying to sound like a Michael Bay joint. This option is also the best way to enjoy the needle drops by Carl Orff and Richard Wagner that gave the movie its distinctive, operatic feel. Either way, the dialogue is very obviously looped and the spotty lip-synch can be off-putting.

The movie is joined on Disc One by two new expert audio commentaries as well as an archival track by Boorman himself. Disc Two carries a menagerie of substantive new interviews with key talent; a new mini-documentary about Boorman; an archival making-of directed by “creative associate” Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), making its home video debut here; and quite a bit more.

As with some of Arrow’s most highly regarded limited editions, this release also includes an exclusive bonus disc that presents the film in an alternate form: a television cut. To be clear, this is not the fully reconstructed 1980s broadcast version that featured alternate takes, different camera angles, and occasional additional footage. Instead, it is a toned-down edit where sexual content and graphic violence have been adjusted to meet network broadcast standards of the era. With an SD tape from the Warner vault as a guide, this two-hour presentation was reconstructed from the new restoration, in 1080p at the theatrical aspect ratio. Welcome certainly, although not exactly the holy grail that fans have been seeking. (See what I did there?)

Excalibur – Movie Details

• STUDIO: Arrow Video
• FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray (February 24, 2026)
• THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR:: 1981
• ASPECT RATIO: 1.66:1
• HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
• AUDIO FORMAT: DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0, 5.1
• LENGTH: 141 mins.
• MPAA RATING: R
• DIRECTOR: John Boorman
• STARRING: Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Picture

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Extras

Where to buy: $59.95 at Amazon

Westworld

On a fateful evening in June of 1993, as I sat in a darkened theater surrounded by enthralled fellow ticket-buyers, I was distracted from the events unfolding onscreen as one nagging thought persisted: “Damn, Jurassic Park sure feels a lot like Westworld.” Whereas Jurassic Park began life as a novel that triggered a high-profile bidding war among several A-list directors before landing at Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton conceived Westworld very differently. Rather than adapting a book, Crichton wrote it directly as an original screenplay and went on to direct the film himself, marking his theatrical directorial debut in 1973.

For his first high-concept sci-fi theme park run amok, he envisioned the ultimate vacation destination for deep-pocketed guests, with three distinct environments populated by robots virtually indistinguishable from people. The cowboy-themed land has attracted a nice-guy lawyer/tourist (Richard Benjamin) and his cavalier buddy (James Brolin) for a week of gun-totin’ fun, but a series of minor malfunctions quickly gives way to deadly consequences, with no human likely to survive. Top-billed Yul Brynner has limited screentime yet steals his every scene as the menacing, black-clad Gunslinger, riffing slyly on his character from The Magnificent Seven.

Arrow’s new 4K/16-bit restoration serves up Westworld at a wide 2.39:1. Nighttime scenes and many of the interiors boast deep shadows that enhance the realism and the organic ‘70s vibe. There’s a lot of beige in the western locales but the trappings of neighboring Medieval World deliver more colorful pop. Grain varies quite a bit but it is definitely in evidence throughout. Director of photography Gene Polito didn’t employ a lot of sharp focus, but in closeups we can really see that crisp 4K sparkle.

The movie packs quite the array of audio options, starting with three original theatrical mixes. The disc defaults to the restored original 4.0 “stereo” (left/center/right/mono surround), along with 2.0 and 1.0, plus a more modern 5.1, all in DTS-HD Master Audio. The 4.0 is quite strong and surprisingly did not reveal much of a difference when we switched to 5.1, each offering an engaging if not jaw-dropping spread across the home theater. The major explosion during the jailbreak sequence lacks real impact across all included audio options, sounding more “.0” than “.1” in practice, with limited low-frequency weight. Meanwhile, Fred Karlin’s eclectic score does much of the heavy lifting, establishing the distinct atmosphere of each themed world before shifting into something far more ominous as the seemingly unkillable androids close in.

Westworld is a single-disc affair yet manages to round up some solid bonus goodies. Arrow corralled the two leads for new on-camera interviews, leading me to believe they probably could have gotten Yul too, if he was still with us. There’s also a producer interview, a middling audio commentary, an interesting “video appreciation,” and one of those terrific old behind-the-scenes featurettes created to promote upcoming films of the era. Well-intentioned but a tad incongruous is the pilot episode of the spurious, short-lived TV spinoff, Beyond Westworld.

As you can see from the photos, both titles arrive in premium packaging: A rigid box holding the plastic disc case with reversible sleeve artwork and a set of six photocards, a perfect-bound companion book and a two-sided poster, all surrounded by a cardboard slipcover. If you’re an Arrow fan, you already know how great these will look on your shelf, just like you know that either or both are destined to sell out.

Westworld – Movie Details

• STUDIO: Arrow Video
• FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray (February 24, 2026)
• THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR: 1973
• ASPECT RATIO: 2.39:1
• HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
• AUDIO FORMAT: DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.1
• LENGTH: 89 mins.
• MPAA RATING: PG
• DIRECTOR: Michael Crichton
• STARRING: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Norman Bartold, Alan Oppenheimer, Dick Van Patten

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Picture

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Extras

Where to buy: $59.95 at Amazon

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