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Now, probably you're thinking this is no big deal. But the tires carry the weight of your car, and the pounds per square inch (PSI) of air in them impact handling, braking, and safety. And low air pressure in your tires can also cost you. A 2014 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found that low pressure can lead to a 10% reduction in fuel economy. (Although, hold that thought, because how much tire pressure actually affects gas mileage isn't the biggest risk.)

To be sure your PSI setting is accurate, manufacturers recommend filling your tires when they're cold, meaning you haven't been driving on them. If that's not possible, then recheck the inflation the next morning at the coolest time of day, to make sure you're in the ballpark of the inflation mark recommended for your car. And FYI, using the inflation number on the tire sidewall is a terrible idea. That number isn't specific to your car make and model. Instead, use the pressure shown on the placard inside the driver's door. 

The safety hazard of a low tire is greater than the mileage ding

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First off, we just said that if the temperature drops by 20 degrees overnight, the pressure in your tires will likely fall by roughly 2 to 4 PSI. Is that a huge deal? Well, it's not going to have a significant impact on fuel economy. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory 10% fall-off rate was for a tire at a scary 50% inflation. However, as we'll get into, there are several other risks to squishy tires.

Back when the Feds used to study stuff, in 2008, the National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA) looked at whether running tires on pure nitrogen rather than the air you typically get from a compressor would reduce pressure loss. How come? Because on this planet, most of what we breathe and inject into our car's tires isn't oxygen; it's 78.08 percent nitrogen, 20.95 percent oxygen, and 0.93 percent argon. But nitrogen leaks more slowly, so if somehow we could roll on nitrogen-filled tires, we'd be better off — NHTSA found running only nitrogen reduced the pressure loss by 35%.

Unfortunately, you're not going to find nitrogen at the gas station. And while a four PSI drop in air pressure overnight may not have that much of a ding on fuel economy, the friendly folks at retailer Tire Rack caution that a tire that's underinflated just six PSI could lead to tire failure. And they're not alone. Consumer Reports also says an underinflated tire can lead to a softer ride, make the car "wallow," and possibly lead to a tire blowout.

Low tire pressure leads to greater tire wear

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Americans are chronic under inflators, but we are getting better, kinda. See, a 2011 NHTSA study found that the advent of Tire Pressure Monitor Systems (TPMS) has greatly improved our attention to sagging rubber. Overall, in a look at 6,103 cars with and without TPMS, they found that 12.4% had tires that were 25% or more under the manufacturer's recommendation. But sifting finer, looking at cars equipped with the sensors, that number fell to just 5.7%.

Here's the rub(ber — get it?!). AAA found that TPMS sensors often don't trigger until you've hit about a 20% loss in pressure. Now remember that both Consumer Reports and Tire Rack cautioned that lower inflation cam lead to poor handling and a possible blowout, and you know you can't just rely on the TPMS. Although underinflation may not hurt too much at the pump, it will cost you with as much as 25% reduced tread life, according to Tire Rack. And a separate 2019 finding in the journal Reliability Engineering and Resilience found a 15% reduction in tire life caused by rolling around on squishy balloons. 

Bottom line: A hot tire shows a higher pressure than a cold tire. But the bigger hazard to proper inflation is inattention. Check the pressure monthly, so you're not paying as often for new rubber, and you're safer on the road.   %!s()

“We actually wrote a sequel to ‘Dungeons & Dragons.’ We were hired to write it,” co-director and writer Jonathan Goldstein told ScreenRant. “I don’t know that it will see the light of day for a number of financial reasons. They’re expensive movies to make, but it’d be great fun to do it. We love that cast, and we think we wrote something that fans would like.”

Directed by frequent collaborators Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the 2023 release “Dungeons & Dragons” was met with enthusiastic praise, currently holding a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 92% audience score. However, the likelihood of any sequels being made became unlikely after the film underwhelmed at the box office, grossing $205.46 worldwide on an estimated $150 million production budget (shared between Paramount and Hasbro’s subsidiary Entertainment One).

The film, starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant, Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis, follows an unlikely band of heroes who must work together to find a lost relic.

Grant, who played the villainous con artist Forge, has previously spoken out about the film’s box office performance. Back in 2024, he told Vanity Fair: “It’s the biggest mystery to me — why didn’t anyone do market research before? I think that’s what went wrong: basically, people just thought, I don’t want to see a film about this game. Why had no one asked the public?”

Goldstein and Daley are known for directing comedies like 2015’s “Vacation” and 2018’s “Game Night.” Next up, they are set to direct “Renegades,” an action thriller based on a short story by Will Simmons. The two are also developing the next “Star Trek” film for Paramount.

Before “Honor Among Thieves,” the first live-action “Dungeons & Dragon” film released back in 2000, but was met with poor reviews, grossing $33 million worldwide on a $45 million budget. The two sequels, including 2005’s “Wrath of the Dragon God” and 2012’s “The Book of Vile Darkness,” premiered on Syfy. %!s()

Sound strange? It is! But Harrison Atkins’ sophomore feature, following 2015’s “Lace Crater,” is filled with indelible images that will get adventurous cinephiles talking. Atkins spoke to Variety after its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival about the ideas behind the film, finding truth in surrealism and the joy of reading reviews.

What was the genesis of the idea for this movie?

I had been trying to get a movie going on a bigger scale for a while in L.A., and the films that I write are kind of weird. This movie, I had done about 40 drafts of it and had actors attached. It was moving at such a glacial pace: two steps forward, one step back. I was having meetings where I’d find myself at brunch with frat guys who said, “Oh, this is such a cool script. Of course, we could never finance it.” And so I started to think, “Man, I’m finding myself developing this other movie and sanding down its rough edges to try to fit it into a box to attract money. What would I be making if I was making a film that wasn’t for sale at all?” And I started to find myself writing poetry. The poetry was sort of in the shape of a movie. The movie originally was a document that was eight pages long, and it kept expanding until it was 80-something pages, and it was a cross between a screenplay and a poem. I wasn’t totally sure how I could make it, but I kept noodling on it. Eventually it hit a boiling point where I realized that I had to make it or else I was gonna die.

Is there a truth you achieve by keeping things on the weirder side versus if you tried to cram these same ideas into a more conventional project?

I’m most attracted to cinema and formal language that reminds you that the medium is young. I really want to be evoking sensations or tones or moods that are inaccessible in other art forms that you can’t express in words. I think a lot about the Edward Hopper quote, “If I could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.” So I’m trying to tune in to something that I don’t have words for. I think that what we’re calling “weird” here is almost aberrant. I find the delicious, juicy sensation that I’m chasing at the intersection between opposing meanings.

I try not to overintellectualize where the stories are coming from or where the images are coming from. I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth in terms of whatever is happening with my imagination when this stuff emerges. But I do find in a recurring way these images that are associated with maybe the supernatural or maybe the off-kilter weird. This stuff seems to kind of invade my work either as a byproduct or by necessity, as I’m searching for this transcendent third thing that emerges from the friction between two things.

What ideas were you considering while you were developing this film that shaped the final product?

The film is, I think, maybe inherently a post-pandemic movie. There’s something about the alienation between characters, friends who drift into becoming strangers, people having wildly different experiences of reality, almost postmodern bubbles, that I think reflects how we’re all being increasingly siloed into our little internet feeding tubes. We all have our own programming that we’re watching, and increasingly, our intake is becoming so dissimilar from one another.

I think that there’s something about that condition of modernity that permeates the movie and, maybe in ways that are subintellectual for me, they just bled into my attempt to intuitively channel what was coming out, this more guttural shape of the writing process for me, which was allowing ideas to flow into the movie rather than trying to shape them into a more traditional narrative form, into something more a hero’s journey or a three act structure. I tried to not filter or shape what was coming in and just sort of let it show me its form. So I think to whatever extent it’s a mirror of reality or of the time that we’re in, some of that stuff is just emergent.

When you’re making a project like this that gets people talking, do you read and process some of the feedback that’s written about it online?

This idea of trying to make a film that can’t be put into words … It’s exciting to me to see how the world tries to put it into words because there’s inherent tension between those ideas. I find it really fun actually to watch how people attempt to describe the movie, because I don’t know how to describe the movie. To some extent I’m not even trying to describe the movie. So to hear other people grasp for those words, it’s a bit delicious to me. I don’t know that I seek out everything that everyone says about the movie, but I’m happy to read what people think. Sometimes I talk to people about what they think. It’s very fun for me to get that feedback.

Gersh is representing “Sour Minnows” for worldwide sales as it searches for distribution. %!s()