Good morning! I hope you enjoyed a lot of turkey. I did. I celebrated two Thanksgivings. Double the fun, double the calories. Anyway, welcome back from holiday break, and let’s get right into Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku’s daily round-up of gaming news and other stuff you might care about. And please, nobody mention turkey. I’m done with it until next year.
There Will Be Another Hitman Game, Says IOI
IO Interactive is currently wrapping up 007: First Light, which is set to launch in March of next year. While some are excited, there are plenty of Hitman fans who are worried that perhaps Agent 47 and his deadly franchise have entered extended retirement. That’s not the case.
“So of course there will be more Hitman,” IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak told Variety. “But right now, I think we need to get to the other side of this year and next year you’ll get more news about Hitman co-op, because I think co-op is a really, really good extension to the universe, and will introduce very interesting mechanics and combinations in World of Assassination. But we will, after that, be talking about the next Hitman — because, of course, there’s going to be a next Hitman.”
Zootopia 2 had one of the best opening weekends ever
Zootopia 2 hit theaters over the holiday weekend, and it broke a whole bunch of records on its way to earning an impressive $556 million. As reported by Deadline, Disney’s new animated sequel had the largest opening for an animated movie in history, was the fourth-biggest opening in movie history ever, and now also holds the record as Disney’s biggest animated movie opening. And that’s just some of the records it smashed.
A bunch of Xbox games are nominated for PlayStation Game of the Year awards
On Monday, Sony announced that fan voting for this 2025’s PlayStation Blog Game of the Year Awards was now open. And if you peruse the categories, you’ll notice that an awful lot of games are from studios or publishers owned by Xbox, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, The Outer Worlds 2, and Forza Horizon. In fact, four of the games nominated for the blog’s top honors, Best PS5 game of 2025, are from Xbox-owned studios. Video games in 2025 are so weird now, y’all.
Oops, some GTA 6 animations have leaked
A demo reel containing what appears to be GTA 6 animations was uploaded by an animator who worked on the highly anticipated open-world game. Fans quickly spotted the animations and started sharing them online. Of course, the video has since been deleted, but that hasn’t stopped the animations from spreading on social media and Reddit.
The clips show a man loading an electric bike into a bike rack and a woman jumping out of a pickup truck. Not the most exciting stuff, but fans who have been waiting for over a decade for GTA 6 will take anything they can get their hands on between now and the game’s launch on November 19, 2026.
ICYMI:
Watch this:
