The trailer for The Eyes of Ghana is out as of Oct. 16, 2026, and it zeroes in on Ghanaian cinematographer Chris Hesse—the personal cameraman to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah—as he races to save an irreplaceable archive: more than 1,000 reels capturing independence movements across Africa in the 1950s and ’60s. With Hesse’s eyesight fading, the work of preserving, cataloging, and protecting those images becomes a literal race against time.

Backing the project is YouTube star IShowSpeed (Darren Watkins Jr.), making his producing debut. It’s a sharp left turn from the viral chaos of his livestreams to a sober, historical documentary—and it puts his massive audience behind a story that rarely gets a big-screen spotlight.

The film also traces the danger surrounding the material after the 1966 coup that removed Nkrumah from power, when historical recordings were reportedly at risk of being destroyed. Hesse’s mission isn’t just nostalgia; it’s about safeguarding a visual record of how independence was organized, fought for, and won on the continent.

“It is a great honor to be part of The Eyes of Ghana and help bring this extraordinary piece of history to the big screen. I felt a profound connection to Ghana when I visited this year, and learning about Chris Hesse’s work deepened my understanding of the country and its people,” IShowSpeed said in a statement.

One night in theaters

The documentary will play a special one-night theatrical event on Oct. 28, 2026, in participating cinemas across the United States and Canada. Tickets and local showtimes are available through the film’s official site.

In the New York–New Jersey area, listed Regal screenings include:

• Regal Essex Crossing (NY) — 6:35 p.m., 6:50 p.m., 7:05 p.m.
• Regal Deer Park — 6:40 p.m.
• Regal New Roc — 6:05 p.m.
• Regal Secaucus — 6:50 p.m.
• Regal Commerce Center — 6:00 p.m.
• Regal Lynbrook — 7:10 p.m.
• Regal Hadley Theatre — 1:00 p.m.

Showtimes can change; check the official site or your local theater for the latest listings ahead of the Oct. 28 event.

Inside Netflix, the new content chief’s first order of business isn’t a memo — it’s the greenlight board. With Peter Rice stepping in for Bela Bajaria, the decisions that shape what shows and movies make it from pitch to your home screen now run through a veteran who’s spent years balancing prestige and mainstream taste. That could mean fewer disposable titles crowding the carousel and more bets with a clearer point of view — the kind of shows that stick, the way The Queen’s Gambit did.

What could change

Rice inherits a global hit machine that’s also been dinged for feeling anonymous at times. The mandate isn’t volume — it’s identity. As Puck News framed it, the question is whether Netflix can sharpen its taste without abandoning the broad appeal that built its audience.

• Scripted series with a pulse — Expect pressure for a more distinctive stamp: creator-led ideas that still play wide, instead of lookalike thrillers that trend for a weekend and vanish.
• Movies with definition — Rice’s Fox Searchlight and Disney track record could help woo filmmakers who want a consistent identity and an audience that shows up. Netflix has tried prestige runs and crowd-pleasers; the next step is cleaner lanes for both.
• The theatrical question — Select Netflix films have hit theaters for awards pushes and events, but there’s no standard 45‑day window in place. Any change here would need alignment with co-CEO Ted Sarandos.
• Franchises and live events — Recognizable IP still turns a release into an event. Rice will also oversee the live slate that’s grown under Bajaria — think NFL showcases and the WWE deal — and weigh when exclusivity is worth the price tag.
• Global shows that travel — The international engine stays central: local hits that break out worldwide. Co-CEO Greg Peters recently pointed to strong viewership in India, while Sarandos underscored the importance of “big” titles that play across markets — execution, not retreat, is the theme.

The film play

Netflix has chased both awards heat and four-quadrant action, but the brand for its movies can feel scattershot. This is where Rice’s relationships matter. His years shepherding specialty films and large-scale projects could help land directors who want creative backing and a plan for how their movies reach fans — whether that’s a targeted theatrical pop, a global streaming moment, or both.

No standard 45-day theatrical window has been announced at Netflix.

On the franchise front, the math is similar: license big, build your own, or partner. Netflix has already seen how known worlds can supercharge awareness; Rice’s task is choosing which universes are worth expanding into series, films, and animation — and which are better left as one-offs.

Internationally, don’t expect a reset so much as a tune-up. Under Bajaria, the streamer proved a Korean thriller or a European crime saga can become a U.S. binge; recent earnings remarks from Peters and Sarandos again highlighted travel-friendly hits and stronger creative follow-through. That’s the bar Rice now has to clear — making the platform feel indispensable by turning more of those bets into bona fide moments, not just weekend spikes.

One thing he hasn’t done yet: set a new distribution policy. Netflix hasn’t announced changes to its release approach or theatrical windows, and any shift would come from Rice in concert with Sarandos.

At a Sony Pictures Television FYC panel in Los Angeles in mid-October, about five months after the finale, Antony Starr shut down the recurring fan question he’s been getting: can Homelander be redeemed? The exchange, captured from the audience and posted online, shows Starr recoiling before giving a blunt answer.

“F****** h*** man... Eeeck,” he says to people who argue Homelander is redeemable. “Hope you don’t have kids…don’t breed.”

The moment was filmed by the account @dawnyb, which shared four clips from the panel on October 15. The event gathered the show’s creative team and cast for awards-season Q&A.

• Eric Kripke — creator
• Jack Quaid — cast
• Chace Crawford — cast
• Phil Sgriccia — director

Starr has been consistent on this point for years, once comparing a Homelander redemption arc to “the shark from Jaws going vegan.” He’s said he wants viewers to grasp the character’s trauma and isolation — without ever rooting for him.

Season 5 by the numbers

Prime Video says Season 5 of The Boys was its most-watched season yet, averaging 57 million viewers per episode worldwide in its first 39 days. Across the same window, the full series reached about 69 million viewers, according to the streamer.

In the U.S., Nielsen measured roughly 968 million minutes per episode, which was about 19% below Season 4. Finale week still hit a season high of 1.07 billion minutes, indicating plenty of people kept watching — and debating — to the end.

Critics stayed largely positive, with Rotten Tomatoes scores in the low-to-mid-90s, but audience sentiment slid. The finale, “B**** and Bone,” now sits at 5.6 on IMDb from roughly 133,000 ratings, the lowest of the series and down from about 6.7 in May. Common viewer complaints focused on rushed pacing and a few minutes of Gen V crossover screen time.

Homelander, however, remained a villain through the final episode — exactly the endpoint Starr has long advocated. The clips from the panel were posted on October 15.

Midway through The Kardashians episode 3, Kim sits with comedian Nikki Glaser and pulls out a list of 50 traits she wants in a partner. By her count, the mystery man hits 55. Producers try to pry for names; Kim grins, stays mum, and takes a private call from him on camera. Then she sneaks in the wink everyone was waiting for.

“Funny I’m 44% British, if you know what I mean,” Kardashian said. “Let’s just say that every single box on my manifest list was checked.”

The math isn’t random. The 44 is Lewis Hamilton’s longtime Formula 1 car number, and the British champion—born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire—has been linked to Kim since February after nearly a decade of friendship. The pair went Instagram official in June 2026 with a carousel that included a bike-ride video together.

Earlier this month, Kim told The Times of London she’d rather not talk about the relationship. On the show, she keeps the details close, but the cheeky “44%” does the heavy lifting.

About that AI intro

Season 8 opens with credits built entirely by artificial intelligence: a glossy, glitching spoof of the family in a Calabasas kitchen, cracking jokes about tech, schedules, and stiff acting before the visuals start to warp. As the scene spirals, the effects get weirder:

• Khloé — an oversized, cartoonish eye
• Kim — a swollen, misshapen ear
• Kylie — a flicking digital tail

The gag ends when the real Kris, Kourtney, Khloé, Kim, Kendall and Kylie stride in to face their uncanny doubles. Viewer reaction has been split—some liked the self-aware swing, others found it awkward or just plain eerie—while Kim’s “44% British” line quietly steals the episode.

Episode 3 is now streaming on Hulu (also available on Disney+).

On the But Also With Michael and Asher podcast, Chloe Troast said the months after Season 49 left her in limbo — she was kept “on hold” over the summer — while hearing feedback from the Saturday Night Live creative team that made a return feel daunting. When the decision finally came down, she said, the dominant feeling wasn’t shock. It was release.

“And there’s some type of relief in that.”

The 29-year-old didn’t detail what was said to her behind the scenes, but she was frank about how it changed her relationship to the job. As she put it on the podcast,

“I was relieved to know that I wouldn’t then have to walk into a place that I was now deeply scared of.”

Troast described the odd split-screen of that moment: friends and the public had no idea she was out yet, even as writers and cast members reached out privately. She said the support came fast and hasn’t ended — she still performs live shows with SNL folks even after her exit.

Her hunch that she wouldn’t be back grew during the hold period, and the uncertainty around it became its own stress test. Getting the official word, she said, ended the waiting and the dread that came with it.

Season 52 shuffle

Behind the scenes, SNL also reworked parts of its staff ahead of the new season.

• Keri Powers became the sole head of the talent department, overseeing bookings for hosts, musical guests, and guest stars. She joined the show in 2014 after time at Paramount Pictures and CAA, and stepped up after Brian Siedlecki’s departure.
• Rebecca Schwartz, with SNL since 2015, was promoted to producer.

The cast moved around, too, with veteran faces staying put and several big changes elsewhere in the lineup.

• Departures: Chloe Fineman (after seven years), Martin Herlihy, and Bowen Yang.
• Returnees: Kenan Thompson, Colin Jost, Michael Che, and Sarah Sherman.
• Promotions: Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline moved up to the main cast.
• New additions: Grace Reiter (The Chair Company) and filmmaker Saidah Belo-Osagie.
• Not returning: Chloe Troast.

Season 52 premiered September 26, 2026.

Before stepping onto a Broadway stage for the first time, Joe Keery says the strongest push came from someone who knows that world cold: Sadie Sink. Asked about which Stranger Things castmates had stage advice, he told People that Sink — who played Max opposite his Steve — was the one in his ear.

“[Sadie] had some good words of advice and really kind of urged me to do it,” Keery said. “She thought I would have a nice time.”

Keery is now playing Trip Wyeth — the easygoing youngest son caught between his parents and older sister — in Other Desert Cities at the Hudson Theatre. He’s sharing the stage with an all-star lineup:

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus
• Allison Janney
• Ed Harris
• Lily Rabe

Sink’s encouragement comes with receipts. People notes she made her Broadway debut as a kid in the 2012 revival of Annie, later appeared opposite Helen Mirren in The Audience, and earned a Tony nomination in 2025 for John Proctor Is the Villain. Keery said he caught up with her in London ahead of her Romeo & Juliet opening, and he’s also been trading notes with Gaten Matarazzo, who’s starring in a West End revival of Rent.

What’s next

Keery is set for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday, October 26, appearing alongside Billy Crystal. Music remains in the mix too: as Djo, he released his third album, The Crux, in April 2025. He told People he has no immediate plans to do a musical onstage, but he isn’t ruling it out.

As for the superhero chatter, online speculation has linked Keery to possible MCU turns as Harry Osborn or Nova; none of it’s confirmed. He addressed the fan casting in February 2026, saying timing tends to sort itself out, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrived without him — leaving those rumors squarely in the “maybe someday” column.

The Broadway engagement is scheduled to run through January 17, 2027.

Tony Gilroy’s character drama Behemoth! is up first, fresh off a Centerpiece slot at the New York Film Festival on October 2. Searchlight Pictures releases it in theaters on December 4, 2026; the film runs about 125 minutes and is rated R.

Pedro Pascal plays Alex Serian, a former child prodigy who returns to Los Angeles to untangle family business while paying the bills as a Hollywood session cellist. He’s on screen in nearly every scene, and he started taking cello lessons before the project was even locked.

In Alex’s orbit:

• Olivia Wilde
• Eva Victor
• Will Arnett
• Hank Azaria

A heavyweight trio anchors the score at the center of the story:

• James Newton Howard
• Alan Silvestri
• Michael Giacchino

Two Pascal movies arrive just 14 days apart: December 4 and December 18, 2026.

Back-to-back Marvel

Avengers: Doomsday lands on December 18, 2026, reuniting directors Anthony and Joe Russo with the MCU for the first time since Avengers: Endgame. Filming has wrapped, and the Phase 6 tentpole pits a packed roster of heroes against Doctor Doom — played by Robert Downey Jr., a twist that sent fans into theory overdrive.

Pascal returns as Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic), continuing from The Fantastic Four: First Steps in 2025. The ensemble is crowded, with familiar faces and a few legends stepping in:

• Pedro Pascal — Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic)
• Robert Downey Jr. — Doctor Doom
• Vanessa Kirby
• Joseph Quinn
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach
• Chris Evans
• Chris Hemsworth
• Anthony Mackie
• Florence Pugh
• Patrick Stewart
• Ian McKellen

Todd Haynes’ De Noche

Next up in 2027 is De Noche, Todd Haynes’ 1930s Los Angeles noir romance, which he co-wrote with Jonathan Raymond. The project was first developed with Joaquin Phoenix before Pascal stepped in; filming took place mainly in Mexico starting around March 2026. It’s now in post-production with an R rating and no firm release date yet.

Pascal stars as Richard Rent, a volatile LAPD detective who falls into a forbidden affair with a boarding-school teacher played by Danny Ramirez. Targeted by the city’s political machine, the couple flees to the Pacific coast jungles of Mexico, where the romance only intensifies. It’s described as a frank, queer love story with noir echoes of Chinatown, and Ramirez has praised his on-screen chemistry with Pascal.

Secret Wars on deck

The year closes with Avengers: Secret Wars, arriving December 17, 2027. The Russos direct again with Kevin Feige producing; the finale is set to close the Multiverse Saga, reportedly pulling from both the classic comics and the 2015 run for Battleworld-scale chaos and a post-shake-up MCU.

Pascal is confirmed to return as Reed Richards, with the full Fantastic Four expected to play a major role and some reports even pointing to Franklin Richards. The cast should overlap heavily with Doomsday — including Robert Downey Jr., Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Anthony Mackie, and Florence Pugh — alongside a wider ensemble of legacy and multiversal characters. Final rosters will lock closer to release, depending in part on who makes it out of Doomsday.

Before he was on anyone’s shortlist, Christopher Abbott once slipped into a packed casting session without an invite and tried to quietly learn the sides. He told Rolling Stone Studio there were roughly twenty actors in the room — all of them, unlike him, actually expected to be there — when the casting director suddenly called his name and demanded to know how he got in.

“Who sent you? Who are you with?”

Abbott had no agent and no appointment. He says he edged closer to the table to keep the exchange from turning into a show for the whole room, but the moment had already become a public grilling. Whether he ever got to read wasn’t the point — the lesson in audition etiquette landed loud and clear.

From crash to Professor X

Cut to the present: Marvel has given Abbott the most official invite there is. At D23 in August, Marvel Studios confirmed he’ll play Professor X — Charles Xavier, the telepathic founder of the mutant team — in director Jake Schreier’s upcoming reboot of X-Men, now dated for May 5, 2028. The role has previously been played on screen by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy.

Abbott joins a young lineup of mutants and foes in the film:

• Sadie Sink — Jean Grey
• Kit Connor — Cyclops
• Samara Weaving — Emma Frost
• Inde Navarrette — Rogue
• Maya Boyd — Storm
• Adam Driver — Nathaniel Milbury

The casting caps a run that’s seen Abbott bring unnerving intensity to Possessor and Wolf Man, plus acclaimed stage turns including Death of a Salesman, after earlier TV work on Girls and The Sinner. Now he’s set to channel that steadiness — and edge — into Xavier when X-Men hits theaters May 5, 2028.

On the red carpet at AFI Fest on Oct. 22, Ray Nicholson didn’t pretend the comparisons are easy. Asked about growing up under Jack Nicholson’s legend, he admitted the weight of that name used to creep into the most basic acting drills.

“It’s so hard,”

he said of trying to learn the craft while the bar at home was three Oscars high. Early on, he found himself sizing up Meisner exercises against a five-decade career — a surefire way to freeze up. Now 34, Nicholson says he’s reset the scoreboard, zeroing in on one performance at a time and taking satisfaction from steady improvement.

The family resemblance isn’t exactly subtle. His unnerving smile in Smile 2 this year instantly sparked The Shining callbacks — a likeness director Parker Finn clocked, too. At home, there’s less mystique and more practical advice: Nicholson recalls his dad once praising a performance because the camera kept cutting back to him, a simple note that stuck.

WWII on the gridiron

Next up is a very different arena. Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl tracks four standout college football players who enlist in the Marines after Pearl Harbor, culminating in a makeshift Christmas Eve game on Guadalcanal in 1944 as they prepare for the invasion of Okinawa. The film is based on Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction book.

• Ray Nicholson — Tony Butkovich
• Nicholas Galitzine — John McLaughry
• Bill Skarsgård — Bob Bauman
• Tom Francis — David Schreiner

After its AFI Fest bow on Oct. 22, The Mosquito Bowl opens in select theaters Oct. 30 before streaming on Netflix Nov. 25.

Between setups on The Birdcage, Nathan Lane says a low-key visitor turned the set into a fan pilgrimage: Clint Eastwood had popped by for a quick trim, thanks to a stylist who worked on his movies. Robin Williams burst in with the update and, despite Lane being fully costumed in drag — “basically looking like Barbara Bush,” as Lane put it — insisted they go meet him.

“Clint Eastwood is here!”

Lane recalled that Williams assured him a fellow actor would understand the wardrobe situation and marched him to Eastwood’s trailer. They caught the Western icon just as he stepped out, hair freshly cut. Lane couldn’t resist a pitch about doing a Western someday. Eastwood, deadpan as ever, didn’t miss.

“Maybe for the school marm.”

The story came out at a SAG-AFTRA Foundation event on Oct. 19, where Lane was looking back on the 1996 comedy, in which Williams played Miami nightclub owner Armand and Lane played his high-strung partner, Albert.

Beyond the bit

Lane also talked about the way Williams looked after people. He said he felt protected and supported by his co-star while making the film, calling Williams intelligent, sensitive, and attentive on set. Lane has previously credited Williams with stepping in to deflect an uncomfortable question during a televised interview.

The glare of fame, though, wasn’t simple. Ethan Hawke, who worked with Williams on Dead Poets Society, has said on the Scene Stealers podcast with John Feitelberg that public attention followed Williams everywhere — into restaurants, cars, even on walks — and called the day-to-day reality of it “super complicated.”

Robin Williams died in 2014.

The chaos is concentrated at Slice Club, a small-town pizza joint that’s circling the drain while a gaggle of teenage employees try increasingly bonkers schemes to keep it alive. The trailer shows a disastrous “valet” idea, a car somehow ending up in a lake, a sketchy freezer experiment, and — yes — a parking-lot fight club. Keeping the ovens hot looks easier than keeping the doors open.

Shot like a low-stakes workplace doc, Minimum Wage leans into short, punchy episodes — about 12 and a half minutes each — that feel like security-cam footage with group-chat energy. The shop’s future hangs on the whims of its eccentric owner, and the kids wind up pleading for the business as much as they’re serving slices. It sits comfortably alongside Netflix’s mock-doc mischief tradition while carving out a snack-size format of its own.

The show spins out of American High Shorts, whose original Minimum Wage sketches racked up more than 30 million views across social platforms. Jeremy Garelick and Will Phelps shepherd the Netflix version, keeping the frantic, bite-sized pace intact.

Who’s behind the counter

• Grace Reiter — Grace: Returning from the American High ensemble; she also joined Saturday Night Live for its season 52 cast.
• Ryan Micho — Ryan: Seen in the trailer catching blame from the boss — the go-to scapegoat at Slice Club.
• Aidan Micho — Aidan: Pulled into that eyebrow-raising freezer stunt teased in the footage.
• Hyde Healy — Hyde: Also tied to the freezer fiasco thanks to an online claim mentioned in the preview.
• Julia DiCesare — Julia: Another alum of the original sketches, back on shift behind the counter.
• Randall Park — Mr. Sylvester: The anxious, eccentric owner whose doubts about the shop’s future threaten everyone’s paychecks.

Release details

Minimum Wage launches on Netflix Monday, October 26, 2026, with 14 episodes (about 12.5 minutes each) available at once.

Netflix ordered 28 episodes in total; the remaining 14 don’t have a release date yet.

In the first footage from I Play Rocky, a young Sylvester Stallone hauls his script around town while studio execs push him to hand the role to a bankable star. He won’t budge. As the trailer shows, that stubborn streak becomes the point.

“I play Rocky.”

Director Peter Farrelly shapes the movie as both a scrappy production saga and a personal portrait: the home-front push-pull with Stallone’s wife Sasha, the fraught bond with his father Frank Sr., and the chaos of mounting Rocky on a shoestring. There’s the brutal shoot schedule, and the then-new Steadicam that could either capture an all-timer of a sequence or blow the day.

Cast and characters

• Anthony Ippolito — Sylvester Stallone
• AnnaSophia Robb — Sasha Stallone
• Matt Dillon — Frank Stallone Sr.
• Jay Duplass — John G. Avildsen (director of Rocky)
• P.J. Byrne — Irwin Winkler (producer)
• Toby Kebbell — Robert Chartoff (producer)
• Tracy Letts — Sandy Maddox, a fictional composite of studio executives

Farrelly (Green Book) directs from a script by Peter Gamble, zeroing in on the moment when Stallone, with only a handful of small credits to his name, ties his fate to a character he refuses to surrender. The trailer leans into the nuts and bolts of a low-budget miracle: cramped sets, ticking clocks, and a crew gambling on new gear to nail an iconic shot.

Early reaction has been bullish. “A young Stallone fighting to get Rocky made has me hyped,” one viewer posted after the trailer landed. Another called it “the making of a legend, through color,” while a third summed it up: “Betting on yourself is the real underdog story.”

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and drew enthusiastic applause; it currently holds an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I Play Rocky opens in select theaters on November 6 before expanding nationwide on November 20.

When Marvel came calling about Mephisto, Sacha Baron Cohen says the pitch started with a sensitivity check. At a live Happy Sad Confused event at New York’s 92Y, he recalled the creative team — which he described as largely Black across producing and directing — explicitly acknowledging the history of antisemitic tropes that link Jewish people to demonic imagery before asking if he’d be comfortable playing the devil.

“I think for the Jews out there, sometimes we don’t feel seen,”

Cohen said of the exchange, which he called unusually considerate and rare in Hollywood, according to Variety’s account of the talk. He added that the care shown in that room mattered to him personally, not just professionally, and that the outreach felt like genuine recognition rather than box‑checking.

Cohen’s debut as Mephisto arrived in the finale of Ironheart on Disney+, a dramatic MCU turn far from his Borat and Ali G personas. The character had been teased for years across Marvel projects; here, the devil finally stepped out of the shadows to make an offer Riri Williams couldn’t refuse.

Inside the finale

• Dominique Thorne — Riri Williams accepts Mephisto’s deal to bring back her best friend.
• Lyric Ross — Natalie is resurrected, but Riri’s new dark veins hint at a cost to the magic.
• Anthony Ramos — Parker Robbins is defeated, then pops up mid‑credits seeking help from Zelma Stanton.

Season 2 status

As for more Ironheart, Marvel has left the door open on screen but hasn’t unlocked it behind the scenes. As of October 2026, Marvel Studios and Disney+ have not announced a Season 2 renewal, and there’s been no official cancellation either.

The six‑episode series was created by Chinaka Hodge, with Ryan Coogler and Zinzi Coogler among its executive producers. Hodge told Entertainment Weekly she’d welcome additional seasons and urged audiences to show support in a separate TVLine interview — statements of interest, not a production order or a date.

Asked on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast whether another big franchise might lure her after playing Wednesday Addams, Jenna Ortega didn’t hedge.

“I think after Wednesday, I’ll probably be off the TV for a while,” Ortega said.

She pointed to a childhood spent on sets — from Jane the Virgin to Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle — as the reason a long TV breather sounds appealing once Wednesday runs its course.

Ortega also noted that conversations about jumping straight into another franchise have been limited, and she isn’t chasing one; if the right thing appears, it appears. No dramatic exit, just a pause from TV after Wednesday.

Where Season 3 stands

Netflix confirmed Wednesday Season 3 finished filming on September 30, 2026. Production returned to the Dublin area, and a behind-the-scenes glimpse from Paris hints the new episodes will venture beyond Nevermore’s halls.

Season 2 left several cliffhangers in play: Enid turned into an alpha werewolf to save Wednesday and fled north, unable to shift back; Wednesday set off with Uncle Fester to find her; and Aunt Ophelia was revealed alive in Grandmama Hester’s basement, leaving a distinctly unfriendly message for her niece.

Season 3 mixes returning players with high-profile additions:

• Eva Green — Ophelia
• Winona Ryder
• Chris Sarandon
• Lena Headey
• Noah Taylor
• Catherine Zeta-Jones — Morticia Addams (returning)
• Luis Guzmán — Gomez Addams (returning)
• Emma Myers — Enid (returning)

Netflix has not announced a release date or episode count for Season 3.

On the latest episode of the podcast Happy Sad Confused, Jenna Ortega said she’s been deep into gymnastics conditioning and stunt work for her next movie, Nasty—and she’s thinking big about where this could take her. She joked that she’s been studying action icons while training and made clear she wants a real run at the action lane, not just a one-off.

“I think it’s me and Tom going neck and neck,” Ortega said, putting herself right alongside Tom Cruise.

Ortega added that she’s been looking to “the greats” for inspiration, name-checking Arnold Schwarzenegger, and admitted she still needs to queue up Pumping Iron before cameras roll. Coming off Wednesday and a streak of horror hits like Scream and X, she framed Nasty as her most physically demanding pivot yet.

The film

Nasty is a sports drama set in the world of gymnastics. The story follows a young athlete chasing an Olympic berth while facing down a formidable obstacle: her own coach.

• Jenna Ortega — starring
• Rose Byrne — co-starring
• Mary Bronstein — director
• Isabella Jarosz — writer; the script appeared on the 2024 Black List
• LuckyChap (Margot Robbie’s company) — producing; Robbie has not been announced as cast

Filming is scheduled for fall 2026. A release date hasn’t been set.

On a recent episode of The Overlap podcast, Sylvester Stallone didn’t hedge about where he stands on AI in filmmaking, calling it less a trend than a force that’s already arrived. He framed the technology as something the industry has to learn to live with, even if it ruffles feathers.

“It’s an avalanche. It’s just out of our control. If you don’t go with it, you will be trampled by it.”

Stallone said he’s willing to use AI in his own projects, despite knowing the backlash that can follow. He acknowledged the critics head-on and still argued that taking the leap is worth it.

“I would take that risk, even though you get blasted bombastically from the creative community. And their [complaints are] right!”

His comments come after he floated a movie idea centered on a half-human, half-AI character — a pitch he said drew fire from peers. He’s also talked about using AI to play a younger version of himself as Rambo, and warned that the technology could make it tougher for actors to build careers; he’s even told his daughter Scarlet Rose Stallone, who’s acting, to explore other avenues alongside it.

• AI isn’t optional, Stallone says — it’s “an avalanche.”
• He’s open to deploying it in films, including de-aging himself as Rambo.
• He accepts artists’ concerns, but believes resisting it outright is a losing game.
• He’s urged his actress daughter, Scarlet, to diversify her plans.

Open about the rest, too

In a separate conversation at New York’s 92nd Street Y with journalist Tracy Smith, Stallone also got candid about the pressures of physique in Hollywood and his past use of performance-enhancing steroids when chasing comic-book-level bodies on screen.

“Guys … you really think these guys are natural? If you’re trying to play a sort of superhero or a person that is above and beyond a normal guy, you can’t do it. It’s almost like putting on part of a costume.”

He said he stopped after his wife raised red flags that led to medical tests — checkups he credits with ultimately saving his life. And while he’s been frank about that chapter, his eye remains on what’s next: how to fold AI into the kind of big-screen storytelling he’s built a career on — up to and including a digitally younger Rambo.

Thirty-four days before she reported to prison in 2023, Elizabeth Holmes opened her home — and her camera-ready defenses — to filmmaker-comedian Nathan Fielder. The result, the A24 documentary You Can See Everything from Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim, has turned into the season’s curveball: it opened October 16 and is sitting at 98% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

On prediction market Polymarket, an October snapshot had the film running second in the 2027 Best Picture betting at nearly 25%. The front-runner, at roughly 45%, is The Odyssey — Christopher Nolan’s summer behemoth. These are traders’ odds, not Academy votes, and the Oscars haven’t announced nominations.

Universal says Nolan’s monster-slaying, storm-dodging take on Homer — with Matt Damon as Odysseus — has not only conquered multiplexes but also critics, sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Universal says The Odyssey has surpassed $1.7 billion worldwide — Nolan’s biggest box-office hit.

The challenger isn’t a standard true-crime recap. Fielder (of The Rehearsal) and Oppenheim followed Holmes — the Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors — as she and partner Billy Evans brought cameras into their daily life, apparently to put forward their side. Over three years, the project morphs from access doc to something more slippery, with Fielder’s probing of image-making and on-camera truth turning the film into a hall of mirrors.

Nolan’s next move

Nolan hasn’t announced his next directing gig. In July, he told NBC’s Today that making The Odyssey left his team spent and he expects at least three years before he directs another movie — not shocking after mounting an ancient epic on IMAX.

That downtime hasn’t stopped fans from floating a diabolical follow-up: Dante’s Inferno. Given how Polyphemus’s cave played like survival horror, Circe’s transformations induced queasy dread, and the trek toward the underworld chilled the air, you can imagine Nolan’s enormous-screen tactility tackling nine circles of Hell, a frozen Lucifer, and punishments that mirror earthly sins.

For now, it’s all speculation — and one very real race between a billion-dollar epic and a late-breaking A24 documentary with serious momentum.

On the latest episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Jenna Ortega said the project that finally cut through the noise after Wednesday was Klara and the Sun — not because it was bigger, but because it was different. After Wednesday’s breakout, she said most offers centered on yet another teen archetype. The Ishiguro adaptation, developed as a dystopian sci‑fi feature, promised a new lane.

“Lot of what's had come my way was just a lot of nasty teenager,” she said.

Ortega admitted she didn’t recognize the title at first. What got her attention was the author behind it — Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro — whose books became films like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. She praised the way he builds deceptively simple stories with weight behind them, and said that reputation pushed her to take a closer look.

“They told me about Klara and the Sun. I didn't know what that was. Said it was based off a book. They said it was based off an Ishiguro book. I went, ‘Oh, okay.’”

She also described an early conversation with director Taika Waititi that made the movie click for her. Ortega said Waititi’s take doesn’t mirror the novel beat for beat — and that those differences might make the film even more compelling. The goal, she added, was to step out of the teen-character box she’s been handed again and again.

After Wednesday

Looking ahead, Ortega told Horowitz she plans to step back from TV once her Addams run is done and carve out time for films.

“I think after Wednesday, I’ll probably be off the TV for a while. You know I had many years doing [TV]. I was bouncing from show to show as a kid and I want to leave time for new things.”

Production on Wednesday season 3 has wrapped, but there’s no update yet on a fourth season. For now, Ortega says the focus is on finding movie roles that stretch past the “nasty teenager” mold that kept landing on her desk.

Asked about Mike Flanagan’s next swing at The Exorcist while promoting her new poetry audiobook, Ellen Burstyn didn’t hedge. The 93-year-old, who played Chris MacNeil in William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, was talking to Variety when the conversation turned to Flanagan’s upcoming film.

“Isn't there enough already of the ‘Exorcist’ thing? It's enough already.”

Her remark wasn’t a review of Flanagan’s movie or a swipe at Scarlett Johansson; it was about Hollywood’s never-ending appetite for another possession. The rest of the interview stayed upbeat: Burstyn discussed Poetry Says It Better, the audiobook she narrates as a possible path to a long-shot EGOT (she already has an Oscar, a Tony and two Emmys) — a project her granddaughter encouraged.

Flanagan’s new chapter

The Exorcist: Martyrs is written and directed by Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep) for Universal, with a story that steers away from 2023’s Believer. At New York Comic Con, Flanagan said he’s taking the franchise in a new direction, blending a serial-killer investigation with supernatural horror. Early promo footage reportedly features a church massacre and a bleak, methodical case.

• Scarlett Johansson — Julie Miller, a New York detective
• Jacobi Jupe — Max, Julie’s son
• Chiwetel Ejiofor — a former prison chaplain
• Sasha Calle — Julie’s rookie partner
• Diane Lane — Julie’s mother
• Laurence Fishburne — a priest
• John Leguizamo — Father Sunday

Johansson’s Julie is still haunted by a satanic serial-killer case she closed 13 years earlier when a new murder drags her back into a conspiracy that spans generations. As the investigation deepens, a hostile presence edges closer to her son, Max.

The Exorcist: Martyrs is set to hit theaters on March 12, 2027.

After more than a decade, filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom is back with a follow-up to her breakout 2011 documentary. Miss Representation: Rise Up premiered in New York theaters on October 22, 2026, and zeroes in on how social platforms, algorithms and AI are supercharging harassment and misogyny online. Siebel Newsom wrote and directed the new film, which centers the voices of women and girls navigating toxic digital spaces.

The documentary argues that modern tech hasn’t just reflected sexism — it’s been actively used to bully, target and undermine women’s progress, with a particular focus on how these dynamics hit young girls. Alongside first-person accounts, the film threads in commentary about the incentives that shape the platforms themselves.

Who shows up

In addition to interviews with teens and parents, the film features appearances from political leaders and media figures who’ve weathered the same storm at scale. Among them:

• Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Nancy Pelosi
• Amy Klobuchar
• Jameela Jamil
• Gretchen Carlson

Siebel Newsom’s original Miss Representation (2011) put a spotlight on how women are portrayed — and too often sidelined — in politics and media, a film that went on to screen at Sundance. Since then, she’s also explored the flip side of gender expectations with her 2015 documentary The Mask You Live In. The new sequel shifts the lens to the tech era, tracing the pipeline from engagement-driven algorithms to real-world harm.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Siebel Newsom didn’t mince words about the culture inside Silicon Valley and the consequences for vulnerable users.

“The fact of the matter is we’ve let these guys go unregulated for too long, and they’ve prioritized profit over the health and wellbeing of not just women and girls, but any vulnerable population. And they’ve exploited women and girls for profit. We are the product, and they’ve done this intentionally.”

Miss Representation: Rise Up opened in New York on Oct. 22 and will roll out to additional screenings next. A U.S. streaming home has not been announced.

The viral “Avengers vs. Justice League” headline that rocketed around social this week didn’t come from either studio. It started with Havoc Crave, a parody account, which posted that Marvel Studios and DC Studios were in talks for a live-action crossover. There’s no announcement, no confirmation and no evidence from either company that such a movie is happening.

Comic-book crossovers between the two universes do exist — the classic Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man team-up among them — but nothing like that has ever made it to a live-action film. As of now, there’s nothing official tying the Marvel Cinematic Universe to DC’s film slate.

The “Avengers vs. Justice League” post originated on a parody account — not from Marvel or DC.

• The claim came from Havoc Crave, a parody feed, not a studio source.
• Neither Marvel Studios nor DC Studios has announced or even acknowledged talks about a live-action crossover.
• Crossovers have happened in comics, but there’s been no live-action Marvel/DC movie to date.

For now, the big mash-up to watch is still inside Marvel’s own sandbox. The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday is expected to pull in characters from the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and more — a mega-team-up that stays strictly MCU.

Secret Wars timing

Separately, Avengers: Secret Wars may be shifting its production calendar again. Industry watcher Daniel Richtman has reported that filming, previously expected to start in November, could slide to February 2027. Marvel hasn’t commented or confirmed any change.

The movie is currently dated for December 2027, and further production delays could push it into 2028 — but for now, that timing chatter remains unconfirmed rumor. The film is still on the calendar for December 2027.

On her October 22 stop by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Slovak pop singer Adéla Jergová watched a clip of Nicole Kidman raving about the pop tribute built in her honor — and just about melted. The Oscar winner had praised both the song and its wink-filled video during a September visit to the same show, a moment Jergová admitted still doesn’t feel real.

“I can't believe that,” Adéla exclaimed, visibly astonished by the recognition.

The timing couldn’t be better: Jergová’s single “Nicole Kidman” has pushed into the Billboard Hot 100’s top 10, powered in part by a music video that recreates some of Kidman’s most talked-about screen moments. The actress said the homage even jogged her memory on a few deep cuts.

• Moulin Rouge!
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Birth
• Babygirl

Kidman’s support hasn’t been confined to late night. She was spotted embracing the track at a Chanel event in Paris, and the song turned up again during October’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show — a full-circle pop-culture coronation for a tribute that started as a fan’s love letter.

Back to witchcraft

Kidman’s busy fall also included a return to a fan-favorite world: she and Sandra Bullock reunited for Practical Magic 2, directed by Susanne Bier. The sequel finds Gillian and Sally Owens facing down an ancient family curse once more, nearly 30 years after the original introduced the witchy sisters.

The movie opened at No. 1 in North America with $30 million in September and has crossed $105 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Reviews have been sharply split — Rotten Tomatoes currently shows a 36% critics’ score against a 90% audience rating.

For anyone planning a cozy occult double feature at home, the sequel hit digital platforms on October 13. You can rent or buy it on:

• Prime Video
• Apple TV
• Fandango at Home

In a very John Wilson move, The History of Concrete starts with him signing up for a workshop on writing Hallmark TV movies. He then takes that tidy, happily-ever-after formula and applies it to… concrete. What begins as a bit turns into a full-length excavation of the stuff under our feet and all the strange, everyday ways it shapes American cities and routines.

Fans of HBO’s How To with John Wilson will recognize the deadpan curiosity and street-corner serendipity. The feature wanders from infrastructure to urban rituals and the textures of daily life, finding comedy and poignancy in places most of us overlook.

Who’s behind it

This is Wilson’s feature directorial debut, backed by a team of notable executive producers.

• Josh Safdie — executive producer
• Eli Bush — executive producer
• Ronald Bronstein — executive producer
• Conor Hannon — executive producer
• Richie Doyle — executive producer

Release in the U.S.

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2026, where it drew praise from critics, and was later acquired for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Pictures. It began a limited theatrical run on September 18, 2026.

Now playing in select U.S. theaters via Magnolia Pictures; a streaming date has not been announced.

As of today, it’s in theaters nationwide on a limited schedule, with streaming plans still to come.

After a soft box office run, Masters of the Universe roared back at home. In its first week on Prime Video, the 2026 He-Man reboot racked up 1.17 billion minutes of viewing in the U.S., according to Nielsen, topping all streaming titles that week. But director Travis Knight says that pivot to the couch wasn’t an accident — it was the plan he didn’t expect.

“Its life on streaming was much more important to them than in theaters,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s not something I understood going into it. I wanted their faith in us as filmmakers and in the movie to be rewarded in a way that wasn’t to my hopes and expectations.”

Box office vs. streaming

The movie’s theatrical take — about $114 million worldwide — couldn’t touch its reported production cost, which industry reports put around $200 million before marketing. Once it hit Prime Video, though, the curiosity was clearly there, just not at ticket-buying levels.

Built on one of the ’80s’ most recognizable toy brands, the film paired a sprawling fantasy world with a steep price tag and the tricky task of updating He-Man for younger moviegoers. Reviews questioned the mix of winking humor and earnest mythology, and the nostalgia skewed older — not exactly the demo that rushes out on opening weekend.

Knight’s long road to Eternia didn’t make the outcome any easier. The project spent years in limbo before Amazon MGM revived it in 2024. On screen, Nicholas Galitzine plays Prince Adam and Jared Leto takes on Skeletor — marquee names that still couldn’t turn the theatrical run into a win.

Knight told THR he’s made peace with where the movie landed, even if it stung to watch the big-screen dream shrink to fit the living room. On streaming, at least, it became the hit Amazon was counting on.

Masters of the Universe is now streaming on Prime Video.

The big-screen plan packages the series into paired installments, rolling out as three double features that bring its most charged moments to full theatrical volume. The rollout, first reported by Variety, begins November 6, giving fans a chance to experience the show’s quiet stares and bench-side whispers alongside a crowd instead of a couch.

How the screenings work

• Episodes are presented in pairs as theatrical double features
• The engagement kicks off November 6
• Designed to turn the show’s slow-burn beats into a shared, big-screen moment

At the heart of Heated Rivalry is a queer romance wrapped in a hockey feud: Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov lock into a rivalry that doubles as a love story, where every look across the ice lands like a confession. The series has grown into a full-on fandom and recently took home Program of the Year at the Television Critics Association Awards.

Fans on X didn’t wait for puck drop before turning the theatrical news into its own event, mixing jokes with genuine glee over getting the show in cinemas.

“Best birthday present I could’ve asked for.”

Some are already thinking about the merch potential that comes with a theater run.

“Excited to see what popcorn container they come up with for this one.”

Others zeroed in on the format itself, basically framing it as a communal binge watch with stadium seating.

“Pairing episodes for a theatrical run is just a binge watch with assigned seating and overpriced snacks. November 6 can’t come soon enough.”

“Heated Rivalry hits theaters as three double features, so fans can now binge a TV show the old-fashioned way: by driving to it three separate times.”

And plenty of fans are simply ready for the in-theater energy that comes with watching this particular pairing play out on a massive screen.

“Releasing a series in paired theatrical episodes like this is a brilliant move for the fandom. The theater energy for Ilya and Shane is going to be absolutely unmatched.”

The first double feature hits theaters November 6.

Roughly $1 billion from Elon Musk is headed to Skydance, part of a fresh equity push as the newly expanded company trims costs and knits together a sprawling empire, Semafor reported. An anonymous source told the outlet the investment is one piece of a larger fundraising effort now underway.

The cash comes as Skydance moves through a massive consolidation phase that followed the October 6 close of its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to the report. Co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz are now dealing with a complicated to-do list that spans film, TV and streaming under one banner.

• Film studios: Paramount and Warner Bros.
• Streamers: Paramount+ and HBO Max
• TV networks: an extensive cable and broadcast portfolio
• News: two major divisions now under one roof

“Musk has invested approximately $1 billion into Skydance,” Semafor reported, citing a person familiar with the deal.

Semafor also noted that Paramount explored bringing Musk on as an equity investor in September. Musk has publicly praised the Ellison family and Skydance, and his arrival has already kicked up speculation about possible tie-ins with his satellite internet company, Starlink.

The move underscores a long-standing connection between Musk and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and David Ellison’s father. Larry Ellison put $1 billion into Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter (now X), invested in Tesla in 2018, and served on Tesla’s board. According to the report, he also personally guaranteed upwards of $40 billion in equity financing that helped power the recent studio consolidation.

Skydance’s market mood has been choppy: the company’s shares have slipped since it rolled out 471 million warrants that let longtime holders of Paramount Skydance PSKY Class B stock buy into the new entity. On the consumer side, the first noticeable pricing change since the takeover has been on Discovery+, which hiked subscription rates; other Skydance-owned streamers haven’t followed suit so far.

Skydance is continuing to line up additional equity investors as integration work continues, per Semafor.

In a new interview published October 21, 2026, comics mastermind Jonathan Hickman said he’s been inside the room on Marvel’s next team-up epic, reading drafts and consulting as Avengers: Doomsday takes shape. Hickman, whose storytelling has steered some of Marvel’s most ambitious comic arcs, described a behind-the-scenes process that’s been evolving as the studio resets its big-screen roadmap.

"I don't know that it's common knowledge, but I consult for studios and read almost all the movies that they're making while they're in development… It has been fascinating watching that change over the past two and a half years since I've been reading scripts for it,"

He pointed to a momentum shift when Anthony and Joe Russo returned to direct with screenwriter Stephen McFeely back in the fold — and when Robert Downey Jr. signed on to rejoin the MCU as Doctor Doom. Hickman called the creative team “very, very nice” to him and said he’s energized by what they’re building.

"Those guys are very, very nice to me and take care of me; I'm very excited about what they're working on."

Why Hickman matters

Hickman’s stamp on Marvel lore is hard to miss. His runs on Fantastic Four and Avengers culminated in 2015’s Secret Wars, a multiverse-shattering saga that destroyed entire realities and stitched the survivors into Battleworld under Doom’s iron fist. The movies aren’t confirmed to follow those beats, but Hickman’s experience mapping massive crossovers makes his perspective unusually relevant to where the MCU is headed.

What’s locked in so far

• Robert Downey Jr. — returning to the franchise as Doctor Doom
• Directors — Anthony and Joe Russo
• Screenwriter — Stephen McFeely
• Release — Theatrical, December 18, 2026

Meanwhile, chatter around the follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars (due in 2027), is heating up. A report relayed by ComicBookMovie cites industry scooper MyTimeToShineHello claiming Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen could reprise Professor X and Magneto. That casting talk is unconfirmed by Marvel Studios.

For now, Marvel’s next big swing arrives first: Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters December 18, 2026.

After a review by the Golden Globes category committee, Michael won’t compete as a musical/comedy this season. Gold Derby reports the committee turned down Lionsgate’s submission and shifted the biopic into the Globes’ drama fields, reasoning that while the film features major performances, the songs don’t primarily drive the plot — a key requirement under the Globes’ musical definition. That move puts the blockbuster on a collision course with likely drama heavyweights, including The Odyssey.

• Best Picture path — now in Best Motion Picture — Drama, not musical/comedy.
• Lead actor slot — Jaafar Jackson moves into Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama.
• Supporting races — unchanged; the Globes don’t split supporting categories by genre, so names like Colman Domingo remain unaffected.
• Appeal window — Lionsgate is weighing an appeal the committee could review before the Oct. 31 deadline.

The Globes have gotten stricter about musical placements since biopic winners Ray and Walk the Line triumphed in those fields. In recent years, high-profile music biopics — Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and the Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown — all ran as dramas instead.

Michael has topped $1 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing biopic ever.

Sequel plans

Looking past awards chatter, Jaafar Jackson told GQ Middle East that a sequel, Michael 2, is being envisioned to cover the years the first movie didn’t touch. The initial film ends around the 1987 release of Bad; a follow-up would move into the 1990s, addressing the criticism and the child-abuse allegations that emerged in 1993, with an emphasis on presenting his uncle’s perspective.

Jackson added that he doesn’t control the screenplay, but he hopes the next chapter examines those later years in detail and keeps the sense of humanity he sees at the core of Michael Jackson’s story — a response to what the family feels are outside narratives with their own agendas. For now, though, the current movie’s awards road runs through the drama side at the Globes, with a possible studio appeal due by Oct. 31.

New on-set photos show Dwayne Johnson nearly unrecognizable as the 70-year-old “Chicken Man” in Benny Safdie’s film Lizard Music. The 54-year-old star was spotted in a tan bucket hat and white coat, sporting a snowy beard and heavy facial prosthetics, munching a slice of pizza while walking alongside young co-star Theo Clark Leber.

Johnson said he dropped 30 pounds to disappear into the role, revealing the cut during a talk at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival. He added that signing on with Safdie took almost no convincing.

“I’m so excited to get a chance to hopefully transform again like I was able to do in ‘Smashing Machine,’ [It means] eating less chicken.”

The transformation teams him again with legendary makeup artist Kazu Hiro, who worked with Safdie and Johnson on The Smashing Machine. Hiro’s resume includes Tom Cruise’s elderly look in Digger and Jim Carrey’s iconic turn in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. For Lizard Music, the duo is taking Johnson in the opposite direction from his bulked-up Mark Kerr turn — aging him up with prosthetics and that striking white beard.

The story

Based on Daniel Pinkwater’s novel, the movie follows a kid who catches bizarre lizard musicians on late-night TV and winds up befriending the mysterious Chicken Man — plus his 85-year-old chicken, lovingly nicknamed Claudia. Their oddball meeting kicks off a magical adventure and an unlikely friendship.

The ensemble around Johnson includes:

• Colman Domingo
• Alicia Silverstone
• Tim Heidecker
• Arya Parvathi
• Jeff Goldblum
• Regina Hall
• Rachel McAdams

Amazon MGM Studios has set the film to open December 25, 2027.

After a contemporary routine with pro partner Sharna Burgess set to Ed Sheeran’s “Supermarket Flowers” on Dancing with the Stars’ Dedication Night, Tyler Cameron learned his first child with fiancée Tate Madden is a girl — and he shared it in the ballroom, live on air on Oct. 22.

“I get to be a girl dad. What a gift, what an opportunity.”

The dance was dedicated to mothers — including Cameron’s late mom, Andrea, who died in March 2020 — folding the family news into an already emotional night for the former Bachelor Nation favorite.

Speaking to PEOPLE after the broadcast, Cameron said the baby news is already reshaping their world.

“It’s going to change everything in our lives.”

Madden told the outlet she took a pregnancy test the night the couple returned from getting engaged. Soon after, they relocated to Los Angeles for Cameron’s run on season 35, and rehearsals meant he couldn’t make the ultrasound appointment. She later carried the scan to New York City so he could see it; that photo, he said, made it feel real.

The pair kept the pregnancy mostly under wraps to time the reveal with Dedication Night — the week Cameron hoped to reach so he could honor his mom on the dance floor and share the news at once.

Kardashian wants back in

Kim Kardashian says she’s up for another spin in the ballroom, 18 years after her only season. On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, she asked if the show ever brings people back; Kimmel told her it does. Kardashian competed on season 7 in 2008 with partner Mark Ballas and finished 11th. The series has run 35 seasons with only one All-Stars edition — won by Melissa Rycroft in 2012.

She recalled crying in her trailer nightly during that 2008 stint and praying to be eliminated, and says she hasn’t danced since. At a family poker night three weeks ago, Kylie Jenner put Kardashian’s old routine up on a big screen; Kardashian remembered a few moves and even pitched a full Kardashian–Jenner season, noting brother Rob Kardashian was runner-up on season 13.

As for a return, Kardashian told Kimmel she’d do it again — if the show invites her.

During rehearsal week for the Dancing with the Stars tribute to Heath Ledger and 10 Things I Hate About You, Julia Stiles says she rewatched most of the movie, combed through clips, and even listened to the film’s audio to lock into the moment. The process hit hard: at 45, revisiting something she made at 17 pulled her straight back to Tacoma High and the set where she first played Kat Stratford.

“We were watching a lot of clips and listening to audio for the rehearsals and I was like bawling,” Stiles told Variety. “I mean it just brought back a ton of great memories.”

Stiles also put a firm boundary around how the tribute would look. If anyone was going to join her on stage to represent Ledger’s legacy or the film, it couldn’t be just one or two faces from 1999 — it had to be the whole crew. She says she personally called and begged her former co-stars to take part, and they rallied, turning the ballroom into a full-on reunion.

Broadway is next

Meanwhile, the story that made Kat and Patrick a late-’90s touchstone is headed to a bigger stage. A new 10 Things I Hate About You musical is in the works, with preview performances set to begin August 17, 2027. No theater, opening night, or casting has been announced yet, but the creative roster is already set.

• Carly Rae Jepsen and Ethan Gruska — music and lyrics
• Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang — book
• Tom Kitt — music supervision, arrangements, orchestrations
• Christopher Wheeldon — director and choreographer
• Mike Bosner — producer

The logline pitches a rebellious musical about two sisters defining themselves on their own terms — a clear nod to Kat and Bianca’s push against the rules that sparked Ledger’s unforgettable serenade and everything that followed.

Preview performances begin August 17, 2027.

In his new memoir Sitcom, creator Chuck Lorre says he dangled $750,000 per episode to land Hugh Grant as the new lead of Two and a Half Men after Charlie Sheen’s 2011 exit — and thought a deal was close. Grant’s sticking point, according to Lorre, was performing in front of a live studio audience, so Lorre even offered to scrap it and add prerecorded laughter instead.

“When it came time to sign a contract and proceed, he bailed. He just bailed. I've never spoken with him since that time. Just some agent or manager called and said, 'Mr. Grant doesn't want to do this,'”

Lorre writes that the live-audience workaround didn’t change Grant’s mind. The actor ultimately passed, and Lorre never spoke to him directly again about the part.

The push to keep the sitcom alive came from then-CBS chairman Les Moonves, Lorre recalls; he’d first considered ending the show altogether when Sheen left in 2011. After a wide search for a fresh lead, Grant emerged as the target before negotiations collapsed.

Asked later why he thinks Grant walked away, Lorre told PEOPLE it likely came down to the actor’s priorities at that point in his career, not the paycheck.

“I would have to guess that he decided that, for his career, it wasn’t a good play,” Lorre said. “The money was secondary to his needs and demands as an actor and as an artist.”

With Grant out, Lorre kept looking and eventually tapped Ashton Kutcher, who joined the show and took it in a new direction.

If the bleachers serenade is already looping in your head, there’s a reason. While competing on Dancing With the Stars, Julia Stiles revisited that unforgettable 10 Things I Hate About You moment, performing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” with partner Ezra Sosa as members of the movie’s cast reunited on the show to honor Heath Ledger. The number was a direct nod to Ledger’s Patrick Verona belting Frankie Valli from the stands while Kat Stratford tried to focus on soccer practice.

Back on the big screen, the teen rom-com first hit theaters in 1999, marked the feature directing debut of Gil Junger, and went on to earn $53.5 million worldwide. Led by Stiles and Ledger, the film helped launch a stacked young ensemble that included Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gabrielle Union, and it’s only grown into a cult favorite over the years.

The story tracks Cameron, a new kid who falls hard for Bianca, only to run into her dad’s house rule: no dates for Bianca until older sister Kat dates. Cameron hatches a plan to pay the school’s resident bad boy, Patrick, to woo Kat — a setup that spirals into sharp-tongued banter, teen chaos, and that now-iconic bleachers serenade.

“I said, if we had to have someone with us on stage representing Heath’s legacy or the film, I said it had to be the whole cast. I begged them, each and every one of them, and they all rallied,” she told Variety.

Stiles also told Variety rehearsals for the tribute were unexpectedly heavy, with the song — and hearing both her voice and Ledger’s — stirring old memories. The moment landed exactly where she hoped: as a shared remembrance for fans of the film and of Ledger.

Where to watch

In the U.S., the movie is easy to find right now:

• Disney+ — streaming with subscription
• Prime Video — available to rent

In Episode 3, the show pulls the curtain back on Vision’s chatty operating system: F.R.I.D.A.Y. isn’t just a voice, she’s modeled after a real person — Allison Hogan. The episode frames Allison as Howard Stark’s trusted assistant who helped raise a young Tony Stark, turning a familiar piece of tech into a character with history and stakes.

The name Hogan also sets off bells for MCU diehards. The hour nods toward a possible link to Happy Hogan, Tony’s friend and longtime fixer, by sharing the surname. The series stops short of confirming any family tie, so for now, Allison-as-Happy’s-mom remains speculation, not canon.

Episode 3 keeps connecting dots on the AI front, too: E.D.I.T.H. is revealed to be based on a woman named Edith Mark. And F.R.I.D.A.Y. delivers a line that clearly points back to Tony’s fate after Avengers: Endgame, sharing a loss that goes beyond code.

“Half the world came back that day, and I lost half of mine,” she said.

As a direct sequel to WandaVision, VisionQuest follows a resurrected Vision as he tries to map out who he is by talking with the different AI personas embedded in his programming — all while a bounty on his head adds pressure to every move.

Release plan

The season runs eight episodes, rolling out in two-episode drops before shifting to weekly singles at the end:

• October 13, 2026 — Episodes 1–2
• October 20, 2026 — Episodes 3–4
• October 27, 2026 — Episodes 5–6
• November 3, 2026 — Episode 7
• November 10, 2026 — Episode 8

A steampunk spin on a Western legend is headed to Netflix: in Bass X Machina, Brian Tyree Henry not only voices Bass Reeves but also serves as an executive producer. The series comes from creator LeSean Thomas (Cannon Busters) with animation by Studio Mir, and it mashes up six-shooter grit with clockwork tech and the supernatural.

The first teaser leans hard into that vibe: Reeves boards a speeding train in pursuit of a target, dispatches the job with precision, and reveals a mechanical arm that doubles as a weapon and a tool. The enemies aren’t just outlaws — they include hulking war machines and otherworldly threats.

Set around a reimagined version of the first Black U.S. Marshal, the show follows Reeves working as a bounty hunter determined to protect the people he loves, even as the frontier around him turns stranger and deadlier.

The voices

• Brian Tyree Henry — Bass Reeves (also an executive producer; Atlanta)
• Tati Gabrielle — Dana Starr (The 100, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina)
• Janelle Monáe — Glory Reeves (Homecoming)
• Cree Summer — Ahni (Inspector Gadget, Tiny Toon Adventures)
• Chaske Spencer — Lighthorse (Shouting Secrets)
• Currie Graham — Rivenbark (Rancid, Assault on Precinct 13)
• Starletta DuPois — Etta (The Mighty Gents)

Thomas steers the series’ genre blend while Studio Mir handles the animation, teaming with a cast that mixes awards-season regulars with veteran voice talent.

Release plan

All six episodes drop on Netflix on November 3, 2026.

There’s no weekly rollout here — every episode premieres at once, making this a straight-to-binge launch.

In a candid interview for Jessica Radloff’s upcoming oral history, Young Sheldon: The (Juicier-Than-Meemaw’s-Brisket) Inside Story of the Hit Comedy, Iain Armitage makes it clear he has zero interest in aging his character up. After nearly seven years playing Sheldon Cooper on Young Sheldon, the actor says any version where he’s 23 is a nonstarter.

“I would hate to be on a show playing 23-year-old Sheldon. That would suck. I would not want to do that,” he said.

Armitage also isn’t big on grieving the show’s end. He told Radloff that dwelling on it felt “heavy and annoying and weird,” and he’d rather look forward — travel, spend more time in Virginia, and jump at movie opportunities when they pop up.

That doesn’t mean he’s leaving the people behind. He says he misses the Warner Bros. lot, the crew, and the colleagues he grew up with, even if he isn’t the type to obsess over specific on-set memories. For him, the bigger picture — and the next chapter — matters more.

What he’s doing next

• The Adam Trials — a psychological thriller with a sci‑fi edge starring Martin Freeman. Armitage plays a terminally ill son whose parents turn to experimental nanotechnology in a desperate attempt to save him.
• Scoob!: Holiday Haunt — he recorded voice work reprising Young Shaggy, but the completed animated movie was shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery and hasn’t been released.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Keanu Reeves is in negotiations to headline a new take on The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil at Paramount, with South Korean star Don Lee returning to the role he originated. Horror hitmaker James Wan is reportedly developing the project and is being eyed to direct, which would mark his first feature in the chair since Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

The reimagining draws from the 2019 Korean thriller’s hook: a crime boss and a detective forge an uneasy alliance to hunt a serial killer after the gangster survives an attack. Lee (also known as Ma Dong-seok, seen in Marvel’s Eternals) is set to reprise the gangster; Reeves’ role hasn’t been disclosed.

Sylvester Stallone is on board as a producer of the remake.

Behind the camera

Wan has spent the past couple of years producing horror hits like Saw X, The Nun II, and Insidious: The Red Door while steering Atomic Monster’s merger with Blumhouse. If he steps in to direct, it’s a pivot back to hard-edged action-thriller terrain with a major Hollywood pairing in Reeves and Lee.

The producing roster is already stacked. In addition to Lee’s Big Punch Global, the film is being shepherded by longtime action heavyweights and key partners:

• Balboa Productions — Sylvester Stallone and D. Matt Geller
• B&C Group — Chris S. Lee
• BA Entertainment — Jang Won-seok (CEO)
• Lorenzo di Bonaventura — joining the producing team

Why this title matters

The 2019 original debuted in the Cannes Film Festival’s Midnight Screenings, where its mash-up of gangland intrigue and serial-killer suspense found an international audience. It also cemented Don Lee as a force: burly menace with unexpected heart, a persona he later carried into Marvel’s Eternals.

Paramount’s version puts that combustible odd-couple setup into the hands of a Hollywood action icon and a filmmaker known for precision-engineered set pieces. Paramount Pictures has not announced a start date or release window, and deals for the creative team are still being finalized.

Some of Netflix’s splashiest upcoming movies — including Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew and David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, both earmarked for exclusive IMAX runs before hitting the service — will now move forward without the executive who championed them. Over the weekend, producer-turned-exec Dan Lin was let go as the streamer’s film chief, leaving the movie division without a named boss while Netflix rethinks how it greenlights and releases films, according to Variety.

Around 1,000 Netflix jobs — roughly 6% of the company — are being cut as part of a broader shake-up.

The slate he leaves

Lin had pushed for tighter spending and a more curated pipeline, and said he had greenlit or acquired 88 films during his short run. Several of those titles — including big-screen concessions for directors who want theaters first — stay on the books for his successor to oversee.

• Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew — Greta Gerwig’s take on C.S. Lewis, planned for an exclusive IMAX theatrical window before streaming.
• The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth — David Fincher’s film, also set to get an IMAX window before landing on Netflix.
• Emilia Pérez — part of the Netflix film lineup Lin assembled.
• Apex — another title from the batch he brought in.

Whether the leaner-spend approach survives him is an open question, but the projects he set in motion are expected to roll ahead under whoever takes the reins.

Who’s steering film now

Netflix hasn’t explained Lin’s exit or named a permanent replacement. Industry chatter has floated former Warner Bros. film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy as possibilities, but neither has been confirmed. Variety reported Lin was let go over the weekend; Netflix has not commented on the decision.

The change comes amid a larger reorg. Longtime chief content officer Bela Bajaria has departed, with veteran executive Peter Rice stepping in to oversee Netflix’s global content operation — film, TV and live events included. Two key film lieutenants tied to Lin, Doug Belgrad and Sheroum Kim (who ran the indie division), are also out.

Netflix has faced questions about slower engagement and a sliding share price, and recently pulled back from a potential Warner Bros. Discovery deal when it no longer made financial sense, per the report. Who directly runs the film unit day-to-day remains to be announced. Peter Rice starts October 26.

The handoff is unusually personal: Quentin Tarantino has given David Fincher the keys to The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a Netflix-backed follow-up to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino said Brad Pitt helped bring the two filmmakers together — a fitting bridge, given Pitt’s Oscar-winning turn as Cliff Booth in the original film.

Fincher takes on Cliff Booth

Speaking on the podcast The Church of Tarantino, the director explained why he’d let someone else steer a character he created, and why it’s Fincher in particular.

“I like the idea that any great director, a great director, would adapt my work,” Tarantino said.

He didn’t hedge on who tops his list, either.

“Fincher is my favorite director,” he added.

Tarantino, who’s famously protective of his scripts, said Fincher’s interest signaled a level of seriousness he respects. He also put himself in the same elite tier, framing the matchup as one master handing the baton to another.

The Adventures of Cliff Booth continues the world fans met in 2019, where Pitt’s stuntman stole scenes and collected a Supporting Actor Oscar. With Netflix on board and Fincher now “in the chair,” Tarantino is sitting this one out after writing the script.

What Tarantino’s doing next

On The Graham Norton Show, Tarantino said the script for his long-discussed tenth and final movie is finished — and that he plans to take his time. First up is a stage detour he’s writing and directing, with family time and a little real-world living before he decides how to mount that last film. He previously shelved an earlier version of his farewell, The Movie Critic, in 2024.

The play, a swashbuckling comedy titled The Popinjay Cavalier and starring Sacha Baron Cohen, now has dates locked in London.

• Previews: February 23, 2027 — Phoenix Theatre
• Opening night: March 18, 2027
• Closing: June 2027

In a new clip from her podcast, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Mayim Bialik says the fallout from Charlie Sheen’s very public split with Chuck Lorre didn’t just live on the Two and a Half Men set — it followed Lorre to what was supposed to be his escape: The Big Bang Theory. Bialik, who spent 11 years on the CBS sitcom, recalls the tension bleeding into their workdays as headlines piled up in 2011.

On-set fallout

“I remember those years. It was very, very difficult for us to see him like that.”

Bialik pushed back on the idea that a powerful TV producer is somehow immune to that kind of barrage.

“I know a lot of people are like, ‘Serves you right,’ like, ‘You’re a rich producer.’ But there’s a human side to the story that deserves attention.”

She told co-host Jonathan Cohen that the timing made everything louder — social media was just taking off, amplifying the ugliest barbs — and that Sheen’s Hollywood lineage (son of Martin Sheen, brother of Emilio Estevez) supercharged the spectacle.

How the reunion happened

Years later, Lorre described on Dinner’s On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson how the anger eventually burned off. That shift led to an unexpected idea: inviting Sheen to play a version of himself on Lorre’s Max comedy Bookie, which he co-created with Nick Bakay.

• After years of distance, Lorre realized the rage and hurt were gone and called Bakay with the pitch.
• Bakay asked if he could truly handle it; Lorre agreed, with one condition — that Sheen be sober.
• Lorre reached out through an agent; Sheen said yes and asked that his past struggles not be part of the storyline.

Sheen ultimately appeared as an exaggerated version of himself on Bookie (streaming on Max), with Lorre stepping behind the camera to direct. For the Big Bang cast who’d watched those rough years up close, it marked the pair’s first collaboration since the split — and a far gentler coda than the one they remember.

They were spotted arriving at and leaving the same Los Angeles party on October 16, reportedly sharing a car but slipping into the event separately. And while neither has said anything publicly, a source told Page Six that Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein are seeing each other — emphasis on low-key.

“The one thing they have in common is they both enjoy going out to parties and restaurants. Unlike her ex Ben [Affleck] who always had a scowl on his face when they were out,” the source said.

The two connected while making the Netflix romantic comedy Office Romance, where they play each other’s love interest. Their on-screen chemistry fueled speculation during the press tour, but both had previously brushed off the idea that anything was happening off camera; this latest report frames it as “casual” rather than anything official.

The timing comes after Lopez’s marriage to Ben Affleck ended — they wed in 2022, she filed for divorce in August 2024, and it was finalized in January 2025. Affleck, in a recent Variety interview, praised Lopez’s talent and argued that awards don’t always capture what an actor brings to the screen.

For now, the reported romance remains unconfirmed by either star, and representatives haven’t publicly commented.

Instead of a plain alternate feed, Disney is building a full-on animated broadcast for Super Bowl LXI. The company will air Star Wars Funday Football on Disney+, Disney Channel, Disney XD, and the ESPN App, where every snap is recreated in real time with players rendered as animated avatars. Expect droids, aliens, and surprise nods to the movies slipping in during big moments.

Super Bowl LXI is Sunday, February 14, 2027.

How it works

The telecast pulls directly from the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking to turn live action into animation on the fly. C-3PO is set to have a prominent part, with Anthony Daniels involved. The reveal came via a joint video from ESPN and the official Star Wars YouTube channel. Disney says settings, commentators, and which characters pop up will be detailed closer to kickoff.

More ways to watch

Not into lightsabers with your football? There’s also a new on-the-field option. Pat McAfee will lead Field Pass, a commentary-first telecast built around sideline access and reactions. McAfee said he personally pitched the concept to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to lock down that on-field presence, and ESPN later confirmed the plan.

• Star Wars Funday Football — real-time animated feed on Disney+, Disney Channel, Disney XD, ESPN App
• Field Pass with Pat McAfee — commentary-driven alternate telecast alongside the ABC/ESPN broadcast
• ManningCast — Peyton and Eli on ESPN2
• Playbook — a stats-focused view on NFL Network
• ESPN Deportes — Spanish-language telecast

McAfee also has a weekly role on Monday Night Countdown with Jason Kelce and Scott Van Pelt, so his voice will be familiar even before the big game.

One more Star Wars tie-in lands right after: to mark the franchise’s 50th anniversary, Lucasfilm is putting the restored 1977 original back in theaters on February 19, 2027.

Asked point-blank which of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s roles he wishes he’d snagged, Sylvester Stallone didn’t hesitate: “All of his.” In a new chat with Entertainment Tonight, Stallone said the two sized each other up from their very first meeting and instantly knew what they were in for.

“First time I laid eyes on Arnold, and first time he laid eyes on me, we knew we were gonna be frenemies forever.”

Stallone even joked that Schwarzenegger was born to play the killing machine in The Terminator while he, with his famously crooked snarl, looked like someone who had “fell off the experimental table.” It’s the kind of self-deprecating jab that underlines how much of their rivalry was performance—and how real it felt in the moment.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the competition ran hot across everything that mattered in action-movie land: opening weekends, biceps, body counts, one-liners—and yes, paychecks. Stallone said they clashed often but also pushed each other, a rare case where he saw another actor as true, direct competition.

Paychecks and pranks

Schwarzenegger has his own receipts. On the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast earlier this year, he said he took the icy villain turn in Batman & Robin as Mr. Freeze—reportedly for about $30 million—partly to finally out-earn Stallone, even though playing the bad guy wasn’t exactly calling his name.

“I didn’t want to play the villain. They said, ‘$25 million is petty cash, what’s the matter with you guys?’”

The rivalry also spawned one of Hollywood’s great gotchas: Schwarzenegger has long said he feigned interest in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, prompting Stallone to swoop in for the lead. Stallone later labeled the family comedy a career low point.

Time cooled things off. The former sparring partners wound up on the same side, sharing the screen in The Expendables films and reuniting as co-leads in Escape Plan—proof that one of Hollywood’s fiercest feuds eventually morphed into a working bromance.

The 1972 Godspell troupe that launched a generation of comics gets rebuilt from the ground up in You Had to Be There — director Nick Davis stitches together fresh interviews, long-lost party recordings, and a secret audio tape of a live performance to drop you back in that tiny Toronto theater with Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and their soon-to-be-famous friends. The documentary, backed by Judd Apatow, is rolling out quietly, not everywhere at once.

Opened Sept. 18, 2026 in select U.S. theaters; no streaming date announced.

Where it’s playing now

For the moment, the film is only in select U.S. theaters via Greenwich Entertainment, and the run is already winding down in many cities. If you’re outside a big market, screenings may be scarce — and you won’t find it on the big streaming homes just yet:

• Netflix
• Prime Video
• Hulu
• Max
• Apple TV

While you wait: Short on Netflix

If you’re itching for more from that crew, Marty, Life Is Short has been streaming on Netflix since May 12, 2026. The feature-length portrait of Martin Short comes from director Lawrence Kasdan, produced by Imagine Documentaries with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer as executive producers, and mixes never-before-seen archival footage with new interviews. It tracks Short from Saturday Night Live to Jiminy Glick and his current renaissance, with appearances by Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Mulaney, and Tom Hanks, and it also addresses personal loss, including the death of his wife, Nancy Dolman, in 2010.

Digital plans

A digital release for You Had to Be There may not be far off — there’s an unconfirmed report pointing to November 20, 2026, though Greenwich Entertainment hasn’t announced anything. When it does land online, expect initial rental and purchase options on:

• Amazon Prime Video
• Apple TV
• Google Play
• YouTube Movies

Subscription streaming could follow later, depending on deals, but for now the only reported digital target is November 20, 2026.

In her forthcoming memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, Judi Dench doesn’t dance around how she feels about making Cats. Reflecting on the movie’s rocky rollout — and on how long Andrew Lloyd Webber had hoped to see a film version — she writes:

Oh God, I can’t bear it – and [Lloyd Webber] had waited so long for it to be made. What a waste of all that goodwill and talent.

Dench also acknowledges she hasn’t actually watched the finished cut, saying she can’t judge the final product firsthand. At the same time, she defends the work that goes into any production, adding:

It’s a miracle that anything is ever made – films, plays, TV – let alone turn out to be a success.

Tom Hooper’s 2019 adaptation of the stage smash leaned hard on CGI “digital fur,” a choice that quickly became the headline. Dench played Old Deuteronomy in a cast stacked with pop stars and movie names, including:

• Taylor Swift — Bombalurina
• Idris Elba — Macavity
• Jennifer Hudson — Grizabella
• James Corden — Bustopher Jones

On trigger warnings

Dench also uses the book to weigh in on content advisories for stage and screen. Speaking to Brendan O’Hea for the memoir, she argues that modern trigger warnings can over-explain what audiences are about to see.

I think they have gone too far. It’s mollycoddling. If you’re that sensitive, don’t go to the theater.

While noting that advisories can help some viewers prepare for difficult material, she says there should be limits on how much a production reveals in advance — comments she makes as part of her wider conversation with O’Hea in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?

After the Ibiza chaos in Episode 5, Youth swings back home with Alex and Patrick acting like a couple again — literally walking hand in hand to Sam and Frank’s place to check on Frank after his frightening boat-rave heart attack. Frank, somehow sunnier post-scare, greets them buzzing with new energy, and Alex even jokes about wanting to grow old and die alongside Patrick — a not-so-subtle hint she’s ready to get serious.

That bubble pops fast. A text from Lars asking Alex out lands while she’s chatting with Sam, who needles Patrick for his reaction. His shrug — basically, she should “make the most” of her life — rattles Alex and reopens all the doubts. When Patrick later invites her to meet his friends to talk about Syria, she can’t tell if they’re on the same page and punts on a clear answer.

Meanwhile, Alex is hustling at work. She’s lined up a lunch with author Malcolm, a move that had Sam seriously considering making Alex a junior partner. Over at Sam’s agency, Alex’s son Ruari ditches Frank’s bar job and settles into a desk — in the same office where his mom works — and strikes up an unexpectedly easy rapport with co-worker Plum.

The Malcolm lunch detonates the plan. Their nemesis agent Grayson “happens” to be at the restaurant, swoops in, and Malcolm bails before Sam and Alex can pull him back. Reeling, Sam nudges Alex to go meet Lars anyway. Alex, anxious, accepts a Xanax from Sam and orders a cab.

A single Xanax and a wrong turn in the cab send Alex to the wrong rendezvous — and straight into a showdown.

She dozes off, the driver drops her home, and in the haze she reroutes herself to Patrick’s get-together with his friends. One problem: earlier, Alex had texted Lars her live location. He follows it right to Patrick’s hangout. Introductions are a mess, the room tenses up, and Patrick is mortified. The argument outside is brutal — he says she embarrassed him; she fires back that he’s a man-child.

Back at the office

Alex has also been running a risky side play: quietly courting publisher Camille with a pitch to sign writer Yafa Barghouti, while pretending Sam’s agency already represents Yafa. Camille bites with a deal offer — and Alex’s meeting gets blown up by a call from her dad, who can’t figure out how to turn off his podcast. Unable to reach Ruari, she leans on Patrick for help.

Guilt catches up with her. Alex heads to the agency and finally tells Sam the truth about the Yafa lie. Sam doesn’t mince words and tells Alex to leave. Dejected, Alex returns home to find Patrick sitting with her dad, which softens everything between them. They talk it out; Alex tells him she doesn’t want to see anyone else while they’re together, and they seal it with a kiss.

The win at home comes with a cost at work: Alex’s Yafa gambit puts that potential partner title squarely in jeopardy.

The NFL’s first Wednesday-night Thanksgiving week game is headed to Los Angeles, with the Green Bay Packers visiting the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium — and halftime belongs to U2. The primetime matchup streams live on Netflix on Wednesday, November 25, 2026, with kickoff at 8 p.m. ET.

For the Dublin rockers, it’s a full-circle moment in a milestone year. U2 turns 50 in 2026, nearly a quarter-century after their 2002 Super Bowl XXXVI performance, when the band unfurled a tribute to the victims of September 11 — one of the defining halftime shows in NFL history. The Thanksgiving Eve gig will also mark U2’s first time playing SoFi.

New music in the mix

The timing lines up with fresh material. U2’s 16th studio album, Carnaval de Luz — the band’s first collection of new songs in nine years — arrives November 13, 2026, less than two weeks before the game. The record spans 12 tracks that range from punk-charged cuts to moodier, atmospheric turns, giving the band a choice between road-testing new songs or rolling out stadium anthems.

Netflix has teased special guests, and the new album’s collaborators could point to who shows up under the lights:

• Rosalía — featured on “The Mirror Maker”
• Martin Garrix — tied to the electronic-forward “Glorify”
• Brian Eno — longtime U2 confidant and contributor on the project

Fans are already weighing in on the new era — and picking early favorites.

I have been listening to ‘#TheGreatestShowOnEarth’ by #U2 over and over since it came out and it moves me every time.You can interpret this song in so many different ways. Is it about humanity as a whole? Is it about Christianity or any religion in general? Is it about the band?… — Dyana (@Dyana_) October 18, 2026

The Thanksgiving Eve game kicks off at 8 p.m. ET on November 25 at SoFi Stadium — Packers vs. Rams — with U2 headlining halftime, streaming live on Netflix.

On the red carpet at the 6th Annual Academy Museum Gala, Michael Johnston kept plot secrets close but confirmed one big thing about The Mummy: Book of the Dead: he’s not stepping into Alex O’Connell’s boots. Speaking to Deadline, the Obsession breakout said he’s playing a brand-new character written for the sequel, joining a reunion led by Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.

Johnston also hinted his part is heavy on physicality. He’s been in boxing training for the shoot and described the production’s feel as classic high-adventure with supernatural stakes — in line with what fans loved the first time around. The movie is being directed by Radio Silence, the filmmaking collective known for high-energy, crowd-pleasing genre swings.

“It’s going to be a load of fun. It’s a wild ride.”

What we know so far

• Johnston’s role — A new character created for the sequel, not Rick and Evelyn’s son Alex.
• Returning stars — Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are back.
• Director — Radio Silence is at the helm.
• Tone — Aiming to recapture the original films’ mix of adventure, danger and the supernatural.
• Prep — Johnston says he’s doing boxing training for the action-forward role.
• Story — Specific plot details remain under wraps.

It’s a rapid climb for Johnston, who led Curry Barker’s micro-budget horror hit Obsession — a $750,000 production that turned into a global phenomenon — before vaulting into franchise territory with The Mummy.

Beyond The Mummy

Johnston isn’t sticking to scares only. He teased an untitled drama he calls an “incredible queer story,” and also has work lined up on TV with 9-1-1, signaling a slate that bounces between big-screen action, horror, and character-driven drama.

After weeks of sounding out other stars, Jay-Z has reportedly circled 2027 as the year he takes the Super Bowl stage himself. Per Puck News, the mogul who’s helped book the show since 2019 weighed multiple options before deciding a Jay-Z-led performance would be the “more compelling” choice. It’s not official, and neither the NFL nor Roc Nation has confirmed the report, but the scenario would mark a major shift from his behind-the-scenes role to the spotlight.

Roc Nation has co-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019.

Who else was in the mix

The search reportedly focused on a handful of massive names, some of whom were hesitant about the scrutiny that comes with the world’s biggest TV stage. A multi-artist, all-star set was also floated as a fallback.

• Miley Cyrus — considered a leading contender
• Justin Bieber — also high on the shortlist
• Harry Styles — reportedly among the top choices

If a single headliner couldn’t be locked, one backup plan involved Jay-Z anchoring a collaborative show with famous friends. That’s fueled fan speculation about potential cameos, though no guests are confirmed.

• Beyoncé
• Rihanna
• Alicia Keys

Why 2027 lines up

The calendar sets up a victory-lap moment. In 2026, Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt hits its 30th anniversary and The Blueprint turns 25. He’s also proven his current live draw: three sold-out Yankee Stadium shows that reportedly brought in more than $42 million.

There’s history, too. While he once said choosing himself early in the NFL partnership would’ve been “selfish,” Jay-Z has since overseen a run of blockbuster halftime sets through Roc Nation, including:

• Dr. Dre (with Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar)
• Rihanna
• Usher
• Kendrick Lamar

For now, the 2027 headliner remains unannounced, and the report of Jay-Z taking the mic is unconfirmed by the NFL, Roc Nation, or Jay-Z’s camp.

Springfield’s most debated shopkeeper speaks again in Season 38, and the show doesn’t tiptoe around it. In Episode 3, titled The Revengening, Apu returns in a Halloween-themed prelude with a distinct Scream-style slasher vibe — and it’s the first time the character has had lines in roughly nine years.

The voice, however, is new. Indian American actor Sunil Malhotra now plays Apu, taking over from longtime performer Hank Azaria, while Janina Gavankar joins the cast as Apu’s wife, Manjula.

• Episode — “The Revengening” (Season 38, Episode 3)
• Apu’s new voice — Sunil Malhotra
• Manjula’s new voice — Janina Gavankar
• Tone — Halloween prelude with a Scream-style slasher setup

From backlash to recast

Apu’s portrayal has been a flashpoint for years, with critics arguing the convenience-store owner, voiced for decades by a white actor, leaned on stereotypes about South Asians. The conversation hit a new level with the 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, in which comedian Hari Kondabolu explored how the character’s exaggerated accent became fodder for bullying — especially at a time when there were so few South Asian characters on American TV.

After initially brushing off the criticism, the show shifted course. In 2020, Hank Azaria stepped away from voicing Apu and publicly acknowledged the harm the character’s portrayal had caused. Bringing in Sunil Malhotra marks the first time Apu has been voiced by an Indian American actor on the series.

took long enough for The Simpsons to do the literal one thing that The Problem with Apu wanted them to do (recast him with an Indian actor)

That reaction — posted Oct. 19, 2026 by X user American Dad Hope (@GRANDDADWHATTHE) — echoes a common response online as the episode made the rounds.

Apu’s updated voice and Manjula’s new casting both debut in The Revengening, the third episode of The Simpsons Season 38.

At the height of The Secret World of Alex Mack, the show’s producer put a five-season extension on the table, plus a feature film and a big payday. Larisa Oleynik walked away. Years later, she explained the choice without any mystery or mess.

“I have absolutely no regrets about that,” she told HuffPost in 2012. “It was an incredible thing he was offering me, and I knew that at the time, but I was a little burnt out.”

Oleynik said the glare of fame didn’t suddenly crash in — it built slowly — so by the time Alex Mack was everywhere, she already had ways to handle it. She stressed her exit wasn’t about the show, anyone she worked with, or Nickelodeon; the pressure was internal. She was pushing herself to be great at everything and didn’t want a job to feel that hard forever.

Life after Nickelodeon

Instead of riding the teen-star wave, Oleynik pivoted to Sarah Lawrence College, where she spent four years buried in books and skipped the theater track. She still popped up on screens: in 1999 she played Bianca in the hit teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, then followed with the college comedy 100 Girls the next year.

• 10 Things I Hate About You — Bianca (1999)
• 100 Girls — Wendy (2000)
• Mad Men — Cynthia Cosgrove (5 episodes)
• Remember Sunday — TV movie
• Wish Upon a Christmas — TV movie
• Erin & Aaron — returned to Nickelodeon in 2023 as a mom

Off set, Oleynik keeps things low-key in Venice, California, and hasn’t shared much publicly about marriage or kids. Her most recent nostalgic full-circle moment came with that 2023 Nickelodeon return on Erin & Aaron.

At the Across the Arrowverse panel at New York Comic Con, Grant Gustin admitted he nearly skipped the audition for The Flash because he couldn’t picture himself as Barry Allen. He said he only agreed to try once he heard David Nutter would be involved — and then got a personal push from the director after his callback. The CW series ultimately ran from 2014 to 2023.

As Gustin recounted, via PEOPLE:

"The audition went well, and then [executive producer] David Nutter was in my callback, who is considered to be the pilot king."

"He's the nicest man in the world. He called me after my callback that he had been in and basically was like, 'I want you to get this'."

Enter David Nutter

Nutter’s “pilot king” nickname isn’t hype. He has directed 24 TV pilots, with 21 going to series, including a streak of 16 consecutive pickups. He helped kick-start the Arrowverse by directing Arrow’s 2012 pilot, then set the tone for Central City by directing the first two episodes of The Flash.

• Smallville
• Supernatural
• The Mentalist

From backdoor to breakout

The CW initially planned to introduce Barry Allen through a backdoor pilot in Arrow season 2. But after seeing Nutter’s approach and Gustin’s performance, the network ordered a stand-alone pilot — and then a full season. When The Flash premiered in October 2014, it drew 4.8 million viewers, the network’s most-watched series launch in five years.

The debut also posted a 1.9 rating among adults 18–49 and expanded its reach to more than 13 million viewers across TV and digital in its first week.

Producer Nina Jacobson says the new Dirty Dancing sequel is building space into the story to acknowledge and mourn Patrick Swayze—and it will not attempt a digital recreation of him. Speaking at the Future of Filmmaking 2026 Summit and in an interview with IndieWire, Jacobson said the team has been working with Swayze’s estate from the start; his widow, Lisa Niemi Swayze, read the script early and was “very moved by it.”

Honoring Swayze, not recreating him

Jacobson put the guiding principle plainly.

That’s one of the things that you really have to focus on: how to let people mourn him in a movie.

She also made an unambiguous pledge about technology.

And don’t worry, we won’t be bringing him back with AI.

The sequel’s creative team consulted closely with the Swayze estate to shape how Johnny’s presence is felt without appearing on screen. Lisa Niemi Swayze, who received the script before production, said she was “very moved by it,” and appreciated the care taken with Johnny’s legacy, according to Jacobson.

A new love story, same feeling

Rather than replaying the 1987 plot, the filmmakers are chasing the same rush the original delivered—young love that feels dangerous and transformative—while telling a contemporary story. Jennifer Grey has been deeply involved, helping the team zero in on what makes Baby’s journey still resonate.

It should make you feel the way the book did, and it should feel the way the book felt.... Being able to tell a young love story that could take some of those risks but also inspire those feelings felt like an incredible chance for us.

It’s the first substantial update on the project in years; a director hasn’t been announced yet. Filming is currently planned to begin in late 2026.

Netflix isn’t just bringing back The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call — it’s doubling down. The streamer has ordered Seasons 2 and 3 to be filmed back-to-back, with cameras slated to roll in October 2026. Director Lee Do-yun returns to helm both runs, writing Season 2 solo and co-writing Season 3 with rising writer Tomasi.

The core trauma team is staying intact, with one key recast on the nursing side. Here’s who’s scrubbing in for the next rounds:

• Ju Ji-hoon — Dr. Baek Kang-hyuk
• Choo Young-woo — Dr. Yang Jae-won
• Yoon Kyung-ho — Dr. Han Yu-rim
• Jeong Jae-kwang — Dr. Park Gyeong-won
• Jeong Ye-in — Cheon Jang-mi (veteran nurse), taking over the role previously played by Ha Young

Season 1 was a rocket

Launched on January 24, 2025, the medical drama didn’t just find an audience — it overtook a juggernaut. Within 10 days, it bumped Squid Game Season 2 from the top of Netflix’s global Non-English TV chart, with reach stretching across 63 countries.

Season 1 hit No. 1 on Netflix’s global Non-English TV chart just 10 days after its Jan. 24, 2025 debut.

What’s ahead in Seasons 2 and 3

With two seasons locked, the series is poised to scale up the chaos: larger disasters, mass-casualty scenarios, and missions that push the team beyond the hospital — a trajectory teed up by that rescue helicopter, which opens the door to more field work.

Character-wise, expect the spotlight to stay on growth inside the pressure cooker. Dr. Yang Jae-won is positioned to evolve from hesitant trainee to an independent trauma surgeon capable of leading operations, while Dr. Han Yu-rim’s move to Chief of Planning and Coordination could give Baek Kang-hyuk a crucial ally when hospital politics flare. And with Cheon Jang-mi joining the unit, the floor dynamic gets a veteran jolt.

Both new seasons will be produced simultaneously, with filming scheduled to begin in October 2026.

Midway through night two at the Hollywood Bowl, Miley Cyrus stopped the music to address the chatter around her comeback. Without naming names, she called out a commentator she said was chasing clicks over her Friday opener.

“I don’t know if any of you heard that somebody was doing commentary to get clickbait on their video talking about my show on Friday night, but I’m a lot of things and we’re not even going to entertain that,” she said.

The online nitpicks included complaints that she didn’t sing every single line of familiar hits like “Party in the USA” and “Flowers.” Cyrus met that head-on during Sunday’s set, tossing off a wry aside as she launched into “Bass Persuades,” the lead single off her new album:

“Oh, I forgot I’m supposed to sing every f****** line!”

The weekend also carried a softer moment. Cyrus fought back tears giving a stripped-down “Jolene” in honor of Dolly Parton, and told the crowd performing doesn’t feel as automatic as it once did after four years away. She revealed she nearly walked from Sunday’s show before stepping out for “Orbit,” but added she wouldn’t leave fans sitting in their seats without a performance.

After the Bowl

The two-night engagement doubled as a live unveiling of her new era — performing simply as Miley — and her first full-length concerts in four years.

• Venue — Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles
• Dates — October 16 and 18
• New album — Bass Persuades
• Billed as — Miley (mononym)

Demand was intense — reportedly nearly 1.5 million people queued online for about 35,000 available tickets — but don’t expect a road map for a traditional tour just yet. Cyrus has no additional shows on the books and is cautious about the grind of touring, though a return to the Bowl as a residency has been floated as a way to get back onstage without living on a bus. For now, there are no further dates scheduled.

On the latest episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, Jason Sudeikis said there’s no roadmap yet for where Ted Lasso goes after its surprise Season 4 return. He explained that the fourth season happened because the team felt there was still story to tell, but when it comes to possible Seasons 5 and 6, nothing is mapped out and the writers’ room hasn’t started.

“We’ll see. It takes a village.”

Pressed on whether he actually wants to keep making the Apple TV+ comedy, Sudeikis didn’t play coy. He said he’s in if there’s a real appetite for more.

“thought it would be fun.”

Sudeikis added that he assumes Apple TV+ would be open to continuing if the creative team is game, but emphasized there’s no official plan for more episodes. Season 4’s finale was built to work either way — it leaves room for further stories while also functioning as a possible endpoint.

The show also took some big swings this year, including the death of Mae and a pivot that saw Ted move into coaching a second-division women’s soccer team — a change that sparked debate among viewers even as it kept attention on Richmond’s world.

Season 4 by the numbers

• 296.6 million U.S. viewing minutes in the first two days, reportedly topping the show’s own Season 3 record
• 866 million minutes across premiere week
• No. 1 in 37 countries and Apple TV+’s second most-watched global series (reportedly)
• Rotten Tomatoes: 89% critics’ score, 79% audience score

For now, Sudeikis says the interest is there but the next steps aren’t — there’s no writers’ room underway and no renewal in place for Seasons 5 or 6.

In a move that gives U.S. viewers a hefty dose of Brazilian storytelling, Netflix has licensed 18 titles from Rio-based powerhouse Globo in what the companies are calling their biggest deal together so far. The slate spans feature films, classic telenovelas and a series from a brand long known for exporting addictive melodramas around the world.

What’s in the package

• 14 feature films
• 3 telenovelas — including India — A Love Story (created by Glória Perez, directed by Marcos Schechtman), winner of the 2009 International Emmy
• 1 series

For anyone who’s ever sampled Globo’s hits, the inclusion of India — A Love Story (known in Brazil as Caminho das Índias) is the eye-catcher. The Emmy-winning telenovela blends cross-cultural romance with the sweeping, high-gloss style that helped make Globo a global export brand.

Release plan

Netflix won’t dump the entire library at once. The streamer plans a staggered rollout that starts at the end of 2026 and continues into the following year, effectively turning the deal into a months-long pipeline of Brazilian movies and TV.

The agreement also speaks to a broader shift on streaming: more licensed catalogs flowing between platforms as companies balance originals with proven library draws. For Globo, it’s a way to put signature titles in front of new international audiences without abandoning its own streaming ambitions on Globoplay; for Netflix, it’s a ready-made infusion of Brazilian stories with built-in appeal.

The titles start arriving on Netflix in December 2026, with releases continuing through mid-2027.

On The Graham Norton Show, Quentin Tarantino said his script for what he’s long billed as his tenth and final movie is done — but he’s not racing to make it. First up: a detour to the stage, plus some time away from the camera.

“I’ve written a script that I could do, that I really really like, but I have to do the play and see who I am.”

“I’ll finish the play, and then I’ll go back and be with my family for a while and then live, and then see what that guy wants to do.”

West End first

Tarantino is writing and directing The Popinjay Cavalier, a swashbuckling comedy led by Sacha Baron Cohen. He said it started life as a screenplay before he realized it worked better as a play, and he’s keeping plot details under wraps for now.

About that “final film”

The director has treated “ten and out” like a finish line for years, which is why each new project feels like a possible curtain call. His most recent attempt at a farewell, The Movie Critic, was abandoned in 2024. The 1977-set film had Brad Pitt attached, was close to production, and had secured a $20 million state tax incentive. Tarantino later said he lost interest during prep, noting that rebuilding a vintage Los Angeles felt repetitive after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, among other reasons.

In the meantime, his writing is headed to the screen in The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth — a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up directed by David Fincher and starring Pitt — with Tarantino staying off the director’s chair this time.

• Tenth film: Script is finished, but Tarantino hasn’t shared a production timeline or title.
• The Popinjay Cavalier: Previews start February 23, 2027 at London’s Phoenix Theatre; opening night is March 18, with the run scheduled to close in June 2027.
• The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth: A Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt; release timing TBA.

After a red‑carpet exchange about whether she’s spoken with Elizabeth Holmes lit up social media, Amanda Seyfried jumped into the comments of a reposted clip to roast her own meandering answer from the You Can See Everything premiere.

“What AM I even saying”

On the carpet, when The Hollywood Reporter asked if interviews have gotten tricky lately, Seyfried didn’t pretend otherwise.

“It’s interesting, yeah, it’s interesting,”

she said, adding that things feel different “for a good reason.” She drifted into thoughts about timing and fate — that everyone in her life is “meant to be there,” that she was meant to be at the event that night and home the next day — and admitted everyday small talk has gotten hard “only of late.”

Pressed on what she’d rather chat about — given there are some things she couldn’t touch — Seyfried got very specific:

• Emus
• Halloween
• Apple pie
• Olives
• “Really good hard ciders”

Why the hedging

There’s a reason she’s dodging. The A24 documentary You Can See Everything, from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is reportedly a Holmes project that also involves Seyfried herself. Reports say Fielder recruits her to re‑enact real conversations he had with Holmes, while the film also features Holmes reacting to Seyfried’s Emmy‑winning turn in Hulu’s The Dropout — a meta setup that blurs documentary and performance and puts the real entrepreneur, the actor who played her, and the filmmaker in the same frame.

Want to queue up the original before the reboot hits theaters? In the U.S., the 1994 Street Fighter is easy to find. It’s streaming free (with ads) and also available to rent or buy if you want a cleaner copy.

• Stream free with ads: Tubi, Pluto TV
• Buy or rent digitally: Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home

Directed by Steven E. de Souza, the ’94 movie throws Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Colonel Guile into a showdown with Raul Julia’s M. Bison, while bringing in franchise staples like Chun-Li, Ryu and Ken for a swirl of cartoon-villain plotting, big-shoulder-pad bravado, and ’90s-style brawls. Reviews were mixed back then, but it’s hung on as a cult favorite for video game movie die-hards.

The 1994 Street Fighter is streaming free on Tubi and Pluto TV.

The new bout

The next live-action Street Fighter, set in 1993, centers on estranged training partners Ryu and Ken getting pulled back into the fight when Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. A conspiracy lurking behind the matches pushes everyone to face old grudges as much as their opponents. Kitao Sakurai directs.

• Andrew Koji — Ryu
• Noah Centineo — Ken Masters
• Callina Liang — Chun-Li
• David Dastmalchian — M. Bison
• Joe Anoaʻi — Akuma
• Cody Rhodes — Guile
• Vidyut Jammwal — Dhalsim
• Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson — Balrog
• Jason Momoa — Blanka

Plans for a follow-up are already being discussed, but first up is opening night: the new Street Fighter hits U.S. theaters on October 16, 2026.

In a recent sit-down with GQ’s Zach Baron for the magazine’s One More Question series, Ethan Hawke was asked about the bleak line “Fame is Black Death” from his novel The Hottest State. He wouldn’t say whether the line was his personal belief or a character’s, but he didn’t hesitate to describe what celebrity can do to a person.

“I wouldn't be the first person to say that there's an aspect of celebrity that is like a disease and you can handle little bits of it. It's a form of isolation and a form. It's like being put in a zoo, right? And zoo animals go nuts, and so do human beings.”

Hawke also acknowledged the upside — the money, the attention — while pointing out a quieter strain: not knowing who’s being genuine. He said the trick is learning how to live with it and use it well, adding that he aims to channel whatever fame he has into making good films.

Happy in the middle

Asked if younger people sometimes don’t recognize him, Hawke said yes — and laughed about a stranger at an airport who seemed surprised he was still working. He added that he actually prefers where he’s landed on the fame scale.

“I have a certain level of fame that is very pleasing to me, if I'm allowed to say that, which is that I'm getting to work with really talented people, and I really can go to the grocery store. And there's a certain level of fame above me, where life gets really uncomfortable.”

The goodbye played out on screen in a tense case that pushed Kevin Atwater to rethink his life off the job. In Season 14, Episode 2, Atwater stepped away from the Intelligence Unit and hinted at a move into teaching, a choice tied to the weight of fatherhood after a case hit painfully close to home.

For LaRoyce Hawkins, it caps a run that stretches back to the show’s early days, when Atwater was a rookie on patrol before becoming one of the unit’s most reliable voices. Over roughly a decade on the long-running Chicago P.D. on NBC, Atwater’s arc tracked promotions, hard choices, and a growing sense of responsibility that made this exit land with extra force.

Hawkins logged approximately 268 episodes as Kevin Atwater.

Who’s left the unit before

Hawkins joins a line of major departures that have reshaped the team more than once over the years:

• Sophia Bush — Erin Lindsay. Bush later alleged she endured a toxic work environment during her time on the series.
• Jon Seda — Antonio Dawson, a core player from the show’s early era.
• Jesse Lee Soffer — Jay Halstead, who exited in 2024 after more than a decade.

Separately, Tracy Spiridakos (Hailey Upton) has spoken out about unrealistic beauty standards placed on women in the industry, adding to ongoing conversations about what life behind the scenes can look like.

Shortly after the episode aired, Hawkins thanked viewers for the ride in a message on Instagram Stories.

On the carpet in Los Angeles on October 14, Sacha Baron Cohen answered in full Ali G mode when Variety asked why it took so long to bring the character back to the big screen.

“I've been very busy, I've been boning, I've been wanking a lot, I've been toking.”

Staying in character, Ali G also spun a tongue-in-cheek “business” tale: he said that after two seasons of his show he tried to make a third with HBO, but the talks fell apart. He claimed he’d been treated badly despite believing he brought huge value, and joked that he’d held the line for two decades.

“If you've got a dream, give it up.”

The new movie

Ali G: Who Iz I? picks up after 20 years of “chillin’, tokin’ and bonin’,” when Ali learns his longtime girlfriend, Julie, is eight months pregnant. Facing fatherhood, he heads to America to recapture his old fame, only to run into people who threaten his and his kid’s future.

• Sacha Baron Cohen writes, directs and stars — his feature directorial debut
• Morgana Robinson plays Julie

The comeback hasn’t been smooth. The first trailer sparked immediate pushback online, with viewers split over whether Ali G’s brand of provocation still works in 2026.

Ali G: Who Iz I? opens in theaters October 23, 2026.

On the red carpet at the premiere of his action thriller The Beast, Samuel L. Jackson got a very public request he’s heard a lot: can anyone actually nail a Samuel L. Jackson impression? When entertainment reporter Simone Boyce volunteered to try hers on the spot, Jackson didn’t sugarcoat his review.

“No, you did an impression of a bad actor trying to do a bad impression of me. That was great if that's what you were doing. But if you were really trying to do an impression of me, that was f****** horrible.”

Before Boyce’s attempt, Jackson said he hasn’t heard a single imitation that truly lands. He even name-checked Jamie Foxx as someone who thinks he’s got Jackson’s cadence down — and, in Jackson’s view, doesn’t.

Plenty of actors have tried their luck over the years. Tom Hiddleston once did a Jackson-as-Loki bit that fans loved online, though Jackson didn’t bring him up during this exchange.

That ‘Pulp Fiction’ verse

If the bar sounds high, consider the muscle memory he’s still carrying around. Marking the 32nd anniversary of Pulp Fiction, Jackson recently posted an Instagram video reciting the killer monologue his hitman Jules delivers before icing a guy named Brett — the faux–Bible verse that’s burned into movie history.

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.”

The speech, reworked by Quentin Tarantino for the film, remains one of its most quoted moments — and clearly one Jackson can still deliver word-perfect decades later.

When Ethan Hawke asked his eldest daughter what her friends thought after she showed them Before Sunrise, the reaction stopped him cold. As he told GQ’s One More Question, the group admired the film but got hung up on the most 2026 detail imaginable.

“Love that movie, but it was just so unrealistic,”

Their confusion centered on Jesse and Céline’s choice to part without swapping numbers. Hawke said he had to explain that when the movie was shot in 1994 and released in 1995, cell phones weren’t a given — and that the film wasn’t making a stylistic point about ditching technology.

“They thought we were making an artistic choice to have Jesse and Celine not have a phone,”

That single missing artifact changes how the romance lands for younger viewers. The couple’s plan to meet again in six months once felt thrillingly risky because the connection could actually vanish. Director Richard Linklater has previously talked about that scarcity giving the story its urgency; today, the same setup reads like a time capsule from a world before DMs and location sharing.

Back in Tulsa

Meanwhile, Hawke is very much in the present tense on TV. Season 2 of The Lowdown premiered October 14 on FX, with episodes also streaming on Hulu. He’s back as Lee Raybon, a self-described Tulsa “truthstorian,” rare-book dealer, and trouble magnet whose fixation on corruption has a way of getting him threatened.

• Tommy Lee Jones — Lee Raybon Sr., Lee’s estranged grifter father (awkward, since Lee has told daughter Francis her grandfather is dead)
• Betty Gilpin — joins the cast for the eight-episode season

Creator Sterlin Harjo keeps Tulsa baked into the show’s DNA. Hawke said filming in Tulsa was a big part of the draw, praising the communities, musicians, artists and local characters he met there; he even joked that actors unwilling to shoot in Oklahoma didn’t deserve the chance.

Season 2 runs eight episodes and is now airing on FX, with episodes streaming on Hulu.

During a recent sit-down for GQ’s One More Question with Zach Baron, Ethan Hawke didn’t hesitate when asked if his first Oscar nod marked a beginning or an ending. He went straight back to the moment after Training Day, when acclaim crashed into real life.

“That was like a professional high watermark that then quickly turned into a personal disaster zone,” Hawke said.

Hawke’s turn as rookie cop Jake Hoyt opposite Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris earned him his first Oscar nomination in 2002 and a jolt of commercial momentum. But he said fame can turn every mistake into a public spectacle, and that being candid about it still scares him.

“The world’s cold and mean,” he said.

He and Uma Thurman met making Gattaca and married in 1998. They separated in 2003 and finalized their divorce in 2005.

About that Moon Knight ending

Hawke later stepped into the MCU as Arthur Harrow, the devout cult leader who literally put broken glass in his shoes in Moon Knight (2022), playing opposite Oscar Isaac. The show’s post-credits button left Harrow in a bad way: Isaac’s alter Jake Lockley whisked him out of a psychiatric hospital, loaded him into Khonshu’s limousine, and shot him offscreen.

Marvel hasn’t said Harrow survived — or that Hawke will be back — and Hawke isn’t hanging his hat on a return. He joined the series largely out of friendship with Isaac and curiosity about the cultural juggernaut.

“They were really good to me,” Hawke said, noting that Marvel’s streaming plans evolved differently than he once expected.

As of now, Marvel hasn’t announced a second season of Moon Knight, and there’s no official word on Harrow’s fate or a Hawke comeback.

Playing Dhalsim—the series’ peaceful yogi—in the new Street Fighter movie, Indian action star Vidyut Jammwal brings a real martial-arts pedigree to a role that lives or dies on body control. He trained in the Indian discipline of Kalaripayattu from childhood at an ashram in Kerala, toured internationally to work with other fighters, and spent years doing live action shows before breaking out on film.

Jammwal’s résumé at home spans Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu hits, including Force, Commando, Billa II, and Thuppakki. He’s picked up major hardware along the way—Stardust, FICCI Frames, Filmfare and IIFA awards—and Men’s Health named him one of the Top 5 Fittest Men back in 2012.

He’s also been turning heads online lately with gravity-defying training clips and stunt reels. As for the money question: according to Techno Sports, Jammwal’s net worth is reportedly $6 million ahead of his Hollywood debut.

Who’s playing whom

• Noah Centineo — Ken
• Callina Liang — Chun-Li
• Vidyut Jammwal — Dhalsim

This marks the franchise’s first live-action feature in more than a decade, with filmmaker Kitao Sakurai directing the new installment, slated for 2026.

Sequel chatter

Sakurai told MovieWeb that a follow-up is already on the whiteboard, though there’s no official green light yet from Paramount and Legendary.

“It’s something that we’re thinking about and developing,” he explained.

He added that audience reaction and box-office performance will factor into whether a sequel moves forward. For now, the focus is on getting the 2026 film into theaters.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Tom Rhys Harries had some playful trash talk ready when the conversation turned to Gotham’s most famous vigilante. Asked about a potential showdown between his character and Batman, the Welsh actor didn’t hedge.

“I'm not sure Batman would stand a chance against Clay,” Harries quipped.

Harries said he dove into more than 80 years of comics to prepare for playing Matt Hagen, one of several iterations of the shape-shifting villain. He described Clayface as a straight-up horror movie that happens to live inside a comic-book world — one that starts like a rom-com for Hagen before everything curdles into something much darker.

A very American detour

The late-night appearance doubled as a travel diary. Harries brought his parents over and mapped out a road trip that felt proudly, almost comically, American — complete with coastal views and Sunday football.

• San Francisco — his parents flew in
• Big Sur — they road-tripped the California coast
• Santa Barbara — they met up with Harries
• Los Angeles — first night capped with Buffalo Bills vs. Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium

“I'm a maximalist and America speaks to the maximalist,” Harries said.

Kimmel joked that the family had jumped in headfirst, and Harries didn’t disagree — swapping jet lag for kickoff at SoFi is one way to do L.A.

The movie

Directed by James Watkins, the film follows Hagen, an aspiring Hollywood actor whose disfigurement leads him to an experimental treatment with monstrous side effects. The cast also includes Naomi Ackie and Max Minghella.

Clayface is set to open in North American theaters on October 23, 2026.

He doesn’t tiptoe into the story. In the opening hour of VisionQuest, the mercenary known as Paladin moves on Vision and the mission turns deadly, with Fiona killed in the crossfire. He’s not freelancing: Paladin reports to a handler, Dianne Morgan, and is taking cues from the shadows — Ultron is secretly in contact with him. When Paladin uncovers something even Vision hasn’t, that his son Tommy is alive, he gets there first and stashes the boy at Saint Mabyns, an asylum, turning a manhunt into leverage.

That escalation fits where the show has Vision now — marked with a bounty, hunted by forces that want to turn him back into a weapon. The series reframes Paladin as part of a centuries-long lineage of professional hunters who take contracts on heroes and villains alike, and the job on Vision isn’t just about a paycheck.

“We don’t know who is behind it, but for Paladin, it is more than just a job. It is more than just a contract… it is a blood oath,” showrunner Terry Matalas said during a panel at Star Trek Las Vegas.

From page to screen

Paladin’s comics history starts in 1977 on Gil Kane’s cover to Daredevil #150, billed there as a “man-stalker” who could read as hero or villain depending on the day. Inside the issue, writer Jim Shooter set him up with the classic Marvel swerve: he brawls with Daredevil before realizing they’re chasing the same target. Over the years he popped up as an honorable anti-hero, but Marvel Comics never gave him much backstory — a blank space the show uses to build out his family line of hunters and their code.

What he can do

On the page, Paladin isn’t superpowered — which is exactly why he’s scary. He’s the kind of operator who wins on preparation and precision. The show leans into that profile, with F.R.I.D.A.Y. flagging him as “trained in every art and every weapon.”

• Elite hand-to-hand training and sharpshooter aim
• Expert tracker who can tail a target through a city
• Heavy on tactics: studies opponents, anticipates moves
• High-tech gear: protective armor, specialized weapons, tracking tools

That profile tracks with his comics résumé — he’s fought Daredevil to a stalemate and taken contracts that put him against the Punisher and Elektra and still counted as a credible threat — and with the series beat where he pieces together Tommy’s fate before Vision does. Only two episodes have been released so far.

Set in 1993, the new live-action Street Fighter drops fans into the brutal World Warrior Tournament alongside a roster that mixes Hollywood names with real fighters and wrestling heavyweights. One of the most intriguing additions is Indian action star Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim — the yogic warrior known in the games for extreme flexibility and fire-breathing. He’s not just there to look the part; he brings serious martial-arts bona fides to a role that lives or dies on body control.

Jammwal began training in Kalaripayattu at age 3 at an ashram in Palakkad.

A real martial artist

Jammwal’s foundation is Kalaripayattu, an ancient discipline from Kerala that blends agile movement, striking, weapon work and intense control over balance and breath. That early start — and years of cross-training in other combat styles — shaped the fluid, acrobatic fighting style he’s built his career on, the kind that often looks too clean to be real until you learn he does it himself.

He’s long rejected shortcuts, leaning into punishing physical sequences that showcase timing and precision. In India, he’s known for turning action scenes into problem-solving exercises — how to scale, swing, flip or disarm without relying on movie magic.

No doubles, no wires

Jammwal’s self-imposed rule is simple: no cables, no body doubles. He’s carried that philosophy through films like Commando and Crakk, where he tackled set pieces that would normally go straight to a stunt team. On Crakk, a high-risk bridge sequence reportedly raised alarms over safety-cable issues — a reminder of how far he’s willing to push for authenticity, and how carefully productions have to plan around that commitment.

All of that matters for Dhalsim, a character defined by elasticity and breath control as much as flashy effects. The spiritual-warrior vibe and the contortionist body language are likely to lean on Jammwal’s real flexibility and discipline, even if the fire has to come from VFX.

Story-wise, the movie tracks three franchise staples into the tournament:

• Ryu
• Ken Masters
• Chun-Li

With Jammwal in the mix as Dhalsim — and a cast that includes bona fide bruisers alongside screen fighters — this Street Fighter is planned for 2026, aiming to ground its wildest characters in the kind of movement that reads as real even when the powers don’t.

In a new post on X, Mark Ruffalo tied his long-running crusade against the proposed Paramount–Skydance merger to a separate fight over California’s billionaire tax, using both to blast Gov. Gavin Newsom. The actor argued the governor keeps siding with wealthy interests, saying working people will pay the price in Hollywood and beyond.

“Just like the Paramount Merger Gavin Newsom does what he always does. Sells out the working class people for the billionaires again and again,”

Ruffalo’s post accused Newsom of backing a move that would make taxing the ultra-wealthy harder — and he linked that complaint directly to consolidation in entertainment. He’s been one of the loudest voices warning that a Paramount–Skydance tie-up would lead to job losses and less creative freedom, and he’s folded those concerns into a broader critique of political decisions he says favor billionaires.

What he says is at stake

Ruffalo and other critics argue the combined company would be so large and debt-heavy that cost-cutting would trump creative risk. Figures cited by opponents peg the merged operation’s value around $110.9 billion with debt near $80 billion, and they warn the company would be under pressure to crank out at least 30 theatrical films annually — a pace they say could favor safe bets over new voices.

• Jobs — projected layoffs across studios and production could hit below-the-line crews hardest.
• Creative freedom — fewer buyers, fewer greenlights, more franchise churn.
• Bargaining power — with fewer independent outlets, creators and smaller producers could have weaker leverage.
• Debt pressure — an estimated $80 billion tab, critics say, would push executives toward cuts over experimentation.
• Theatrical output — a 30-films-a-year target Ruffalo has railed against as quantity over quality.

Ruffalo has broadened his case beyond Hollywood boardrooms by linking the merger fight to California’s tax debate, framing both as choices that help billionaires and squeeze workers. He made the comments on X.

The union’s top honor will be handed out at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles on February 28, 2027, during the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards. The SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award spotlights a body of work that spans film, television, and the stage — the full arc of Al Pacino’s five-decade career.

Pacino marked the news with a nod to the craft itself and the people he’s worked alongside.

“I wondered and wandered most of my life but have always felt at home with a script and my fellow actors. It’s the work and the actors along the way that have been among the greatest joys of my life. It’s an honor to be recognized by SAG-AFTRA in celebrating the journey,”

The union, in announcing the tribute, pointed to the way his performances reshaped what screen acting could look and feel like.

“Across film, television and the stage, Pacino has captivated audiences with transformative performances, creating some of the most memorable characters in entertainment history and has profoundly influenced generations of actors and culture itself,”

From Corleone to contradictions

Part of the case for the honor is how wildly different his defining turns are — and how alive they feel moment to moment. The range stretches from a coiled Michael Corleone to combustible antiheroes and dogged truth-seekers.

• The Godfather — Michael Corleone’s simmering restraint that curdles into cold authority.
• Dog Day Afternoon — Sonny’s volatile swing between bravado, panic, and surprising vulnerability.
• Scarface — a portrait of unbridled ambition pushed to the edge.
• Serpico — an idealist NYPD officer isolated by his refusal to accept corruption.
• The Insider — controlled intensity and relentless determination in a journalism drama.

SAG-AFTRA’s citation also acknowledges the influence behind those titles — the pauses, sudden gear shifts, and barely contained energy that actors have studied ever since.

When and where

Pacino will receive the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award at the Actor Awards on February 28, 2027, at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles.

Timothée Chalamet says the next chapter isn’t just more sand and spectacle. In a new interview with Empire, he described Dune: Part Three as a sharp left turn for Paul Atreides — a story steeped in paranoia and isolation as the onetime liberator grapples with the cost of ruling.

“...its own beast. It’s its own story, its own siege, its own hail of paranoid isolation,” Chalamet said of the third film.

The shift lines up with Frank Herbert’s darker follow-up novel Dune Messiah, which the movie adapts. After the destruction of House Atreides in the first film and Paul’s rise among the Fremen in Part Two, the focus now moves to the fallout: what happens when a messiah becomes an emperor — and who pays for the legend that made him.

Villeneuve’s next move

As he heads into what’s planned as his third trip to Arrakis, director Denis Villeneuve told Empire he’s determined to keep the edges sharp, not comfortable.

“I want to make sure that I will be severe with the material. That I will not be complacent,” the filmmaker explained.

Villeneuve also said the timing was right to close the book on Arrakis because another franchise came calling. He’s attached to direct the next James Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios — an offer he called the push he needed to move on.

“When I was asked to do the next Bond, I said: ‘Okay, this is what I need,’” he told Empire.

Who’s in, and when it lands

Dune: Part Three is set to hit U.S. theaters on December 18, 2026. The cast includes a mix of returning faces and new power players:

• Zendaya
• Florence Pugh
• Jason Momoa
• Rebecca Ferguson
• Javier Bardem
• Anya Taylor-Joy
• Robert Pattinson

Warner Bros. has not yet announced additional release details beyond the theatrical rollout on December 18, 2026.

An original feature is taking shape for Tim Burton: a collaboration with Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, who has written an original screenplay set in Japan just after World War II. The project is still under wraps — no title, plot specifics, or cast — with Burton expected to direct, according to Deadline’s report.

The film is an original Kazuo Ishiguro script set in postwar Japan.

Per Deadline, the movie is not an adaptation of any Ishiguro novel, published or upcoming. There’s no distributor yet; the plan is to lock in key talent and then take the package to market. The project is said to be the filmmaker’s main focus since production on Wednesday Season 3 wrapped.

‘Corpse Bride’ climbs again

While the new film develops, one of Burton’s past favorites is back near the top of the streaming charts. Corpse Bride reached No. 4 on Max in October 2026, based on FlixPatrol data cited by Collider, ranking ahead of Coraline as well as horror mainstays like The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The rise came without a new sequel or tie-in pushing it there.

Co-directed by Burton and Mike Johnson, the stop-motion film follows a jittery groom who slips into the land of the dead after accidentally marrying a ghostly bride. Voice cast highlights include:

• Johnny Depp — Victor Van Dort
• Helena Bonham Carter — Emily (the Corpse Bride)
• Emily Watson — Victoria Everglot

What’s next

The Burton–Ishiguro feature remains in development with no casting or distributor announced. As reported, the team aims to assemble the right roster of talent before shopping the film to buyers.

The latest round of Robert Pattinson chatter started with a post from Culture Cave on X that claimed he’d “confirmed” he’s joining Alex Garland’s next A24 sci‑fi movie with Zendaya—and even attached a one‑liner to him: “It’s all about annoying Tom [Holland], really.” The line was tailor‑made to go viral, but there’s a hitch: there’s no verified casting news to back it up.

Trade outlets including Variety and TheWrap have reported that Zendaya is attached to star in Garland’s untitled A24 project. Neither outlet mentions Pattinson, and no official announcement from A24, Garland, or the film’s producers has named him to the cast.

• Confirmed: Zendaya is set for an untitled A24 sci‑fi film from director Alex Garland.
• Not confirmed: Robert Pattinson’s involvement—no credible trade reporting or studio comment names him in the cast.
• Source of the rumor: a Culture Cave post on X that attributed a joking quote to Pattinson; the attribution has not been verified.

Garland, known for Ex Machina and this year’s Civil War, tends to keep plot details tight until he’s ready. If Pattinson ends up in the mix, it’ll come via the usual channels—studio or filmmaker confirmation, or a report from a reliable trade—none of which has happened yet.

Meanwhile, in Gotham

Separate from the A24 rumor mill, Pattinson’s next turn as Bruce Wayne hit a speed bump. Warner Bros. and DC Studios said The Batman Part II is on a temporary pause while director Matt Reeves focuses on a family matter, adding their support for the filmmaker.

“We’re pausing for a little bit, and then we’re going to figure it all out.”

That’s how Pattinson put it to Official Pop Drop while promoting Primetime. The sequel remains dated for February 18, 2028.

Asked by GQ’s Zach Baron what kind of recognition actually matters to him, Ethan Hawke didn’t point to the Oscars. He zeroed in on the prizes decided by festival juries — the ones handed out in dark screening rooms by a handful of peers — and joked that he’s never snagged one. That, he said with a grin, is why he thinks of himself as a “loser.”

“I’m just a loser. I think it’s just envy that’s kept me from the prize,”

Hawke explained that he admires how jury awards at top festivals can land without campaigning or a box-office push attached. As an example, he pointed to Juliette Binoche, who’s won across the major circuit, and contrasted that low-hype world with the bigger business swirling around Oscar season. His own Oscar history spans both acting and writing — including co-writing two of the Before films — but in his mind, those jury decisions feel purer.

• Cannes Film Festival
• Berlin International Film Festival
• Venice Film Festival

“I’ve been nominated five times. I think that sounds really cool.”

He kept the tone playful, but he also drew a line around how much attention he wants. Hawke said he likes the fame level he’s at — famous enough to work with great directors and actors, but not so recognizable that a grocery run becomes an ordeal. In his view, stardom can turn sour if you keep feeding the need for praise.

He told a quick airport story to make the point: a traveler asked if he was still acting and told him to keep going. Different people know him from different corners of his résumé, and he’s good with that.

• Training Day
• Sinister
• Before Sunrise

Hawke said he likes that his career jumps across genres and eras — and that he’s stayed in the sweet spot where the work is front and center, not the trophy chase.

On Instagram on October 15, Anna Faris addressed the passage in Chuck Lorre’s new memoir that questions her casting on CBS’s Mom, saying the remarks blindsided her.

“Yikes. Yes, I read a few things. I really didn’t see that coming. Of course it hurts.”

Faris also kept the focus on what the show gave her, calling out the people she worked with and the years she spent there. “I’m proud of what we made together, and nothing changes how grateful I am for those people and those years,” she wrote, adding that she never took the seven seasons she played Christy Plunkett for granted.

The reaction follows Lorre’s account in his memoir Sitcom, where he writes that he initially questioned whether Faris was right for Christy — a single mom trying to get sober — and later suggested that her exit before the final season affirmed those early doubts. Faris left the show after Season 7; Lorre’s book revisits that decision and his thinking at the time.

Mom ran for eight seasons on CBS from 2013 to 2021, pairing Faris with Allison Janney as mother-daughter duo Christy and Bonnie Plunkett. After Faris departed ahead of Season 8, Janney continued as Bonnie for the final run.

Another casting fight

Lorre’s book also details a very different battle behind Mike & Molly. According to Sitcom, CBS initially pushed back on his choice of Melissa McCarthy as Molly Flynn, with one network executive reportedly suggesting a slimmer actress in a fat suit instead — an idea Lorre rejected as he pushed for McCarthy.

“Once again, my brilliant casting director, Nikki Valko, brought in a comic genius. Melissa McCarthy. And once again, CBS hated her,” Lorre writes.

The decision paid off: McCarthy won the Emmy in 2011 for Mike & Molly — the same year Bridesmaids vaulted her to big-screen fame and earned her an Oscar nomination.

In a new chat with Empire, Denis Villeneuve said the thing that finally pried him away from Arrakis was a tux, a martini, and a sidearm. After years immersed in sandworms and prophecy, the filmmaker explained he needed a jolt strong enough to reset his brain — and when James Bond came calling, that was it.

“I thought, ‘When it’s done, I need a very powerful rocket to pull me away from Arrakis.’”

Villeneuve added that when the 007 offer landed, his reaction was immediate.

“Okay, this is what I need.”

The franchise is personal to him. Villeneuve has said some of his earliest movie memories are watching Bond with his father, starting with Sean Connery in Dr. No. When Amazon MGM named him director, he called Bond “sacred territory” and vowed to respect the character’s history while opening the door to new missions.

The handoff comes after No Time to Die ended Daniel Craig’s 15-year run in 2021. Amazon MGM has since teamed with longtime stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson on the next era, with Amy Pascal and David Heyman producing and Steven Knight writing the screenplay. Amazon said in May that the search for Craig’s successor had officially begun; no actor has been announced.

First, finish Dune

Before Villeneuve takes aim with the Walther PPK, his space-epic trilogy wraps on December 18 with Dune: Part Three, adapted from Dune Messiah. The story jumps nearly two decades after Paul Atreides seized the Imperium, finding him haunted by the cost of his rule as a conspiracy tightens around his throne.

The returning and new faces include:

• Timothée Chalamet — Paul Atreides
• Zendaya
• Florence Pugh
• Javier Bardem
• Rebecca Ferguson
• Anya Taylor-Joy
• Jason Momoa
• Charlotte Rampling
• Robert Pattinson — Scytale

Villeneuve co-wrote the screenplay with Brian K. Vaughan. Warner Bros. has already released a teaser and full trailer, and Vaughan told WIRED he caught an intimate advance screening and considers the finished film his favorite of the three.

Bond comes next for Villeneuve. For now, 007 remains uncast.

The faun we met on screen was almost someone very different. Filmmakers behind The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had initially hired a seasoned actor in his mid-30s to play Mr. Tumnus, then reversed course when they zeroed in on what the character actually does in his first scenes with Lucy: he brings a little girl to his home, lulls her with tea and music, and plans to turn her over to the White Witch before his conscience kicks in. That shift led them to James McAvoy, who was in his early 20s but read much younger.

“As much as Mr. Tumnus is cute and they like they do become genuine friends. He is also somebody who’s kidnapping her,” McAvoy explained on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“we can’t have a man do this, right? And so they were like we need a boy.”

McAvoy has said he remembers almost nothing about his audition, but he distinctly recalls the reasoning that won him the job. He joked he looked about 14 at the time — harmless enough to sell the character’s conflicted kindness without making the setup feel predatory. The part also landed close to home for him: he grew up rewatching a taped BBC adaptation and rereading C.S. Lewis’ book.

First day, worst day

Long before Narnia, McAvoy’s first day as a professional actor was rough. On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, he said an unnamed co-star on HBO’s Band of Brothers rallied a group to point and laugh at him for several minutes during a shoot — his very first day out of drama school. Looking back, he rated the overall experience a nine out of ten, but that specific day “a two.”

The incident happened during a crowded bar scene. As McAvoy told it, many actors had spent nine or ten months on the series for a line here and there, while he came in for a single episode with real dialogue and an arc, which may have stirred resentment. He made clear David Schwimmer wasn’t involved. McAvoy appears in the episode “Replacements” as Private First Class James W. Miller.

If you’ve never seen Marjoe—the Oscar-winning, exposé-style documentary about former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner—the easiest way in right now is the free, ad-supported route in the U.S. The film is widely available without a subscription, and most apps don’t even require an account.

• Watch free (with ads): Tubi, Fawesome, Plex, Cineverse, Fandango at Home Free

It’s not on Netflix—in the U.S. it’s free (with ads) on Tubi, Plex, Cineverse, Fawesome and Fandango at Home Free.

Prefer to fold it into a live TV or specialty doc subscription? It’s included on Philo, fuboTV, and via the Fandor and DocuramaFilms channels on Amazon. If you’d rather just rent it, prices start at about $2.99 on Amazon Video; Apple TV lists it for $2.99–$3.99 to rent and from about $7.99 to buy. Availability tends to shift, so a quick check on JustWatch before you pay can save you a few bucks.

Running a tight 88 minutes, the 1972 film was directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan after Gortner approached Smith in 1971 looking for publicity. The tagline—“You Keep the Faith… Marjoe Keeps the Money”—sets the tone as Gortner, ordained at age 4, walks the filmmakers through the stagecraft behind revival preaching. Free options are strongest inside the U.S., with some reach in Canada.

Netflix’s October docs

Netflix doesn’t carry Marjoe, but October’s nonfiction slate is stacked with music, comedy and sports stories. Here’s what rolled out, date by date:

• Oct 2: Schumacher ’94 – The Birth of a Legend — how the 1994 season made Michael Schumacher a German hero.
• Oct 5: Lorne — director Morgan Neville profiles Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels.
• Oct 7: Who Is Martin Mull? — a look at the late comedian and actor.
• Oct 10: The First Monday in May — behind the 2015 Met exhibition and its star-studded gala.
• Oct 12: Free Leonard Peltier — from directors Jesse Short Bull and David France, following the campaign to free the activist.
• Oct 13: TYSON — a four-part series; plus Surviving Hurricane Otis, about two half-brothers in Acapulco.
• Oct 16: The Disciple — on the Wu-Tang Clan album that sold at auction for a reported $2 million; and Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, Judd Apatow’s tribute to the comedian.
• Oct 23: Paralyzed by Hope — a portrait of Maria Bamford.
• Oct 28: The One About Matthew Perry.
• Oct 29: SCTV closes the month.

The top spot goes to The Haunting of Hill House, and it’s not a close call. The 2018 Netflix breakout marries knockout scares with a family story that actually hurts, from the Crains’ doomed 1992 “flip this mansion” plan to the adult siblings dragged back together by fresh loss. Signature moments like the Bent‑Neck Lady live rent‑free in October brains, but it’s the cast — Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Victoria Pedretti — that makes the haunt feel personal.

All six series are streaming now in the U.S.: five on Netflix, one on Prime Video.

Second place belongs to Midnight Mass (2021, Netflix), a pressure cooker set on Crockett Island where Riley Flynn returns from prison just as a magnetic young priest starts “miracles” that come with a cost. Hamish Linklater’s turn as Father Paul is the standout, with Zach Gilford, Kate Siegel and Samantha Sloyan grounding the town’s faith, guilt and denial. It simmers, sermon by sermon, into a brutal finale that sticks.

Third is The Fall of the House of Usher (2023, Netflix), Mike Flanagan’s bloodiest playground. Pharma titan Roderick Usher watches his six adult children die one by one, while a late‑night confession unspools the family’s pact‑ridden past. Edgar Allan Poe threads through every set piece, and Bruce Greenwood leads a gleefully nasty ensemble with Mary McDonnell, Mark Hamill and Gugino. The kills are inventive and the black comedy bites — pure entertainment, even if the spectacle outweighs the sentiment of Flanagan’s top two.

The rest of the lineup

At No. 4, The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020, Netflix) trades jump scares for gothic romance. In 1980s England, American au pair Dani Clayton arrives to care for two orphaned kids at a remote estate where the dead won’t let go. The heartbeat is Dani’s bond with the gardener, Jamie — a love story that softens the edges of the haunt.

• Victoria Pedretti — Dani Clayton
• Amelia Eve — Jamie
• Oliver Jackson‑Cohen — Peter Quint
• T’Nia Miller — Hannah

No. 5 is Carrie (2026, Prime Video), an eight‑episode Stephen King adaptation that launched with a promising Rotten Tomatoes start. Carrie White is shoved into public high school after her father’s sudden death, bullied online and controlled by her fanatically religious mother. The update lands its takes on cruelty and faith, with strong work across the board, even if it never hits the atmospheric highs of the Netflix titles above.

• Summer H. Howell — Carrie White
• Samantha Sloyan — Margaret White
• Matthew Lillard — the principal

Rounding things out at No. 6, The Midnight Club (2022, Netflix) gathers terminally ill teens in a hospice for nightly ghost stories — and a pact that whoever dies first will reach back from the other side. The show layers an overarching mystery over its story‑of‑the‑week chills; some tales land, others drift, and the tone leans more teen drama than full‑bore dread.

• Iman Benson
• Igby Rigney
• Ruth Codd
• Annarah Cymone
• Zach Gilford (supporting)
• Samantha Sloyan (supporting)

• 1) The Haunting of Hill House — Netflix (2018), streaming now
• 2) Midnight Mass — Netflix (2021), streaming now
• 3) The Fall of the House of Usher — Netflix (2023), streaming now
• 4) The Haunting of Bly Manor — Netflix (2020), streaming now
• 5) Carrie — Prime Video (2026), all eight episodes available now
• 6) The Midnight Club — Netflix (2022), streaming now

The first look from set is only 16 seconds, but it’s pure reunion energy: Sydney Sweeney wraps Kirsten Dunst in a hug, Brittany Snow is dancing off to the side, and Michele Morrone grins next to a “Lionsgate Stage 1” sign. The clip, posted October 15, 2026, also revealed cameras have already been rolling in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Shared by the official The Housemaid account on X, the video confirmed a fresh slate of characters for the sequel while keeping its locked-door mystery intact. The studio is referring to the project as The Housemaid’s Secret (also seen as “The Housemaid 2” in materials), and it’s headed to theaters with a holiday frame in 2027.

The Housemaid’s Secret is set to open in theaters on December 17, 2027.

Cast roll call

Dunst steps into a newly revealed role, joining returning faces and new additions. Here’s who the clip and official posts name so far:

• Kirsten Dunst — Wendy Garrick
• Brittany Snow — Marybeth
• Paul Anthony Kelly — Douglas Garrick
• Stephen Kalyn — Brock
• Michele Morrone — role TBA

Sweeney leads the sequel after fronting the first film; the footage teases a warmer-than-usual Day 1 vibe for a thriller built on secrets and locked rooms.

Why there’s a sequel

The 2025 movie The Housemaid turned a reported $35 million budget into roughly $400 million worldwide. It opened to about $19 million domestically in mid-December and then held through the holidays on word of mouth — the kind of legs that get a follow-up greenlit in a hurry.

That first film largely stuck to Freida McFadden’s novel, with director Paul Feig opening up the finale and altering one key fate: Andrew falls down the stairs in the film instead of dying in the attic as in the book.

What the story is this time

Feig returns to direct from a script by Rebecca Sonnenshine. The official logline mirrors the book of the same name: Millie takes a job cleaning a penthouse owned by a tech executive while his wife is kept locked in a guest room — a setup built for a cascade of twists.

Production is underway, with the cast announcement arriving via that 16-second set clip and filming spotted in Hoboken, New Jersey. The movie is dated for December 17, 2027 in theaters.

Production on The Batman Part II is restarting after a short pause — with a twist behind the camera. Steven Soderbergh has stepped in to finish principal photography while director Matt Reeves temporarily attends to a family matter. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Soderbergh will oversee the shoot in London, with Reeves continuing to guide the movie from Los Angeles and planning to be hands-on again in post.

• Steven Soderbergh will complete the London shoot
• Matt Reeves remains the film’s director and will steer post-production from LA
• Filming is reportedly about two-thirds complete
• Robert Pattinson returns as Batman

Reeves made a point of clarifying his role as news of the arrangement broke, saying he remains very much attached to the sequel even as Soderbergh helps bring the current leg of filming home.

“Just to be clear, I am not leaving The Batman Part II. I am profoundly grateful to Steven for coming to my aid during this challenging time to help me finish principal photography,” Reeves wrote on X.

The switch arrives after the shoot briefly halted, a pause star Robert Pattinson had recently told fans would be short. It’s not the first time a major superhero project has seen a midstream handoff on set — 2017’s Justice League, for example, shifted from Zack Snyder to Joss Whedon during production — but in this case Reeves is staying on and overseeing the film as it heads to the finish line.

The sequel’s tone

Pattinson has been hinting at how the follow-up is evolving from the 2022 hit, saying the new chapter pushes into fresh territory while carrying over key elements from the first film’s world.

“It’s so ambitious. I mean, I sort of said the other day on something that the first one was a different take on a Batman movie, and this one is another,” he told Collider.

Reeves has previously said that Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan have joined the project. Plot and villain details remain under wraps, but Pattinson’s “another take” comment has fueled speculation about how the sequel expands Gotham.

With Soderbergh now running the set in London and Reeves coordinating from LA, cameras are rolling again as the production moves through its final stretch of principal photography.

In a rapid shuffle on the top floor at Netflix, former Disney executive Peter Rice will step in as Chief Content Officer on October 26, following the sudden exit of Bela Bajaria after nearly a decade. The change lands in the same week Netflix began cutting about 6% of its staff — roughly 1,000 employees — in the streamer’s largest layoff since 2022.

Why now

The switch comes as Netflix faces a tougher attention game at home. In July, YouTube accounted for 14.2% of connected‑TV viewing in the U.S., with Netflix at 7.8%. Company engagement grew just 2% in the first half of 2026, while Netflix’s share price has fallen more than 40% over the past year.

Bajaria joined Netflix in 2016 from Universal Television and, per Deadline, built the streamer’s unscripted division, managed an annual content budget near $20 billion, and helped push into live programming via WWE and NFL deals. Her tenure also delivered some of Netflix’s most-watched franchises:

• Squid Game
• Bridgerton
• Stranger Things
• Wednesday
• Beef

“After a phenomenal decade at Netflix, Bela is leaving the company,” Co‑CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in an internal email, adding it’s “hard to overstate the impact Bela has had during her time here,” according to Deadline.

Who’s taking over

Rice arrives with a different toolkit. He ran Fox Searchlight, steering prestige films, then became chairman of Walt Disney Television, where his portfolio included:

• The Simpsons
• Abbott Elementary
• Shōgun

He left Disney in 2022 after being pushed out by then‑CEO Bob Chapek.

The layoffs

The cuts began Wednesday, October 14, when Sarandos and Co‑CEO Greg Peters told staff in a memo that Netflix would reduce its workforce by about 6%. Netflix had roughly 16,000 full‑time employees at the end of 2025. The memo said most reductions hit product, technology, legal, and HR, and noted the business remains on track to meet its full‑year forecast.

Several content leaders also exited in the shake‑up:

• Doug Belgrad — film vice president
• Carolina Garcia — TV executive
• James Oh — TV executive

Netflix is expected to report earnings around October 20.

In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes From a Life in Progress, shared by Variety, Sophia Bush says the note that came back after her first One Tree Hill audition wasn’t about acting at all. Executives, relaying feedback through her agent, wanted her to look “more” like Brooke Davis — and made it clear they thought she didn’t.

So she recalibrated for round two, leaning into an edgier, sexier look — and still hit another wall.

“For the second audition, I went hot-girl-meets-punk-rock—a military miniskirt, stilettos with sharp gold heels, a dark, low-cut tank top, and smudgy eyeliner. The response? ‘This is too much. We want high school s***, not college s***,’” she wrote.

Bush writes that she wasn’t an expert at curating a character’s wardrobe — that’s what costume departments are for — and the back-and-forth gave her real anxiety. A woman in the show’s costume department ultimately stepped in to help her nail the look that would let the team “see” Brooke, the charismatic queen bee who became one of the series’ signature characters.

How Brooke was born

The actress also shares that Brooke didn’t exist in early conversations about the show. With so many heavy plotlines baked into the teen drama, execs were reportedly looking for a spark of levity and mischief — and that’s where Brooke came in.

“A fiery addition who could offer comic relief and stir the pot. A little bit of sass, a little bit of joy!” she wrote. “Thus, Brooke Davis was born.”

Bush admits she initially didn’t see herself as a match for the role, but when a separate ABC pilot fell through, she took another look at One Tree Hill — and landed it. She went on to play Brooke Davis for nine seasons, later headlining series including Chicago P.D. and Good Sam.

Asked about the next chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s saga during a Collider sit-down for his new project Whalefall, Josh Brolin joked that he’s already mad at Dune: Part Three—and he hasn’t even seen it yet. Host Steve Weintraub mentioned he’d heard from someone who caught a cut of the movie and “f****** loved it,” which set Brolin up for a deadpan bit about his own screen time.

“I believed I was the lead. And I’m pissed. I’m super angry about it.”

Brolin returns as Gurney Halleck, the battle-scarred Atreides warrior and mentor who’s been in the thick of it since Villeneuve’s first film. His mock outrage landed as a gag, but it does nudge a real question: how central will Gurney be in the trilogy’s finale?

The next film’s shape

Villeneuve recently told Empire that the tone and tempo will shift for the conclusion. “We are back with the same characters, but this time the world has totally changed,” he said, framing the story as a reckoning with what Paul Atreides set in motion after rising to power.

Dune: Part Three is set 17 years after Part Two, with Paul now Emperor and wrestling with the consequences of his rule. Villeneuve has described the movie as keeping the series’ identity while embracing a different rhythm and pace.

• The story jumps 17 years forward, with Paul dealing with the fallout of his reign.
• Villeneuve says the finale keeps the core of his first two films but changes the rhythm.
• Brolin’s Gurney Halleck returns alongside “the same characters,” per Villeneuve.
• Earlier reports said the film will include about 71 minutes of IMAX-exclusive footage.

As for that early reaction Weintraub relayed—someone who saw a cut and “f****** loved it”—Brolin laughed that he still hasn’t watched the movie himself, joking through gritted teeth about not being top-billed.

Dune: Part Three is slated to open in theaters on December 18, 2026.

On a recent episode of The Kardashians, Kim Kardashian said she’d been angling for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame only to learn why the answer keeps being no.

“But I've never qualified because like reality TV isn't walk of Star worthy,” she explained.

She punctuated the point with a pop-culture curveball.

“I mean Lassie has one, Miss Piggy has one. I'd like one, it would be nice,” Kardashian said.

She’s not wrong on the trivia: Lassie got a star back in 1960, and Miss Piggy shares the honor given to The Muppets in 2012.

The Walk of Fame has long been picky about categories. In 2011, representatives publicly brushed off reality stars. The current nomination criteria call for professional achievement, at least five years of work in a specific entertainment field, community contributions, and a commitment to show up for the ceremony.

Next play: Netflix

Kardashian’s next move could be the kind of credit that changes that conversation. She’s leading and producing the Netflix ensemble comedy The Fifth Wheel, directed by Eva Longoria, about a girls’ trip to Las Vegas that goes sideways when Kardashian’s outsider crashes the reunion.

• Kim Kardashian — an interloper who upends the getaway (also a producer)
• Nikki Glaser — one of the longtime friends
• Fortune Feimster — one of the longtime friends
• Brenda Song — one of the longtime friends

Netflix shared production photos in January 2026, confirming cameras are rolling. The streamer still lists the film as “coming soon,” with no premiere date announced.

Separately, French network Canal+ has ordered a four-part docuseries, Kim, the Diamond and the Grandpa Robbers, about Kardashian’s 2016 Paris robbery; she’s reportedly not involved. No U.S. release details have been announced.

On the latest episode of her podcast Are You a Charlotte?, Kristin Davis told former co-star Evan Handler that early fittings with Patricia Field on Sex and the City were bumpy. Davis said Field struggled with how to dress her body in an era obsessed with straight, narrow silhouettes.

“She would just be so frustrated with my curves because at the time when we started — 1998 or whatever it was, 1997 — everything was straight, like straight. And I’ve never been straight, nothing, no amount of dieting.”

Davis said she even tried eating “like a ballet dancer” before moving toward a healthier routine. Over time, things eased up between them; by Season 6, she felt Field had accepted her shape — and Davis specifically shouted out the wedding gown designed for Charlotte that season. It’s a notable footnote for a character who racked up signature looks, from tulle and pearls to that unforgettable pink dress.

Handler had his own gripes

Handler — who played Charlotte’s husband, Harry Goldenblatt — remembered being less than thrilled with some of his wardrobe too. He acknowledged Harry was supposed to be a simple, unfussy guy, but he didn’t love how that translated in the closet.

“And I was being given these, what felt to me at the time, kind of ill-fitting, stiff, not very attractive suits and ugly ties,” he said. “And she kept [telling me], ‘I’m going to show you the greatest thing ever.’ And I would think it was hideous.”

Handler added that he mostly kept quiet at the time because he was new to the show, and he now credits Field’s bold fashion sense as one of the series’ secret weapons.

Who’s dressing the revival

For the Max revival And Just Like That…, the costume department is led by Molly Rogers — a longtime Field collaborator — alongside Danny Santiago, carrying the show’s style legacy forward on the new chapters of Charlotte’s story.

On the red carpet at the BFI London Film Festival, Aran Murphy said the most helpful thing his dad shared before he stepped onto a movie set for the first time wasn’t about technique or career strategy. It was about how to carry himself as he makes his feature debut in Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel.

“He kind of always just says trust your instincts. It's a pretty universal piece of advice, but yeah, trust your instincts and be kind to people.”

Murphy offered the comment to Deadline at the festival, a rare glimpse into a famously private family. His father, Cillian Murphy—known to U.S. audiences from Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer—has largely kept his two sons out of the spotlight.

The film he’s joining

Directed by Taika Waititi, Klara and the Sun centers on Klara, an “Artificial Friend” designed to combat loneliness. When she’s brought home by a girl named Josie, Klara becomes entwined with a family navigating grief and big decisions about the future. Aran plays Rick, Josie’s close friend.

• Jenna Ortega — Klara, an Artificial Friend
• Mia Tharia — Josie
• Aran Murphy — Rick, Josie’s close friend

• Amy Adams
• Steve Buscemi
• Natasha Lyonne

Based on Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, the movie looks at where artificial intelligence meets emotion and what “being human” really means. It’s set to open in theaters October 23, 2026.

Filming hit pause in October when Matt Reeves stepped away for a private family matter. Into that gap walked Steven Soderbergh, who — according to Deadline — reached out himself and offered to direct the remaining weeks of principal photography on The Batman: Part II. Warner Bros. and DC Studios signed off, with Reeves staying involved remotely during the shoot and planning to take the reins again in post-production.

Soderbergh isn’t there to reinvent Gotham. He’s there to match what’s already in the can. He publicly praised Reeves’ first film and laid out a simple mandate: shoot material that can slot right into Reeves’ cut, not overhaul it or change the tone.

Reeves’ movie was “intentional, specific, and rigorously coherent,” Soderbergh said, adding that his goal is to create footage that will “integrate seamlessly” with what’s already been filmed.

Roughly two-thirds of principal photography was completed before the stoppage, per The Hollywood Reporter (via Entertainment Weekly). Earlier this year the production shot in London, where set photos captured a Gotham simmering with street protests; Reeves also shared a moody camera test showing Robert Pattinson in an upgraded cowl.

The handoff comes after a bumpy ride to release. The sequel’s date has slid several times — from an initial October 2025 window to 2026, then 2027, and now February 18, 2028. Reeves and Mattson Tomlin finished a painstaking script in June 2025, and cameras finally rolled before October’s pause.

Why Soderbergh fits

If you need someone to keep a complex machine running, the guy who won Best Director for Traffic is a decent pick. Soderbergh has a track record of precision and control — from the clockwork cool of Ocean’s Eleven to the procedural snap of Contagion and the backstage business smarts of Magic Mike. More recently he’s leaned into tight, nervy thrillers like Black Bag and Presence, and he’s no stranger to slotting into other filmmakers’ worlds, having directed second-unit material on The Hunger Games and even shot and edited Magic Mike XXL.

• Jeffrey Wright — Soderbergh previously directed him in The Laundromat.
• Sebastian Stan — worked together on Logan Lucky.
• Brian Tyree Henry — collaborated on TV’s The Knick.

At minimum, that’s a filmmaker comfortable with ensembles and familiar faces — including Wright, who is back in Gotham as Jim Gordon.

This isn’t Justice League 2.0

DC has lived through a high-profile director swap before. In 2017’s Justice League, Zack Snyder left during a family tragedy as Warner Bros. pushed for a lighter tone and shorter runtime. Joss Whedon stepped in, rewrote, and reshot large chunks, resulting in a movie that mixed two sensibilities and underwhelmed at the box office (about $658 million worldwide) and with critics. The CG-erased mustache on Henry Cavill became a symbol of the chaos. Behind the scenes, actor Ray Fisher alleged mistreatment by Whedon, while Gal Gadot also reported negative experiences; Warner Bros. said it investigated and took unspecified remedial action. Ben Affleck later called the reshoots the “low point” of his career on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and Snyder’s four-hour cut arrived in 2021 to show what might’ve been.

The situation on The Batman: Part II is different in key ways. The movie is largely shot, there’s no announced script overhaul, and Reeves remains the creative lead — collaborating during Soderbergh’s weeks on set and set to oversee the edit.

“I am not leaving The Batman Part II,” Reeves said, emphasizing he’ll steer the film through post-production.

The plan now is straightforward: finish principal photography under Soderbergh’s steady hand, then hand the keys back to Reeves to complete the movie. For fans marking their calendars, the studio is still pointing to February 18, 2028.

The slasher iconography you’re expecting isn’t showing up—on purpose. In the new Crystal Lake series, creator Brad Caleb Kane winds the clock back to the 1970s and builds the story around Pamela Voorhees, with Linda Cardellini playing the doomed camp cook-turned-avenger. That timeline choice is why Jason’s famous hockey mask never enters the frame.

Kane said the omission isn’t about legal red tape; it’s about staying true to when things happen in the franchise. He told Variety the show takes place before the first movie’s murders—and long before Jason picked up his most recognizable accessory in Part III.

“But we’re doing a show that predates Pamela’s murder in the first movie, and the hockey mask … obviously, we all know that didn’t come until the third movie.”

As a prequel, Crystal Lake leans into Pamela’s backstory—her grief, the camp, the events that set the legend in motion—rather than Jason’s later-era look. It’s structured as an eight-episode run.

• Setting — 1970s Crystal Lake, before the original film
• Focus — Pamela Voorhees, played by Linda Cardellini
• Episode count — Eight
• Iconography — No hockey mask; it arrives in the third movie’s timeline

More brutal than the movies

What the show lacks in the mask, Kane says it makes up for in carnage. Appearing at New York Comic Con, he promised bigger, nastier set pieces than longtime fans might expect, telling The Hollywood Reporter the body count and creativity go beyond much of the film series.

“So if you’re wondering if we’re ever going to go full fathom Friday the 13th, we go there and we drop a lot of bodies in really creative ways. It’s a lot more brutal. I think it’s even more brutal in many ways from some of the movies.”

Cardellini also told Variety to brace for graphic moments, noting some scenes get downright gory—fitting for a story anchored to the origins of a horror myth and the violence that forged it.

Kane added to Variety that there were no rights issues blocking the mask’s use; it simply doesn’t belong in this stretch of the story.

At the Los Angeles premiere of Street Fighter, Seth Rollins didn’t dance around his dream role when a reporter asked which video game hero he wants to bring to the big screen. He named the stealth icon from Konami’s long-running series and even volunteered that he’s been “training” for it by jumping back into an old favorite.

I would love to play Solid Snake. I love Metal Gear Solid growing up, all the iterations of it. I even just went back and played Snake Eater recently so I think I'd make a good Snake.

Rollins told ScreenRant he’d be up for playing Solid Snake, the protagonist of Metal Gear Solid, the landmark stealth franchise created by Hideo Kojima. Snake’s decades of lore include infiltration missions, high-tech gadgets and, yes, the series’ famous cardboard-box disguises.

There is a movie in the works. In April, Sony tapped “Final Destination: Bloodlines” filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein to develop a new Metal Gear Solid film. Rollins isn’t attached to the project; for now, his Snake talk is a very public pitch.

Wrestlers on the big screen

Rollins’ wish comes as fellow WWE headliners make their own gaming leap with Street Fighter, directed by Kitao Sakurai. The cast includes multiple ring-to-screen crossovers alongside a roster of fan-favorite fighters:

• Roman Reigns — Akuma
• Cody Rhodes — Guile
• Noah Centineo — Ken
• Andrew Koji — Ryu
• Jason Momoa — Blanka

Boxoffice Pro’s October 14 forecast has Street Fighter tracking for a $25 million–$35 million domestic opening weekend, down from an earlier $30 million–$40 million outlook. Early critical response started at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes before rising into the 40s as more reviews posted.

Street Fighter opens in North American theaters on October 16.

The goodbye plays out fast and brutal in Law & Order Season 26’s second hour, “Into the Mystic.” Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) leaves a voicemail for ADA Nolan Price and calls Detective Walker for backup, then heads to a neighborhood bar where he believes a lead, Ray Biller, will surface.

Riley finds Biller and tries to talk him down. Biller bolts and fires, hitting Riley. Walker discovers his partner on the street and rushes him to the hospital, where Riley dies.

Riley’s farewell happens in Season 26, Episode 2 (“Into the Mystic”).

The episode pivots to the fallout. Detective Violet Yee connects the dots: Price had prosecuted Biller’s brother, Wayne Biller, years earlier, and Wayne was killed in prison just a week before Riley’s death. Ray Biller was allegedly hunting for Price; Riley crossed his path. By the end of the case, Biller is convicted of Riley’s murder.

In a final tribute, Riley’s name is added to the NYPD Wall of Honor.

Who replaces Riley

Before the episode aired, producers had already lined up a new senior detective. James Badge Dale will join the squad (character name still under wraps), according to Deadline. Dale’s past credits include 13 Hours and 1923.

As for Reid Scott, reports describe his exit as a mutual decision, driven by the cross‑country commute to shoot in New York and spending roughly nine months away from his family.

Mid-summit and on-mic, the U.S. Ambassador to the UK walks off the job. In the climactic minutes of The Diplomat season 4, Kate steps away from the G7 podium, hands over her badge and resigns in front of America’s closest allies — a public break with the White House that triggers an immediate chain reaction. Within moments, Chief of Staff Billie Appiah and Secretary of State Miguel Ganon follow her out.

Kate resigns during the G7 opening remarks, badge in hand, in full view of U.S. allies.

The breaking point

The last straw isn’t the G7 staging — it’s what led there. Deputy Stuart Hayford files a formal complaint through official channels, pushing back on the administration’s increasingly reckless course. Rather than address it, President Grace Penn yanks him back to Washington, effectively sidelining him. For Kate, that’s the red line: internal dissent is being punished, not heard.

All season she’s been shoved into impossible corners by the fallout from the “Poseidon” fiasco — the stolen weapon lifted from a sunken Russian sub off the British coast. The public line to allies was that the sub would be entombed in concrete; privately, Hal Wyler and Grace orchestrated a covert retrieval. Kate’s been asked to bury that reality and even pressure newly installed UK Prime Minister Bethan Vaughn to change course. Staying would mean complicity — and gag rules would keep her from saying any of it out loud. A very public exit solves both problems.

Fallout for Grace

Grace’s grip on power splinters the instant those resignations land on the world stage. With Kate, Appiah and Ganon gone, the President is abruptly isolated, her most capable lieutenants gone in one afternoon. The spectacle exposes deep fractures inside the executive branch and invites exactly what the White House can least afford: skeptical allies abroad and the likelihood of withering congressional scrutiny at home.

Hal walks out alongside the defectors in the final beat — but the cut to black leaves his true intent murky. Is he breaking ranks with Grace or playing a longer game to protect himself? Either way, the President heads into the aftermath without her usual safety net.

And now the secret is out there: Poseidon, a weapon of mass destruction at the center of a three‑nation tug-of-war, isn’t a rumor — it’s the powder keg under every handshake. The show leaves the table set for a next chapter where every move carries bigger consequences than the last.

Call it the sci‑fi handoff. A24 says Zendaya will lead an untitled science‑fiction movie written and directed by Alex Garland, with production targeted for 2027. The studio isn’t sharing plot or character details yet, and no additional casting has been announced.

The project pairs Garland with A24 again and brings Zendaya back to the indie powerhouse after her work on Euphoria and the 2026 dark comedy The Drama. It also arrives as Zendaya’s schedule has been stacked with high‑profile releases and shoots.

Stacked year, new team‑up

Here’s what Zendaya has been juggling in 2026, with one more big title still to come in December:

• The Drama — dark comedy (2026)
• Euphoria Season 3
• Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
• Spider‑Man: Brand New Day
• Dune: Part Three — due in December

Despite talk that she’s eyeing a breather, the Garland film is set up far enough out that it won’t crowd this year’s crush. Zendaya has said she’s ready to step away briefly after the run she’s had:

“mind my business” and “disappear for a little bit.”

There have also been Bond‑girl rumors around her name lately, though nothing official has been announced.

Garland’s lane, A24’s wheelhouse

Garland’s brand of cerebral sci‑fi and near‑future dread has traveled well with A24 before. The filmmaker is best known for Ex Machina and Annihilation, while his A24 releases include:

• Ex Machina
• Men
• Civil War

That history makes his next A24 outing with a marquee star like Zendaya an easy one to circle on the long‑range calendar.

For now, the new film has no title, no logline and no release date. The only thing locked in: cameras are expected to roll in 2027.

Fresh tabloid chatter is zeroing in on alleged overlap between Sydney Sweeney and Scooter Braun’s personal and business worlds. RadarOnline, citing an unnamed insider, claims Braun has financial ties connected to Sweeney-linked ventures — including Novig and her lingerie label Syrn — and suggests that’s become a flashpoint as engagement rumors swirl. None of the claims have been verified, and there’s been no official confirmation of an engagement from either party.

The business crossover claims

Per the report, Braun allegedly maintains investments linked to Sweeney’s projects and, in one instance, tried to engineer a promotional moment at the U.S. Open by seating Sweeney near a Novig executive. The source says the plan fell through and alleges Sweeney wasn’t told the full reason for the arrangement. The same insider also contends Syrn’s early sales trailed internal expectations, prompting behind-the-scenes talks about how to boost the brand’s performance.

RadarOnline quotes an unnamed source calling the pair a “match made in disaster.”

Fast timeline, louder speculation

The two were first publicly linked in 2025 and have been spotted together at select outings while otherwise keeping a relatively low profile. RadarOnline further alleges the relationship accelerated quickly and that Sweeney moved into Braun’s Los Angeles home — another claim that has not been confirmed.

IBTimes UK has separately noted that while engagement buzz has picked up online, reports of friction remain unverified. As of now, neither Sweeney nor Braun has commented on the latest round of allegations or acknowledged any engagement plans.

Chaos kicks off fast in the new trailer for Steps: Lilith, one of Cinderella’s much-maligned stepsisters, snatches a fairy godmother’s wand and immediately zaps her sister Margot into a frog. What was supposed to be a quick scheme to crash the Royal Ball spirals into a full-on magical mess, with spells backfiring and consequences hopping in every direction.

The screwups open the door for Priscilla — a polished, scheming mean girl — to grab the throne. With Margot stuck as an amphibian and the kingdom under the wrong ruler, Lilith has to partner up with Cinderella. Their rescue mission barrels through the Screaming Woods, past biker trolls, and away from royal henchmen, all to the beat of an irreverent, song-filled adventure.

• Lilith — impulsive stepsister whose stolen wand starts the chaos
• Margot — unlucky sister turned frog
• Cinderella — the unexpected teammate with the plan
• Priscilla — the social-climbing usurper aiming for the crown
• Prince Charming — played by Daniel Radcliffe in a first-look reveal

Netflix Animation milestone

Beyond the fairy-tale flip, Netflix is using Steps to plant a flag: it’s the first feature made entirely inside Netflix Animation Studios. Previous Netflix animated standouts like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Nimona were produced with outside partners; this one is homegrown from top to bottom.

Steps is the first feature produced entirely by Netflix Animation Studios.

The footage leans hard into bright CG visuals, musical comedy, and creature-loaded set pieces — a family-friendly package Netflix is slotting for the Thanksgiving and holiday stretch. Think fractured fairy tale energy over glass-slipper elegance, with the “villains” finally taking the wheel.

The trailer is streaming now on Netflix’s channels, arriving alongside a fresh first look at Radcliffe’s Prince Charming. The film is positioned for the Thanksgiving/holiday window on Netflix; an exact premiere date wasn’t included with the trailer.

Just hours after she plays the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, Doja Cat is rolling out a new kind of tour film: a roughly 12-minute short stitched together from footage captured almost entirely with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses worn by her and members of her crew. The first-person POV drops October 23 on her official YouTube channel, which has more than 14 million subscribers.

Shot from the performer’s own vantage point, the mini-doc pulls you into the pre-show jitters in the wings, the crush of backstage activity, and the downtime with her inner circle on the road—an unfiltered, from-the-stage view that a traditional camera setup rarely gets. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the idea is to capture the chaos, craft, and devotion that power each stop of the Ma Vie World Tour.

The short doc runs about 12 minutes and premieres October 23 on Doja Cat’s YouTube channel.

Shot through smart glasses

Ray-Ban Meta is also an official partner of the tour, and Doja has been performing in five custom-designed pairs of the smart glasses. Her creative director Brett Alan Nelson built the bespoke frames to fold into her stage looks and choreography, so the same eyewear fueling the visuals is part of the show itself.

Who’s behind the camera

Filmmaker Quinn Whitney Wilson directs the project, bringing a background that spans feature docs, TV, and music videos. Wilson’s credits include:

• The upcoming feature documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat
• TV series Ziwe
• Your Attention Please
• MPower
• Music videos for artists including Lizzo and Baby Ariel

The result aims to feel like a walk-on pass to Doja’s tour: personal, fast-moving, and seen literally through the eyes of the people making the show happen.

Ma Vie World Tour premieres October 23 on Doja Cat’s YouTube channel.

Stepping out in Nottingham on October 15, Meghan Markle kept things sleek and very British: a deep burgundy coat and matching turtleneck from Joseph, a tailored skirt from The Fold London, and sky-high pumps by Jennifer Chamandi. The look leaned into rich fall color and clean lines, finished with a simple ponytail that let the outfit do the talking.

• Burgundy coat and turtleneck — Joseph
• Midi skirt — The Fold London
• Pumps — Jennifer Chamandi

A quiet callback to 2017

The label choice wasn’t random. Markle also wore Joseph for her first official royal engagement—in the same city—on December 1, 2017, just days after she and Prince Harry announced their engagement. Returning to Nottingham in Joseph again reads as a neat full-circle nod to the start of their public life together.

Back in Nottingham

The visit doubled as the couple’s first official joint engagement since they returned to the U.K. in August with their children, Archie and Lilibet. They arrived to cheers from around 100 well-wishers, stopping to greet people and chat with schoolkids outside their first stop.

Markle reportedly told one person:

It’s great to be back.

When another well-wisher showed her a photo from the couple’s 2017 Nottingham visit, she smiled and said:

That’s so special.

The day began at the Community Recording Studio, a Nottingham charity founded in 1991 that gives young people access to music and recording facilities, mentoring, and other creative programs.

The Miami spotlight comes with hardware attached: at the 13th annual Miami Film Festival GEMS, filmmaking duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (aka Los Javis) will receive the festival’s Visionary Director Award for La Bola Negra. The prize will be presented by Variety on November 4 at the Wolfson Auditorium.

It’ll be a big night for their leading man too. Guitarricadelafuente — making his acting debut in the film — is set to pick up the festival’s Virtuoso Award, and he’ll join Calvo and Ambrossi for an extended in-person conversation moderated by Variety co–editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh.

Festival track record

The Miami honors arrive after a head-turning run: the Spanish queer period epic drew a 16-minute standing ovation at Cannes, where Los Javis also shared the Best Director award, and later won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. At home, it’s crossed €25 million at the Spanish box office.

Cannes greeted La Bola Negra with a 16-minute standing ovation.

Where to see it next

The film keeps adding U.S. festival stops ahead of awards season. Upcoming appearances include:

• Newport Beach Film Festival — October 15–22
• Montclair Film Festival — through October 25
• Middleburg Film Festival — appearance planned; Guitarricadelafuente will also be recognized
• SCAD Savannah Film Festival — appearance planned
• Miami Film Festival GEMS — awards presentation on November 4

Miami Film Festival GEMS runs October 29–November 5 and is hosted by Miami Dade College.

Leading the cast for Netflix’s new Polish period epic Nights and Days are Tomasz Schuchardt and Jaśmina Polak, with the series targeting a global premiere on Netflix in 2027. The project adapts Maria Dąbrowska’s landmark four-part novel into a multi-decade family saga, according to What’s on Netflix.

Behind the camera, Kamila Tarabura is directing and co-writing, working with writers Marta Bacewicz and Katarzyna Tybinka. Produced by Justyna Pawlak through Greenlight Films, the show marks the first major screen take on Dąbrowska’s classic in roughly 50 years, following much-loved film and TV versions from the 1970s.

What it’s about

Set during a time when Poland had been erased from the map, the story centers on Barbara Ostrzeńska, a proud but penniless noblewoman whose first love marries someone else. To avoid life alone, she marries Bogumił Niechcic, a modest former insurgent turned estate manager whose steadiness and work ethic clash with her restless spirit.

Spanning three decades in the countryside, the series tracks the push-pull between Barbara’s yearning for lost status and whirlwind romance and the compromises of daily life. As she battles her circumstances—and challenges her family—Barbara gradually discovers a quieter, unexpected sense of fulfillment in the very life she once resisted.

Expected on Netflix in the second half of 2027.

Who’s making it

• Cast — Tomasz Schuchardt; Jaśmina Polak
• Director and co-writer — Kamila Tarabura
• Writers — Marta Bacewicz; Katarzyna Tybinka
• Producer — Justyna Pawlak (Greenlight Films)

Tarabura told What’s on Netflix the series will take an unvarnished, emotionally honest look at the myths around romantic love and the grind of long-term partnership—how dedication and effort can pay off over a lifetime.

The greenlight comes as Netflix leans further into Polish literary adaptations after the recent buzz around its take on Bolesław Prus’s The Doll. No episode count or exact date has been announced yet; Netflix lists a 2027 debut window.

When the first reviews landed Thursday, Paramount’s new take on Street Fighter was already in a scrap. The reboot opened at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes from 25 early write-ups; a few hours later, as more critics weighed in, the score nudged up to 42% off 36 reviews. Expect it to keep shifting as the count grows, but the initial read is bumpy.

The score ticked from 28% (25 reviews) to 42% (36 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes by Thursday afternoon.

What critics are saying

Directed by Kitao Sakurai, the movie swings big with a chaotic, high-energy mix of action and camp. Even mixed reviews singled out its stylish 2D-animated flashback sequences and bursts of high-octane fight choreography as highlights.

The knocks are louder: a messy script, thin character work, and an overstuffed plot that struggles to juggle its ensemble. Some reviewers leaned into the B-movie absurdity and had fun with it; others called the whole thing incoherent and unengaging as a translation of Capcom’s fighting classic.

WWE stars draw notice

One bright spot in the pile-on: the wrestlers. Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns are getting singled out, with Rhodes earning especially warm notices. Co-star Andrew Schulz said Rhodes impressed so much during filming that producers expanded his screen time.

Here’s who’s playing who in the ensemble:

• Cody Rhodes — Guile
• Roman Reigns — Akuma
• Andrew Koji — Ryu
• Noah Centineo — Ken
• Callina Liang — Chun-Li
• Jason Momoa — Blanka

The franchise’s track record with critics hasn’t been kind: the 1994 and 2009 films both sit at 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. Early preview screenings for the new movie are underway ahead of its wider box-office push, and it’s now playing in theaters.

Jennie is lending her voice to “Someone to Hold,” an original track for Netflix’s animated Cinderella remix Steps. It’s her first song for an animated movie, produced and written by Grammy-nominated hitmaker Justin Tranter, who describes the track as vintage-inspired dance pop.

The song reveal arrived alongside a new trailer released October 15, which sets up a chaotic twist on the fairy tale: stepsister Lilith nabs the Fairy Godmother’s wand, spells go sideways, and at one point a sister is turned into a frog. The movie leans into the tagline “At midnight, we ride.”

Soundtrack lineup

Tranter spearheads four original songs for the film. Alongside Jennie’s contribution, the trailer confirms performances from a mix of pop voices and cast members:

• Jennie — “Someone to Hold”
• Rose Gray — “Meet Me on the Dance Floor”
• EMEI — “The Understudy”
• Amanda Seyfried — “Smile and a Song”

“I love how much heart and personality the characters have, and I’m so happy I got to be a little part of their world. I hope you enjoy ‘Steps’ and ‘Someone to Hold’ as much as I do and I can’t wait for you guys to hear it,” Jennie said in a statement.

Cast and creative team

Directed by Alyce Tzue and John Ripa, the film shifts the spotlight to Cinderella’s stepsisters, Lilith and Margot, and reframes who gets the fairy-tale glow-up. It’s also a milestone for Netflix Animation Studios as its first fully in-house-produced feature.

• Ali Wong — Lilith (stepsister)
• Stephanie Hsu — Margot (stepsister)
• Amanda Seyfried — Cinderella
• Bette Midler — Fairy Godmother
• Daniel Radcliffe — voice role
• Nikki Glaser — voice role
• Young Mazino — voice role
• Peter Dinklage — voice role

Steps and its soundtrack arrive November 20 on Netflix, with the album dropping the same day.

Three weeks into its fall run, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is posting its sharpest year-over-year bounce in a while: the show is up 34% among adults 18–49 compared with the same early-season stretch last year, with total viewers also nudging up 3%, according to TheWrap.

• Keri Russell
• Riz Ahmed
• Charlie Heaton
• Anne Hathaway
• Hailee Steinfeld

Season 14 kicked off in September with a steady stream of big-name guests, helping juice interest as the show settled into its first month back.

Social surge

Off-air, the show’s footprint is massive: more than 127 million followers and subscribers across platforms, and over 8 billion social video views in the past year. As TheWrap reported, that makes Fallon’s show the No. 1 late-night talker on social media right now.

Season 14 is up 34% among adults 18–49 vs. the same period last year.

Elsewhere: a cancellation

Not everything in Fallon’s TV portfolio is on the upswing. NBC has canceled his business-minded reality competition, On Brand with Jimmy Fallon, after one season. Fallon created, hosted and executive produced the series, which he even flew to Cannes to promote; former Netflix marketing chief Bozoma Saint John appeared alongside him on the show.

Back at 30 Rock, Fallon’s late-night future is set: his NBC deal, first signed in 2021 and extended in 2024, keeps him behind the desk through 2028—a runway he’s previously said he hopes will help him chase Johnny Carson’s longevity mark.

In Cabildo 71, Maeve Jinkings isn’t plotting the breakout — she’s on the other side of the bars. The Brazilian star plays one of the nuns tasked with guarding a convent-turned-prison in 1970s Uruguay, where political detainees weigh whether brains and nerve can beat locked doors and armed patrols.

The film is based on a real escape pulled off by a prisoner known as La Parda, who fled the Cabildo convent-prison with 12 others during Mass in March 1970. A year later she was caught and returned to a far tougher lockup, where whispers of another attempt began. Director Victoria Pena Echeverría threads the jailbreak suspense through the sisters’ personal lives too, centering the volatile bond between La Parda and her twin, Lucía, and leaning into everyday ingenuity over action-movie bravado.

The story is inspired by a 1970 convent-prison escape pulled off during Mass.

Who’s involved

The movie is directed by Victoria Pena Echeverría and produced by Monarca Film’s Eugenia Olascuaga, who has emphasized casting Uruguayan talent as the eight central Tupamara prisoners. Alongside Jinkings’ turn as a prison nun, the ensemble features Uruguayan actresses:

• Graciela Ingold — part of the prisoners ensemble
• Carolina Genoni — part of the prisoners ensemble
• Camila Parard — part of the prisoners ensemble
• Renata Denevi — part of the prisoners ensemble
• Luche Bolten — part of the prisoners ensemble
• Matilde Colacce — part of the prisoners ensemble

Jinkings last hit the festival circuit with I’m Still Here, which premiered at Venice in 2024. Cabildo 71 keeps her on the art-house track, but with a stark historical thriller bent.

The project was recently selected for Ventana Sur’s Proyecta Co-Production Forum in Montevideo, a platform for Latin American films courting partners and distribution. U.S. release plans haven’t been announced.

Asked point-blank about dusting off his Oval Office drama, creator Aaron Sorkin didn’t play coy. He told Entertainment Weekly the idea pops into his head daily, even as he admits pulling it off in today’s climate would be a high‑wire act. And despite the complications, he still feels the pull of his old workplace melodrama.

“There’s probably a couple of seconds every day when I think about it,” Sorkin said. “I miss it.”

Pressed on how President Josiah “Jed Bartlet” — played by Martin Sheen — might navigate the current political moment, Sorkin held back. He said he’d need time before putting words back in Bartlet’s mouth and suggested the character’s reaction wouldn’t be much different from how most people are feeling right now.

Who would come back

Two key alumni have already raised their hands. In a recent Variety interview, Bradley Whitford and Dulé Hill said they’d jump at a return if Sorkin called. Whitford even floated a limited‑series format as a smart way to do it, while Hill said that if Sorkin writes it, the cast would answer — framing a potential reunion as a chance to nudge the culture toward empathy, connection and understanding.

For anyone who hasn’t revisited the halls of power lately, The West Wing ran on NBC from 1999 to 2006, spanning seven seasons of rapid‑fire walk‑and‑talks, policy duels and late‑night strategy sessions that helped define prestige network TV.

As of now, there’s no plan on the books — no revival has been announced.

On the Los Angeles red carpet for Clayface, DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran said the bayou beast isn’t going anywhere. He told Deadline that Swamp Thing is actively moving forward and that the screenplay is being worked on right now.

“We're working on it, absolutely, yeah, yeah, the script is being written as we speak, but it's something we're excited about.”

The update breaks a long quiet stretch since the movie was first announced in early 2023 as part of James Gunn’s Gods and Monsters slate. With James Mangold busy on other projects — he’s directing A Complete Unknown and is attached to Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi — fans had started to wonder if the moss had overgrown the project. Safran pointed to scheduling realities with a filmmaker in demand, but made clear the film remains in development.

A darker DC story

Don’t expect a standard capes-and-quips adventure. The plan Mangold is developing leans into Gothic horror — a tragic story about a man trapped in a monstrous body, with an emphasis on mood, psychological dread, and the line between humanity and the creature. Think closer to Frankenstein than a world-saving team-up.

Just as notably, the project is being shaped as a self-contained film. The idea is to let it stand on its own without cameo checklists or heavy setup for other DCU titles, while still living under Gunn and Safran’s larger umbrella.

What we know so far

• Director: James Mangold is attached.
• Status: The script is being written, per Safran.
• DCU placement: Announced within Gunn’s Gods and Monsters slate, but conceived as a standalone Gothic horror story.
• Timeline: No casting or production start has been announced.
• Elsewhere in DC horror: Clayface is set for October 23, 2026; early reactions from critics have been enthusiastic, while presales are reportedly trailing Supergirl.

DC hasn’t shared a release date for Swamp Thing yet, and there’s still no casting or start-of-filming date on the books.

On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, James McAvoy said his first day on HBO’s Band of Brothers went sideways fast. During a crowded bar scene, he recalled, one unnamed co-star rallied others to point at him and laugh — and it went on for minutes. Fresh out of drama school and filming his very first professional job, McAvoy said he rated that day “two out of ten,” even though he still calls the overall Band of Brothers experience a nine.

“One of the guys in that picture decided to bully me, on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school,” McAvoy said.

McAvoy didn’t name the person. When Cohen held up a cast photo, McAvoy said the bully was one of the men shown — and specifically ruled out David Schwimmer, who wasn’t in that shot.

Where he fit into Easy Company

McAvoy appears in Episode 4, “Replacements”, a standout hour that tracks the friction between Easy Company’s battle-tested vets and the green troops dropped in to fill the ranks. The men briefly regroup in England before parachuting into German-occupied Holland for Operation Market Garden, aimed at liberating Eindhoven and capturing key bridges.

He plays Private First Class James W. Miller, one of the new arrivals assigned to Staff Sergeant Denver “Bull” Randleman’s squad. Unlike some regulars who spent nine or ten months on the shoot and only snagged a line here or there, McAvoy’s single-episode turn came with an actual arc, multiple scenes and plenty of dialogue — a contrast he said existed on set as well.

Even with that rough welcome, McAvoy told Cohen he still looks back on Band of Brothers as a nine-out-of-ten experience. The HBO World War II drama, from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, premiered in 2001.

On a tour of Studio MAPPA’s 15th-anniversary exhibition in Tokyo, Tom Cruise pressed animator Tadashi Hiramatsu for the nuts and bolts: how long does it actually take to finish one episode of the hit anime Jujutsu Kaisen?

“When you take everything into consideration, it’s around two to three months,” Hiramatsu replied.

Cruise then zeroed in on how that work gets done today, asking whether animators still start with hand-drawn artwork or have moved fully digital. Hiramatsu said he trained on paper and still believes beginning on paper is a crucial step for young artists, even as more of the next generation leans into digital tools.

From sorcerers to Digger

The visit came as Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu were in Japan promoting their new film Digger, and the conversation quickly turned into a broader craft exchange.

• Tom Cruise — visiting during the promotional push for Digger
• Alejandro G. Iñárritu — director of Digger
• Tadashi Hiramatsu — veteran animator at Studio MAPPA and a key creative voice on Jujutsu Kaisen

Hiramatsu said he’d already seen Digger twice and praised its cinematography, color palette, score, and sound design, adding that the performances and overall scale make it the kind of movie built for a theater.

Cruise talked about the impact of projecting meticulously captured practical footage onto a massive screen, saying the sense of depth can rival a 3D experience. Iñárritu, pleased by Hiramatsu’s reaction, remarked that having another creator truly grasp their intent made the team’s hard work feel worth it.

MAPPA’s 15th-anniversary exhibition in Tokyo runs through December 7, 2026.

A Supreme Court justice is led away in handcuffs, and his wife is left to pick up the pieces — that’s the spark for Alicia’s Law, Netflix’s Mexican reinvention of The Good Wife. After her husband, Aurelio, is publicly imprisoned in a corruption scandal, Alicia returns to the courtroom to support their two children and keep the family afloat. The wrinkle: the firm that hires her belongs to David, her old college boyfriend, pulling personal history right into her day job.

Premieres November 11, 2026 on Netflix.

Who’s playing who

• Fernanda Castillo — Alicia, the attorney rebuilding her career and life (Monarca, The Dad Quest, The Follies)
• Juan Manuel Bernal — Aurelio, the Supreme Court justice minister at the center of the scandal (reuniting with Castillo after Monarca)
• Michel Brown — David, the lawyer and Alicia’s former college sweetheart who owns the firm where she lands

The adaptation keeps the core premise fans know — a woman restarting her legal career after her husband’s very public downfall — but moves the stakes into Mexico’s political and judicial arena. Built for streaming rather than broadcast, the series is designed around tightly connected arcs with a heavier focus on Alicia’s personal evolution than the 22-episode case-of-the-week rhythm that defined the CBS original.

For U.S. viewers who followed The Good Wife, the pedigree is hard to miss. The Julianna Margulies drama ran from 2009 to 2016 on CBS, spanned seven seasons, averaged roughly 9.5–11 million viewers per season, and closed with 10.5 million watching the finale live. It picked up five Primetime Emmys and 43 nominations along the way.

Netflix had previously flagged the project as in development; now it’s on the calendar: November 11, 2026.

On the red carpet for Clayface, James Gunn said the shape-shifting Batman villain’s story in the new DC Universe won’t stop with this film. Speaking with Cinemex at the premiere, he confirmed the character is being set up for more down the line, though he kept the specifics to himself.

“This isn’t the last we’ll see of Clayface.”

Gunn didn’t say where or when the character might pop up next, and he didn’t name a follow-up project. For now, Clayface’s return is confirmed, but his next appearance in the DCU remains unannounced.

The movie

Directed by James Watkins, Clayface centers on Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor whose career is wrecked by disfigurement and an experimental treatment that fixes his face at a terrifying cost. The film leans into horror, turning Hagen’s unstable identity and malleable body into the story’s monster.

It’s the character’s first live-action feature after decades of mostly orbiting Batman in animation, games, and TV. This time, Clayface takes the spotlight.

The debate

Gunn recently defended making a movie around a lesser-known DC character during an exchange on Threads. Responding to a user who questioned who “asked for” a Clayface film, he argued that Hollywood isn’t a public vote and pointed to films like Casablanca, The Matrix, and Mad Max: Fury Road as examples that weren’t born from polling audiences.

He also credited Mike Flanagan with the initial spark for the idea, and said Watkins and screenwriter Hossein Amini shaped the final story — an approach he framed as creative conviction over chasing the most recognizable IP.

Clayface opens in theaters October 23.

On the PBD Podcast, Zachary Levi dug into the less glamorous side of movie-star money, saying the steady checks from Chuck and Shazam! haven’t turned into the kind of cushion people assume. He pointed to his ongoing expenses as the reason he still feels financially tight.

“In many respects, because of my monthly nut and everything that I’m doing, I’m also paycheck to paycheck in some ways,” he said.

Levi also compared his situation to ultra-wealthy figures and the freedom that comes when money truly stops being a factor.

“I don’t have the escape velocity that Elon or Joe Rogan or people have,” he declared.

He added that he doesn’t think money should be the deciding factor in every major choice, urging people to consider what actually matters to them beyond the spreadsheet.

What he’s been paid

Levi’s comments land against some headline paydays from his biggest roles. Reported figures paint this picture:

• Shazam! (2019) — reportedly $1–$2 million upfront; the movie grossed over $365 million worldwide.
• Chuck — reports suggest up to $90,000 per episode at the show’s peak.
• Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) — he returned as the DC hero; his salary wasn’t publicly disclosed.

For Levi, the takeaway is less about any single check than the difference between earning well and having enough wealth to feel truly secure. His most recent turn as Shazam came in 2023 with Fury of the Gods.

On the red carpet at the Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles, where Clayface held its premiere on October 13, star Tom Rhys Harries didn’t hesitate when asked who should front DC’s next villain movie. He went straight to Scarecrow—and even sketched out the tone he wants to see.

“Scarecrow would be pretty cool,”

Harries told Deadline, before tossing out a mind-bending pitch.

“You could do some kind of like Inception the audience don’t know what’s real kind of thing.”

That approach leans into what makes Scarecrow such a lasting Batman foe: a psychologist who weaponizes fear toxins to scramble your reality, he’s tailor-made for a psychological thriller that blurs the line between hallucination and truth—for the characters and the audience.

Why Scarecrow fits

Harries’ pick also tracks with the energy of Clayface, which DC describes as the story of an up-and-coming Hollywood actor’s grotesque transformation and the fallout from obsession, identity loss, and dangerous science. It’s a horror lane where Scarecrow already lives, just through a different prism.

• Obsession — brilliance curdled into fixation
• Isolation — professional or academic bubbles that warp judgment
• Loss of humanity — ambition stripping away what’s left of the person
• Different paths, same nightmare — Clayface’s vanity/body horror vs. Scarecrow’s clinical psychology/weaponized fear

Harries’ comments came during a Deadline chat at the Clayface premiere on October 13 at the Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles.

The X-Men’s most trusted civilian once met the team while posing as their housekeeper. That was Moira MacTaggert, a Nobel Prize–winning Scottish geneticist who became the franchise’s go-to expert on mutant DNA. She first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #96 (December 1975), created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum, and quickly turned into a cornerstone of the mythos.

Born into a Scottish noble family, she studied at Oxford, where she fell for Charles Xavier and even got engaged before abruptly walking away. Later, she built the Mutant Research Center on Muir Island and quietly helped Xavier launch the X-Men, including that undercover “housekeeper” introduction that let her vet the team up close.

Her personal life was far messier. A disastrous marriage to politician Joe MacTaggert ended with her leaving and keeping their son a secret. That son, Kevin MacTaggert—Proteus—grew into a reality-warping mutant with severe psychosis. After Moira’s attempts to cure him failed, he escaped confinement, possessed and killed his father, and was ultimately stopped for good by Colossus (Piotr Rasputin), who can turn his body into organic steel.

Moira’s Muir Island years intertwined science with surrogate family. Sean Cassidy—Banshee—was an on-and-off love interest, and Rahne Sinclair of The New Mutants became her ward. While racing to cure the deadly Legacy Virus, Moira became the first human it infected. Mystique later killed her during an attack on Muir Island, but the data Moira passed along led to a cure. In classic comics fashion, she was eventually revived.

A rewrite changed everything

In 2019, Jonathan Hickman’s House of X and Powers of X rewired her history: Moira was a mutant all along. Her power is reincarnation—each death sends her back to the womb with perfect recall of her past lives. She gets roughly ten or eleven lives, and telepaths can only read her current one, which kept the secret buried for decades.

Across multiple lives, she tried and failed to prevent mutant extinction—often at the hands of Sentinels and the human-machine alliance known as Orchis. In her tenth life, Moira shared everything she knew with Xavier and Magneto, a revelation that led to the mutant nation of Krakoa. Later, Mystique and Destiny used a special weapon to strip her powers, exile followed, and Moira aligned with Orchis—eventually in a robotic body—with a plan to end mutantkind. It was a full-blown villain turn for one of the X-Men’s oldest allies.

On screen so far

• Olivia Williams — X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), as a Muir Island scientist.
• Rose Byrne — X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Apocalypse, as an American CIA agent who teams with—and falls for—Xavier before having her memories erased at the end of First Class.
• X-Men ’97 — The animated series had Moira engaged to Banshee on the Genosha council before Sentinels killed her.

Where the reboot stands

Marvel Studios’ untitled X-Men movie is locked to theaters with Jake Schreier directing. At D23 2026, the studio named three key players:

• Christopher Abbott — Professor X
• Sadie Sink — Jean Grey
• Adam Driver — Mister Sinister

Marvel’s X-Men opens May 5, 2028.

Moira, however, hasn’t been announced. There’s only chatter from unverified social media posts suggesting a small role could be in play. Given her deep ties to Xavier and the team, a cameo would make sense—but as of now, there’s no official confirmation.

In a personal Instagram post, Bryan Cranston shared that he and RJ Mitte had been texting just weeks ago, trying to lock down a lunch. He looked back to their first meeting — Mitte was only 14 when he was cast as Walter White Jr. — and said the young actor soaked up advice from his TV parents, even when he insisted on learning a few lessons the hard way.

Cranston praised Mitte’s determination on set, noting that while he lived with cerebral palsy, he never used it as an excuse and pushed himself as a performer. Cranston said he watched him grow into a confident actor who used his visibility to advocate for inclusion and opportunities for performers with disabilities.

“I don’t know if that lunch would have changed his future… But I do know that I loved him, and thoroughly enjoyed being with him throughout the years on the series, and after the spotlight on Breaking Bad dimmed. I’ll miss you, son.”

Mitte died on October 12, 2026, at 34, in Brownsville, Texas. His representative confirmed his death, and authorities initially said an investigation was underway.

Career and advocacy

Mitte played Walter White Jr. across all five seasons of Breaking Bad (2008–2013), drawing on his own experience with cerebral palsy to shape the character. After the series, he kept acting and broadened his off-screen work around disability representation.

Selected screen credits after Breaking Bad:

• Switched at Birth
• The Oak Room
• The Recall
• The Guardians of Justice

Advocacy and leadership:

• Worked with United Cerebral Palsy
• Worked with Shriners Children’s
• Served as president of the Mitte Foundation

At the BFI London Film Festival, Guy Pearce didn’t pretend he knew how Rupert Murdoch would feel about seeing himself on screen in Ink, Danny Boyle’s new newspaper drama. Even after hearing some reassuring words from Elisabeth Murdoch, Pearce said he’s expecting a frosty verdict from the media mogul himself.

He might watch the film and go, ‘Eugh! What were they thinking?

Pearce made the comment to The Hollywood Reporter at the festival, acknowledging the unique pressure of playing someone who’s very much alive — and who built a global media empire that still bears his name.

The story

Ink rewinds to 1969 London, when a brash young Murdoch buys the struggling British tabloid The Sun and bets on rogue editor Larry Lamb to turn it around. Lamb assembles an unlikely team of underdog reporters who push boundaries — and propriety — in a race for circulation and clout. The film is directed by Danny Boyle and written by James Graham, adapting his own stage play.

• Guy Pearce — Rupert Murdoch
• Jack O’Connell — Larry Lamb
• Claire Foy — Joyce Hopkirk

The movie made its world premiere as the opening film of the Venice Film Festival on September 2 before heading to London for its festival stop.

Ink is set to open in select theaters on December 11, and will stream on Netflix in the U.S. and Latin America starting January 8, 2027.

On a new episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Seth Rogen got unusually candid about what actually scares him about wealth: leaving too much of it behind. He framed it in the most Rogen way possible — with a joke and a pinch of anxiety.

“I don’t have children, and I’m afraid I’m going to die and be like, I could have had a place at the beach,”

Rogen didn’t stop there, spelling out the number that nags him and the reason why.

“I don’t want to die with like $10,000,000 in the bank that I could have spent doing fun, alive things.”

He added that part of the point of having money, for him, is the freedom to do things on a whim — like hop a flight to Paris just because, no special occasion required.

At TIFF together

The money talk came as Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, were enjoying a busy week at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where both had premieres. He lit up when asked what it’s like to share the moment with his partner.

“It’s so nice. It’s just amazing when the people you love, you get to work with them and you’re proud of them and you’re amazed at what they do."

• Babies — directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, with Rogen starring alongside Anna Kendrick.
• Tangles — an animated film featuring Rogen’s voice work.

Both projects premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.

The BBC is assembling a two-part documentary—currently titled J.K. Rowling—that splits its focus between the author’s early climb and the firestorm that followed. The first hour revisits her path from writing in Edinburgh cafés to launching a children’s-book juggernaut. The second zeroes in on how her public stances turned intensely debated, tracing the culture-war flashpoints that reshaped her image.

It’s a two-part documentary, with one episode on her rise and one on the fallout from her views.

Producers say the series mixes rare archival footage with Rowling’s own statements and fresh interviews from people who watched her ascent up close. The aim is to map how a writer who once united readers around Hogwarts became a figure who can split the very audience that embraced her.

Expect it to tackle the hot-button issues that have defined the last few years of conversation around Rowling, including:

• Feminism
• Free speech
• Scottish independence
• Gender identity
• The role of social media in amplifying those divisions

Earlier portrait

This won’t be the first time cameras have followed the author. The 2007 film J.K. Rowling: A Year in the Life, directed by James Runcie, caught her at a watershed moment: finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after 17 years with the series. The documentary took her back to her Edinburgh flat, captured her speaking about losing her mother and how depression informed the Dementors, and showed the spoiler-tight security around the book’s launch.

The new project lands as Rowling continues to defend her positions while former Potter leads Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have publicly distanced themselves from her views. The BBC says the series will hear from voices who witnessed different stages of her career—and the debate that now surrounds it.

The two-parter is set for BBC Two, BBC Scotland and streaming on BBC iPlayer in the U.K. A U.S. distributor and premiere date have not been announced.

Before the save-the-dates even go out, Jack Byrnes already has a dossier. In Focker-in-Law, Ariana Grande steps into the chaos as Olivia Jones — a former FBI hostage negotiator engaged to Henry Focker — and instantly becomes the new focus of the family’s famous “circle of trust.” Jack’s antennae are up, Greg’s nerves aren’t far behind, and the next Focker wedding looks like anything but a soft landing.

Director John Hamburg is steering the fourth entry in the Meet the Parents franchise, picking up years after Greg and Pam’s rocky introductions turned into a uniquely intense family tradition. The setup this time: Henry brings home a fiancée who’s used to pressure, which only raises the stakes for a clan that treats Sunday dinner like an interrogation room.

Opens November 25, 2026.

The baton passes to the kids here, with fresh faces taking over the Focker twins and the OGs circling the buffet table. Skyler Gisondo plays Henry, whose proposal kicks off the story, and Beanie Feldstein is Samantha, his fraternal twin — both roles aged up from Little Fockers’ child actors. Meanwhile, Greg finds himself in a new spot: the protective dad who suddenly sounds a lot like his father-in-law.

Cast and characters

• Robert De Niro — Jack Byrnes, the retired CIA patriarch whose surveillance instincts never retired
• Ben Stiller — Greg Focker, now a dad watching his own son face the Byrnes family gauntlet
• Teri Polo — Pam Focker, trying to keep the peace as tradition collides with a new generation
• Blythe Danner — Dina Byrnes, still the warm counterweight to Jack’s intensity
• Owen Wilson — Kevin Rawley, Pam’s effortlessly charming ex who always complicates a Focker gathering
• Skyler Gisondo — Henry Focker, Greg and Pam’s son (previously played as a kid by Colin Baiocchi)
• Beanie Feldstein — Samantha Focker, Henry’s fraternal twin (taking over from Daisy Tahan)
• Ariana Grande — Olivia Jones, Henry’s fiancée and a former FBI hostage negotiator who won’t spook easily
• Eduardo Franco — role under wraps

Grande’s Olivia isn’t walking into this unarmed: years of crisis training should make her a tougher read for Jack’s tactics, which is exactly why he’s keyed up. Add Kevin Rawley breezing back in with that disarming smile, and the family reunion has its classic third-rail energy baked in.

Focker-in-Law follows Meet the Parents (2000), Meet the Fockers (2004) and Little Fockers (2010), and brings the saga into its next phase with the kids at the altar and the elders watching — closely. The holiday corridor return is set for November 25, 2026.

On stage at MIPCOM Cannes, Robbie Graham‑Kuntz sat beside co‑star Maddie Phillips and made the case for risk over safety. Their project is a new take on Meatballs — not a beat‑for‑beat remake, but a mock‑doc spin on Ivan Reitman’s 1979 Bill Murray summer‑camp comedy — and Graham‑Kuntz credited Crave for backing a version that swings harder than most studio updates.

“It’s a big swing, and as we’ve seen from Crave and others, big swings are worth taking.”

He said today’s comedy climate is a “pendulum,” arguing the appetite has moved back toward bolder, less predictable jokes. This mockumentary approach, he noted, spreads the punchlines across a wide bench of characters instead of aiming from one fixed perspective — the kind of format he believes audiences are ready to meet halfway.

The vote of confidence lands as Graham‑Kuntz rides momentum from Heated Rivalry, the hockey romance backed by Crave and HBO that turned his smoothie‑shop barista‑turned‑sidekick Kip Grady into a breakout. His on‑screen chemistry with François Arnaud helped the show become a word‑of‑mouth favorite, and it went on to win Program of the Year at the Television Critics Association Awards.

Season 2 of Heated Rivalry is already stacking its bench with newcomers Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie joining returning cast, a sign the series is doubling down while Graham‑Kuntz branches into feature territory with Meatballs.

Crave’s next bets

• Meatballs — a reimagining of Ivan Reitman’s 1979 Meatballs, staged as a mockumentary with a rotating lens on its camp misfits.
• Heated Rivalry Season 2 — the fan‑favorite hockey romance returns with new faces including Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie alongside the core cast.
• Yaga — a dark psychological thriller steeped in folklore, positioned far from conventional TV comfort zones.
• Thunder Point — an ambitious drama currently in development.

U.S. subscribers to Discovery+ are waking up to higher monthly bills. Effective today, the ad-supported plan rises by $1 to $6.99, while the ad-free tier jumps $2 to $11.99. The timing lands just a week after the Skydance corporate shakeup involving Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, per Variety.

Discovery+ now costs $6.99 with ads and $11.99 ad-free in the U.S., effective today for new subscribers.

How the new prices work

The new rates apply immediately for all new sign-ups starting Tuesday, October 13, 2026. Existing customers will get a 30-day heads-up; the higher price will appear on billing statements generated on or after November 12, 2026.

Variety reports the increase was likely mapped out before the Skydance deal formally closed, even if it’s arriving right on the heels of that shakeup.

What you get on Discovery+

Discovery+ remains the streaming home for shows from HGTV, Food Network, TLC, ID, Discovery, Animal Planet and Magnolia Network. A portion of its library also turns up on Max (formerly HBO Max).

• 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way — new season streaming
• 90 Day Fiancé: Hunt For Love — new season streaming
• Sister Wives — current season
• Ghost Adventures — current season
• Scariest House in America — current season
• Sin City Rehab — current season
• Gold Rush — current season
• A Very Haunted Renovation — new release
• Evil Lives Here — also available
• Expedition Unknown — also available
• Deadliest Catch — also available
• Signature lifestyle and culinary series from Chip and Joanna Gaines, Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay

What’s next for Skydance apps

For now, Skydance is keeping its streaming services operating as they did pre-merger. Long term, chairman and CEO David Ellison has outlined plans to eventually fold Max and Paramount+ into a single product. There’s no timeline attached to that plan yet.

Greg Focker has finally crossed into the Circle of Trust… as the interrogator. In Focker-in-Law, Greg spirals when his son Henry brings home a fiancée who seems too perfect to be true — and not even Jack Byrnes is on his side this time. The twist: Henry’s girlfriend, Olivia Jones, isn’t just unflappable, she’s a trained FBI hostage negotiator, which makes Greg’s old tricks feel hilariously outmatched.

Yes, the gang is back. Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro return as Greg and Jack, with Teri Polo as Pam, Blythe Danner as Dina, and Owen Wilson once again floating through family chaos as the eternally zen ex, Kevin Rawley. Franchise mainstay John Hamburg is back behind the camera, leaning into a full-on role reversal that turns Greg into the kind of overbearing parent he once dreaded — the setup for the series’ first new movie since 2010.

The cast

• Ben Stiller — Greg Focker
• Robert De Niro — Jack Byrnes
• Teri Polo — Pam
• Blythe Danner — Dina
• Owen Wilson — Kevin Rawley
• Skyler Gisondo — Henry Focker
• Ariana Grande — Olivia Jones
• Beanie Feldstein — Samantha Focker
• Eduardo Franco — Samantha’s boyfriend

What it’s about

Henry announces he wants to marry Olivia, and Greg is convinced she’s manipulating his son. Jack, of all people, takes Olivia’s side — a gut punch that nudges Greg into full-blown paranoia. With wedding prep shoving everyone under one roof, awkward dinners pile up, Jack starts snooping, and Olivia keeps coolly talking her way through every standoff like, well, an FBI pro.

The more Greg pushes back, the more he starts to look like Jack — the very father-in-law who tormented him years ago. That parent-to-parent mirror is the movie’s engine, with the Fockers and Byrneses ricocheting between heartfelt and mortifying faster than you can say “trust but verify.”

Behind the scenes

Universal is releasing the sequel, with John Hamburg — a writer on earlier installments — shaping the new chapter’s generational flip. Expect the familiar mix of interrogation tactics, malfunctioning lie detectors (figurative and possibly literal), and relatives who cannot resist stepping into someone else’s business.

The film opens in U.S. and Canadian theaters on November 25, 2026.

Universal says the international rollout begins November 26, 2026, with Australia among the markets opening that day.

In a recent conversation with Buro 24/7, Paul Bettany said the new Disney+ series VisionQuest keeps Wanda Maximoff front and center in Vision’s mind, even if she isn’t physically by his side. Bettany and co-star Ruaridh Mollica — who plays Tommy Maximoff — talked about how Wanda’s absence shapes father and son, and why the Scarlet Witch still anchors Vision’s idea of what it means to be human.

“It’s hard for me to imagine Vision without Wanda,”

Mollica told the outlet he discovers his on-screen mother through Vision’s memories and love for her, describing that process as poignant and, for him, “beautiful.” As he explained it, Tommy Maximoff carries pieces of Wanda while learning who she was through his father’s eyes — a dynamic the show leans into.

Where we left them

• When the Westview Hex collapsed in WandaVision, the conjured version of Vision and the twins faded with it.
• Before they disappeared, Wanda and Vision parted with a promise that they’d find each other again “in some form.”
• The rebuilt White Vision, having recovered his memories, flew off into the world — the thread VisionQuest picks up.

Could they reunite?

Speculation has already turned to Avengers: Doomsday, where a Wanda–Vision reunion could fit if the story borrows from the comic arc Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, which finds Wanda in Latveria and intertwined with Doctor Doom. Reports have even linked Robert Downey Jr. to a Doom role, which would set up an on-screen crossing with Bettany if it comes to pass. None of that is confirmed by Marvel, and Elizabeth Olsen’s return as Wanda has not been announced.

For now, VisionQuest puts Vision — and the shadow Wanda still casts — back in focus on Disney+. Marvel has not confirmed Olsen for the series or any plot ties to Avengers: Doomsday.

Jessica Chastain turned a weekend box office face-off into a private joke by posting her text thread with longtime friend Jeremy Strong on Instagram Stories. Strong kicked it off by sending her a Vulture headline — “‘Other Mommy’ Spanks ‘The Social Reckoning’ at the Box Office.” Chastain replied “Omg,” and Strong shot back with a middle-finger emoji and a kiss, before the two started clowning on the side-by-side photos that ran with the piece.

“These pics are hysterical.”

Chastain wrote about the images. Strong answered,

“Its so funny.”

Then Chastain landed the punchline:

“You look SO SAD!”

The dig works because it taps right into Strong’s public image after Succession — that instantly recognizable Kendall Roy thousand-yard stare that the internet has practically turned into its own genre of memes.

Box office weekend

Chastain’s horror movie Other Mommy opened at No. 1 with $27.5 million. Made for about $18 million and released by Blumhouse and Universal, it outpaced expectations despite poor reviews and a D+ CinemaScore from opening-night audiences.

Meanwhile, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, The Social Reckoning, debuted to $5.5 million, short of the projected $7–8 million range. The film centers on a Facebook whistleblower and the journalist who pursues the story, with Strong portraying Mark Zuckerberg.

• Mikey Madison — a Facebook engineer who leaks internal documents
• Jeremy Allen White — the reporter who receives the leak
• Jeremy Strong — Mark Zuckerberg

Sorkin told The New York Times that Strong leaned into his method approach on set, keeping some distance between takes to mirror how he felt Zuckerberg would interact with people.

“You cannot argue with the results.”

The New York Times polled 516 television professionals to build its new 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century list, and the top spot went to Breaking Bad. Eligible series had to debut on or after January 1, 2000. The rest of the top five shook out like this:

• 1. Breaking Bad
• 2. The Wire
• 3. Mad Men
• 4. Succession
• 5. Fleabag

Bryan Cranston, who won four Emmys for playing Walter White, told People the recognition belongs to everyone who built the show alongside him.

“I’m exceedingly proud of that,” Cranston said. “That’s something that’s voted on. That’s bestowed upon us as the collective who had something to do with that show,”

Created by Vince Gilligan, the AMC drama carved out a reputation for nerve-shredding set pieces and pitch-black humor — from the pilot’s RV-in-the-desert meltdown to the cartel’s infamous warning delivered on a tortoise that detonates as Hank Schrader inches closer. Nearly 20 years after Cranston’s tighty-whities and an old Winnebago kicked off Walter’s descent, the series is still the one other dramas get measured against.

Invincible loads its next punch

In other TV news from the same orbit of brutal storytelling, Prime Video says Invincible Season 5 will arrive in 2027 — and the streamer has already ordered Season 6 ahead of that premiere.

Voice talent confirmed for the next chapters includes returning leads and several heavy-hitting additions introduced in Season 4, plus a new name for Season 5:

• Steven Yeun — Mark Grayson
• J.K. Simmons — Omni-Man
• Lee Pace — Thragg (introduced in Season 4)
• Matthew Rhys — Dinosaurus (introduced in Season 4)
• Danai Gurira — Universa (introduced in Season 4)
• Jack Quaid — Chris, a.k.a. Gravitator (confirmed for Season 5)

Plot details are under wraps. Robert Kirkman’s comics still have plenty of live ammo — the Viltrumite war looming large, Thragg’s ruthless designs, and Mark’s increasingly complicated choices — but Prime Video isn’t saying which arcs Season 5 will pull from.

Season 5 of Invincible lands in 2027 on Prime Video.

The pull here isn’t just the nanny-from-nowhere setup — it’s how quickly the calm starts to feel off. In Te Conozco, Funda, a painter and first-time mom desperate to reclaim her studio and a little sanity, hires Nazlı, a serene, hyper-competent caregiver who seems to solve everything. Then the edges fray: small irregularities, a story that doesn’t quite add up, a husband with more history than he admitted, and a creeping sense the “help” understands this family a little too well.

The eight-episode psychological thriller folds domestic life into slow-burn suspense — jealousy, guilt, and paranoia — as Funda’s confidence wobbles and those closest to her start picking up on the same uneasy signals. By the time outside connections surface, the household’s new normal is already on shaky ground.

All eight episodes of Te Conozco are now streaming on Netflix; it premiered September 17, 2026.

Cast and characters

• Elçin Sangu — Funda: a painter trying to restart her career after becoming a mother, clinging to her identity and studio time.
• Melis Sezen — Nazlı: the poised, efficient nanny whose arrival turns relief into a psychological minefield.
• Ozan Dolunay — İlker: Funda’s husband; as tensions rise, pieces of his past complicate everything.
• Cemal Hünal — Kemal: Funda’s friend and colleague, increasingly wary of Nazlı and a crucial second set of eyes.
• Efe Taşdelen — Emre: Nazlı’s partner, tied to the mystery around her connection to İlker.
• Mine Teber — Cemile: part of the wider family circle.
• Also appearing: Nergis Öztürk, Arbil Tabur, Esra Şahin, and Murat Garipağaoğlu.

Who’s behind it

Originally titled Seni Tanıyorum, the series was created and written by Tuğba Doğan and directed by Mert Baykal. It’s produced by Bombon Studios, with Pelin Diştaş and Kerem Çatay serving as producers.

Te Conozco is streaming now on Netflix in the U.S., with eight episodes that premiered on September 17, 2026.

On a recent stop on On Film… With Kevin McCarthy, Guillermo del Toro didn’t just reminisce about the movies that shaped him — he copped to the lengths he went to see them before he was allowed. As a kid in Mexico, he tried to bluff the box office with a stick-on ’stache and platform shoes to slip into R-rated fare like Holocaust 2000 and Raw Meat.

“I had a fake mustache when I was a kid,” del Toro recalled.

The stunt bombed, repeatedly. He said his campaign got so familiar to staff that when he finally returned with his uncle to try the “responsible adult” route, someone at the theater recognized him on sight and warned his relative not to buy the ticket. The effort wasn’t wasted: Raw Meat (Gary Sherman’s cult horror) clearly stuck with him — he’s since championed it as a favorite.

Next up: a stop-motion quest

That monster-loving kid is back in animation mode with The Buried Giant, now in production at Netflix. Del Toro is directing and co-writing the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel with Dennis Kelly, marking his return to stop-motion after Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Longtime collaborator Ron Perlman has joined the voice cast in an undisclosed role.

Ishiguro’s story follows elderly couple Axl and Beatrice across a post-Arthurian Britain where a mysterious mist has erased collective memory. As they set out to find their son, long-buried truths start to surface, with trolls, warriors and fairies turning the journey into prime del Toro territory — creatures, folklore, and heartache sharing the same world.

Del Toro has been clear about why this one belongs in stop-motion: he wants every person, creature and environment to feel like they occupy the same physical space, something he worries a live-action version would fracture.

He’s described the film as “made by humans for humans.”

The Buried Giant is currently in production at Netflix.

During a recent chat on On Film… With Kevin McCarthy while promoting Digger, Tom Cruise dug into the most chaotic stretch of his early stardom: he was preparing Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July at the same time he was still sneaking in Cocktail pickup shots on Sundays.

At one point, Cruise was prepping two dramas while squeezing in Cocktail pickup shots on Sundays.

He described a schedule that ran six days a week and said he’d spent more than two years developing Rain Man before cameras finally rolled. The two prestige dramas ended up filming back-to-back after running in parallel for years.

The prep wasn’t light, either: Rain Man required extensive work in step with Dustin Hoffman’s character process, and Born on the Fourth of July demanded a physical transformation to play Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. Cruise framed the grind less as punishment than as fuel — the constant motion kept him creatively lit.

Now: box-office turbulence

Cruise’s latest original bet with filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the satire Digger, has turned into a costly headache for Warner Bros. The film opened to about $8 million domestically and roughly $21 million worldwide; with a production budget reported above $160 million and around $100 million in marketing, it’s projected to lose about $250 million, according to TheWrap, even after post-theatrical revenue is counted.

Meanwhile, Cruise’s franchise lane is locked in: Paramount has officially set a sequel to his 1990 NASCAR drama. There’s no indication the Digger shortfall pushed him toward the follow-up — Days of Thunder 2 was already moving months before that flop — but the timing underlines how different the paths look for originals and legacy titles right now.

• Release date — June 2, 2028
• Tom Cruise — returns as Cole Trickle
• Anne Hathaway — joining the cast
• Director — Jonathan Levine
• Producers — Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, Tommy Harper

R. L. Stine’s 1989 teen chiller The Babysitter is getting a live-action movie at Tubi, with a premiere planned for 2027. The project teams Stine with Canadian banner Blue Ice, with filmmaker Jem Garrard set to both write and direct.

Who’s making it

• Writer-director — Jem Garrard
• Producer — Blue Ice
• Executive producers — Jem Garrard, Lance Samuels, Joan Waricha, Jane Stine

Based on one of Stine’s most enduring stand-alone novels, the film continues the streamer’s ongoing collaboration with the author behind Goosebumps and Fear Street. The Babysitter follows 16-year-old Jenny, who takes a babysitting job to help pay for a prestigious writing program just as a dangerous fugitive is on the loose. Soon, menacing phone calls start, paranoia sets in, and Jenny begins to suspect everyone around her.

The original book was first published in 1989 and spawned two sequels — The Babysitter II (1991) and The Babysitter III (1993) — that track Jenny’s attempt to move on from the first ordeal, only to be pulled into new scares.

“With The Babysitter, one of R.L. Stine’s most iconic novels, we’re delivering a fresh, fun thrill ride for longtime fans and a whole new generation,” said Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer at Tubi.

Tubi’s Stine slate is growing: alongside The Babysitter, the streamer has also announced plans to adapt Afraid of Clowns. The Babysitter is slated to stream on Tubi in 2027.

Donna Murphy says she crossed paths with Kathryn Hahn just before Disney locked in Hahn to play Mother Gothel—and she was ready with a congratulations once it became official. Speaking with People, the original Gothel voice praised the new pick in no uncertain terms.

“And when she got the gig ... well, I saw her shortly before it was official, and then I was thrilled to be able to congratulate her. She’s a rockstar. She’s going to kill it,”

Murphy added that advice wasn’t necessary. In her words, Hahn had a brief case of the jitters—and then got a firm pep talk.

“She doesn’t need any advice. She was sort of doing the ‘I am not worthy’ [thing], and I was like, ‘Don’t even kid yourself, woman.’”

Murphy originated Gothel in Disney’s animated Tangled, and her blessing lands as the studio moves ahead with a live-action, musical take on the story. Disney announced the project in 2024; by March 2026, Hahn was confirmed to step into the tower as Rapunzel’s manipulative keeper.

Hahn’s prep for a musical

Hahn told People that joining a full-on musical at this point in her career came as a surprise—but a welcome one. Rehearsals have meant singing, dancing and, as she put it, drilling down on the physicality the role demands.

“Grace — natural grace — and agility don’t come very easily. So that’s been a real fun thing to figure out,”

She described the process as fun and said she’s leaning all the way into Gothel’s movement and presence as she builds the character.

Who’s in the cast

• Kathryn Hahn — Mother Gothel
• Teagan Croft — Rapunzel
• Milo Manheim — Flynn Rider
• Elliot Cowan — role TBA
• Diego Luna — role TBA
• Hugo McPherson — role TBA
• Patrick McPherson — role TBA

The live-action Tangled is currently slated to arrive in 2028.

There’s a lot crammed into the newly released international artwork for Avengers: Doomsday: a full-on multiversal Incursion with two planets on a collision course, shattered cityscapes, and what looks like the wreckage of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the debris. Front and center, a cluster of heroes braces for impact while Doctor Doom’s shadow hangs over the chaos.

• Thor — wielding Stormbreaker, crackling with yellow lightning
• Steve Rogers — shown lifting Mjolnir again
• Sam Wilson (Captain America)
• Shuri
• Sue Storm
• Yelena Belova
• Cyclops
• Charles Xavier
• Gambit
• Loki
• Bucky Barnes

Fans pick apart the art

Once DiscussingFilm shared the image on X, the comments lit up — not over the scale, but over the vibes. A recurring gripe: for an all-timer roster, the poses feel stiff and oddly low on swagger.

"This is the most auraless photo have ever seen in my entire life," one user wrote.

Several replies singled out Cyclops as the lone standout, while others joked that Steve Rogers just looks like a guy who found a hammer. The “aura” debate became its own thread as fans compared this sheet to past Marvel one-sheets.

"Bruh Steve just looks like some guy with a hammer," another said. "Cyclops only one with aura here."

Details fueling debates

Thor’s electricity drew extra scrutiny, with the poster bathing Stormbreaker in golden bolts rather than the usual blue — a color switch that some took as a plot hint and others chalked up to design choices.

"Official? Thors got yellow lightning now?" one comment asked, echoed by, "Thor gets yellow lightning confirmed?"

Elsewhere, fans wondered why the Spider-Men are nowhere to be seen in an image loaded with heroes from different corners of the Marvel universe. Between Doom looming and an Incursion tearing reality, the absence stood out.

All of this lands as Marvel tees up a movie that’s rumored to pack in 60-plus characters and a fearsome Doctor Doom — a villain Anthony Mackie has hinted will be a major force. The one-sheet making the rounds is a Korean and international poster, and it’s the version that’s been ricocheting across social feeds via DiscussingFilm’s post on X.

On the red carpet at the BFI London Film Festival — where he’s premiering his latest release, Primetime — Robert Pattinson was asked about the brief halt in filming on The Batman Part II. He didn’t duck the question, offering a short, steadying update.

“We’re pausing for a little bit … and then we are going to figure it all out.”

According to studio representatives, director Matt Reeves remains firmly in charge of the sequel and has the full backing of DC Studios. They say principal photography has been paused while Reeves attends to personal matters, but second‑unit work has continued during the stoppage.

The shift is the latest schedule wrinkle for the follow-up to 2022’s Gotham hit, which had been eyeing a late 2027 window before moving into early 2028.

Knock-on effects for DC’s Batman plans

DC Studios co-chief James Gunn has said he wants to avoid overlapping Batmen, aiming to release his in-universe feature The Brave and the Bold only after Reeves’ sequel hits theaters. With Part II pushed, Gunn’s project waits in line; its script and cast haven’t been announced yet.

• Director — Matt Reeves remains at the helm
• Status — brief production pause; second-unit shooting ongoing
• U.S. release — February 18, 2028

Sylvester Stallone isn’t ruling out lacing up again as Rocky Balboa — but he drew a bright line about who can be in his corner. Without naming names, the actor said he’d be open to teaming with Michael B. Jordan on Creed IV if one specific person is no longer attached.

“I'll do Creed IV with him as long as the other fellow is not involved.”

Stallone didn’t identify “the other fellow,” but the franchise’s longtime producer Irwin Winkler is the obvious read. The two have feuded for years, with Stallone publicly venting that he doesn’t own the rights to Rocky and has asked for them to be returned. He last appeared as Rocky in Creed II and sat out Creed III in 2023, citing creative differences over the film’s direction. At the time, he praised Jordan and the studio but called the experience emotionally difficult.

Where Creed IV stands

The next chapter is already in motion. Winkler and Jordan have both said a fourth film is in development, with Jordan expected to return as Adonis Creed and direct. Tessa Thompson is also expected back as Bianca. There’s no release date or production schedule yet.

Behind the scenes, Jordan and the producers are taking their time on the script rather than rushing into another bout, with the story potentially shifting Adonis toward a mentor role. Stallone has said he’s interested in reuniting with Jordan if they land the right story — with the caveat that the unnamed figure he referenced stays out of it.

Stallone’s absence from the last film and his long-running dispute with Winkler go back well before the Creed era, rooted in control of the character he created. Whether that long-standing tension intersects with this new sequel remains to be seen on the business side; on the creative side, the project is moving ahead, but it’s still early days with no date on the calendar.

Papa's father, Pastor Stanley Jackson, was murdered in season 6. Papa spent the next two seasons trying to hold onto his father's church and his faith, and he ends the series back on the air and thinking about proposing.

Shamon Brown Jr. has played Stanley "Papa" Jackson II on The Chi since its first season. He was a recurring player in season 1 and was promoted to series regular for season 2 in 2018. Lena Waithe's drama about Chicago's South Side ended its eight-season run when the series finale, "The Last Dance," premiered on Paramount+ on July 24, 2026.

Spoilers through the series finale follow.

How Papa lost his father

Pastor Stanley Jackson was introduced in season 2 as Papa's father and the head of the family's church. In season 6, which premiered on August 6, 2023, father and son had a bitter falling-out. Pastor Jackson disapproved of Papa's relationship with Kenya, a young mother, believing he was too young for that responsibility, and he disagreed with the teachings of her father, Pastor Zeke. The argument at Papa's graduation celebration ended with Papa being put out of the house.

That same night, a masked figure strangled Pastor Jackson while he prayed. Here's what the show later revealed:

• The killer — Nuck, who did it on the orders of the crime boss Douda.
• The reason — Pastor Jackson was no longer willing to be Douda's puppet. Confronted later by a grieving Bakari, Nuck said the pastor had talked too much.
• The funeral — held in the season 6 episode "Long Live," where Papa delivers his father's eulogy.

Read more: Meet '215,' a series drawn from Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s early years

That eulogy is the scene Brown has singled out when talking about the role.

"I had to tap into real loss," Brown told The Hype Magazine. He added that it was the first time he had let himself be that vulnerable on screen.

How Papa lost the church

Season 7 turned the grief into a trap. Papa's mother, Diane, discovered that Pastor Jackson had left the family and the church in debt. Against her wishes, Papa went to Pastor Zeke (Daniel J. Watts) for a loan, and Zeke told him to think of the money as a down payment on his father's church. Papa became Zeke's assistant pastor and eventually handed the church over to him.

What Papa didn't know was that Zeke worked for Douda too, laundering money through the church, and had been installed as the replacement for the pastor who refused to.

The final season

Season 8 premiered on Paramount+ on May 22, 2026, and opened at Zeke's funeral. He had been killed off-screen. His widow, Carolyn, tells Papa she believes Nuck did it, and Papa passes the suspicion on to Tiff, who is still with Nuck. Nuck later confesses to Bakari that he killed Zeke because he couldn't risk the pastor talking to the police.

Ahead of the season, Brown told The Hype Magazine that Papa's final arc was about the character finally putting himself first, after years as the group's anchor. Not every critic thought the show delivered on that. Reel Chicago's review of the finale argued that Papa was underused for much of the season, his story playing out at the margins despite how central he had been to the show's heart.

By the end of "The Last Dance," Papa is back on the air with his podcast, Papa's Pulpit, and thinking about proposing to Kenya soon. He's one of the characters The Chi lets walk away from the South Side's violence with his future still open, which, on this show, counts as a happy ending.

Earlier we wrote: Who killed Denise on The Oval? Her beheading went unsolved for a whole season

The limp belonged to the actor, not the marshal. James Arness was shot through the lower right leg in Italy in 1944, came home with one leg shorter than the other and wore a lift in his shoe for the rest of his life.

James Arness played Marshal Matt Dillon on CBS's Gunsmoke from 1955 to 1975, then returned to the role for Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge in 1987 and four more TV movies in the 1990s. At six-foot-six, he was one of the most physically imposing leading men on television. The slightly uneven gait viewers noticed, especially when Dillon ran, was the result of a war wound.

What happened at Anzio

Arness was a freshman at Beloit College in Wisconsin when he was drafted into the Army in 1943. He was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division and took part in the Allied landing at Anzio, Italy, in early 1944. Here's what followed:

• The wound — about ten days after the landing, Arness was walking point on a night patrol through a vineyard when he walked into a German machine-gun nest. The rounds splintered the bones of his lower right leg and also injured his foot.
• The recovery — he spent close to a year in hospitals and went through multiple surgeries.
• The discharge — he was honorably discharged in January 1945 with a disability pension of $56 a month.
• The lift — the injury left his right leg about five-eighths of an inch shorter than his left, and from then on he wore a lift in his shoe to compensate.

Read more: At 102, Eva Marie Saint dies; voice of elderly Katara in The Legend of Korra

The injury never fully stopped hurting. Arness dealt with chronic leg pain for the rest of his life, and it often became acute when he was in the saddle for Gunsmoke, a show that put him on horseback for two decades.

How he got the part

Arness came out of the Army, worked in radio in his native Minnesota and moved to Hollywood looking for film work. His friendship with John Wayne turned into the job of a lifetime. A popular legend says Wayne turned down Matt Dillon and recommended Arness instead. What's documented is that Wayne appeared in a filmed prologue to the first episode in 1955, introducing Arness to the audience.

Arness reportedly liked it when Gunsmoke's camera found ways to make his height less obvious. The limp was the one thing about his body the camera couldn't do anything about.

The other limp in Dodge City

Some of the confusion about Dillon's limp comes from the fact that Gunsmoke had a famous limp already. Dennis Weaver's Chester Goode, Dillon's deputy in the early seasons, walked with an exaggerated stiff leg that became the character's trademark. Chester's limp belonged to the character. Dillon's belonged to the man playing him.

Arness rarely gave interviews. He died on June 3, 2011, at 88, having played Matt Dillon across five decades on a leg that had been rebuilt in an Army hospital before his acting career began.

Earlier we wrote: How did Gus die in Lonesome Dove? A doctor could have saved him — Gus threatened to shoot him instead

Per Deadline, A24 and Square Peg are in exclusive negotiations to nab the film rights to Emma Cline’s novel The Guest, with Sadie Sink attached to star and produce. Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers) is set to write and direct the adaptation, which would mark a return to dark, character-driven material for the Stranger Things alum.

The package pairs Sadie Sink with Hustlers filmmaker Lorene Scafaria, with A24 and Square Peg in exclusive talks to close the rights.

Who’s on board

• Sadie Sink — attached to star and produce
• Lorene Scafaria — attached as writer-director
• A24 — in exclusive talks to back the film
• Square Peg — producing partner

Sink, who broke out on Netflix’s Stranger Things and drew raves opposite Brendan Fraser in The Whale, has been actively shaping a slate of prestige-leaning projects. Scafaria’s last feature, Hustlers, earned strong reviews and an Oscar campaign run for Jennifer Lopez, making her a natural fit for Cline’s sleek, psychological material.

What the book’s about

Cline’s bestselling novel follows a cunning young grifter drifting through the rarefied social circles of a Hamptons summer, insinuating herself into the lives of the ultra-wealthy as her options tighten. The book drew broad critical praise, including a PEN/Faulkner Award longlist nod, a Belletrist Book Club pick, and year-end mentions from outlets such as The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.

How it came together

According to Deadline, studios and top talent have been chasing The Guest since publication. Sources told the outlet that Sink, already a fan of the novel, moved quickly when the rights hit the market, attaching herself before bringing Scafaria aboard. Roughly a dozen bidders circled during a heated auction, and the Sink–Scafaria package with A24 and Square Peg emerged on top, putting the companies into exclusive talks to close the deal.

No production timeline or additional casting has been announced. The project is expected to move into scripting once the rights deal finalizes.

Emily Fornell died of an opioid overdose in season 18 of NCIS, off-screen, four episodes after celebrating six months sober. The show never explained the decision publicly, and Juliette Angelo said she wasn't told either.

Emily was the daughter of former FBI agent Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano) and Diane Sterling (Melinda McGraw), who was also Gibbs's ex-wife. She first appeared as a small child in season 4, played by Payton Spencer. Angelo took over the role in the season 11 episode "Devil's Triad" in 2013, when she was 13, and played Emily as a teenager and young adult for the next eight years.

The addiction storyline

Emily's story turned dark in season 16. In the season finale, "Daughters," which aired on May 21, 2019, she was hospitalized after an opioid overdose, and Fornell begged Gibbs to do whatever it took to bring down the dealers responsible. The hunt for the drug ring ran into the following seasons.

By season 18, the arc looked resolved:

• "Sunburn" — Emily earns her six-month sobriety chip.
• "Winter Chill," season 18, episode 9 (March 9, 2021) — Fornell calls Gibbs: Emily has relapsed and is in the hospital. Gibbs finds Fornell outside the trauma center, and the two wait together. She doesn't make it.

Her death happens entirely off-screen. Fornell tells Gibbs he sensed her mother in the room with her at the end, and Gibbs tells him that Emily was not alone.

"I could feel Diane in the room," Fornell says, a line that ties Emily's death to the show's earlier loss of her mother.

It was the second off-screen death in three episodes. Jimmy Palmer's wife, Breena, had died of COVID-19 two episodes earlier, and some viewers were openly angry about the pattern.

Read more: Why did Ellie Bishop leave NCIS? Emily Wickersham walked away — and a month later life handed her a bigger reason

How Angelo found out

After the episode aired, Angelo posted on her Instagram Stories, thanking fans for their messages and describing the death as a shock.

"I found out the same time as you, via text," she wrote.

Angelo was 22 at the time. Because Emily dies off-screen, the actress had no scenes in "Winter Chill" to film, so there was no script to read and no final day on set. By then she had built a separate career, with credits including The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Shameless.

Why NCIS did it

The producers have never given a public explanation. Coverage at the time read the decision as a deliberate choice about the subject matter: Emily's arc was the show's long-running story about opioid addiction, and having her relapse after six months sober reflected how that disease actually behaves, even when the people around someone do everything they can.

Many fans didn't accept that. The death has remained a regular entry in fan discussions of the show's most unnecessary deaths, with a common argument that the drug-ring storyline would have worked just as well if Emily had lived.

What the death did accomplish was narrative. It left Fornell, one of the longest-running recurring characters on the show, without his ex-wife or his daughter, and it gave Joe Spano some of the saddest material of his long run on the show. NCIS mentioned Emily in later episodes. Angelo never returned.

Earlier we wrote: Who is SA Washington in Furious? The tequila-drinking FBI boss critics say stole the show from Emmy Rossum

Early numbers aren’t kind: the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer sits at 17% from 29 critic reviews, with many calling out undercooked lore, choppy pacing, and scares that don’t build much tension. Several notices argue the movie leans so hard on loud jolts that the story gets pushed to the background.

Here’s what that story is: in Other Mommy, eight-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) starts seeing an entity that looks and sounds exactly like her mother, Ursula — both played by Jessica Chastain. The film is directed by Rob Savage and adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, and it brings Chastain back to horror after Mama and It: Chapter Two. Savage has said to expect a barrage of jump scares, and there are plenty.

At a glance

• Director — Rob Savage
• Source — Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House
• Stars — Jessica Chastain (Ursula and the entity), Arabella Olivia Clark (Bela)
• Tomatometer — 17% from 29 reviews (at publication time)

What viewers are saying

The audience response is more mixed than the critics’, with some moviegoers frustrated by the plotting and others showing up for the ride.

“Have a hard time giving it 1/2 star. It is horrible and a waste of a talented actress like Jessica Chastain. It has a ridiculous plot line that is more stupefying than frightening,” wrote @KryptonKid.

“A good idea ruined by too many silly jumpscares and bad writing,” Camila F wrote.

On the flip side, several viewers singled out Clark’s work as Bela and the creature effects, arguing the movie’s chaos is part of its big-screen appeal.

“This movie doesn’t take many stops, its a fun ride all the way through, gets silly sometimes but for the most part this entity is relentless and doesn’t hide,” one reviewer said.

“I do not understand why this film is getting so much hate. We finally get a unique story about an unknown entity that isn't demonic and people are absolutely against it for some reason,” Daniel L commented.

Audience ratings are still rolling in, which will tell us whether the word of mouth evens out or keeps the split intact.

Jason Franklin, the president's son, killed her. The show didn't let viewers find out until the second season, when his mother opened a chest in his bedroom and found a bloody sword.

Tyler Perry's The Oval premiered on BET on October 23, 2019, created, written and directed by Perry, about a family installed in the White House by powerful backers and the staff who keep the building running. President Hunter Franklin had a long-running mistress, Denise Truesdale (Melissa L. Williams), dating back to his time as governor. Denise was beheaded in season 1, and for the rest of that season the question of who did it hung over the show. TVLine summed up the tone of season 1 as a season of beddings and beheadings.

What happened in season 1

Denise's death set off a cover-up instead of an investigation. The blood-soaked mattress became evidence everyone wanted gone: Kyle, who handled much of the cover-up, eventually shows First Lady Victoria Franklin footage of it being burned in a field. Meanwhile, Diane, the former press secretary, went public with DNA tying the president to a dead woman's underwear, and Hunter later admitted to Victoria that the underwear had belonged to Denise.

The finale, a two-hour episode in July 2020, revealed a different crime. Jason (Daniel Croix Henderson), the Franklins' son, raped and strangled the White House maid Jean and hid her body under his bed. But it didn't close the Denise case.

TVLine's finale recap pointed out the gap plainly: after 25 episodes, the show still hadn't said who killed Denise.

BET's own preview before season 2 put it on its list of questions the new episodes had to answer.

Read more: ‘The Family Disappears’ brings David Harbour and John Cena together in the fifth season

How the show revealed it

The answer arrived early in the next run of episodes, which premiered on February 16, 2021. Here's how it unfolded:

• The discovery — in the first episodes of the new run, Victoria makes a gruesome discovery in the White House: a chest in Jason's bedroom with a bloody sword inside.
• "The Fencer" (March 9, 2021) — Hunter, who doesn't want to believe it, and Victoria confront their son. Victoria slaps him, and he answers by putting her in a chokehold.
• The confession — Jason eventually tells his parents he killed Jean, beheaded Denise and later strangled his grandmother Maude. According to the show's fan wiki, his reason for killing Denise was that his father wouldn't stop bringing her around.

Meanwhile, Max had kept a piece of the bloody mattress as evidence, still believing Kyle and the Franklins were responsible for Denise's death.

One wrinkle for anyone rewatching: some episode guides count these early-2021 episodes as a continuation of season 1, so "The Fencer" shows up in some places as season 1, episode 29. BET aired and promoted them as season 2.

Denise didn't fully disappear from the show either. Williams also played her twin sister, Ruth Truesdale, a member of the cult known as the Rakudushis.

How it ended

The Oval ran seven seasons on BET and aired its series finale in early October 2026. Jason, by then the show's central villain, is taken into Secret Service custody after a bombing, and Victoria, finally getting the chance she has been waiting for, injects him with a syringe. The episode cuts away before confirming whether he dies, which leaves the man who started the show's first mystery as one of its last unanswered questions.

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None of the Pogues die in season 5. Five other people do, and the last of them is Chandler Groff, the man who killed JJ.

Outer Banks released its fifth and final season on Netflix on August 20, 2026, all 10 episodes at once, ending the series at 50 episodes. The season opens in Morocco, with John B, Sarah, Pope, Kiara, Cleo and Rafe stranded and grieving JJ (Rudy Pankow), who was stabbed to death by his biological father, Groff (J. Anthony Crane), in the season 4 finale. Co-creator Josh Pate said after that finale that JJ's death had always been part of the plan.

"It was always part of the plan for the series that JJ would eventually die," Pate told Deadline.

Spoilers for the whole final season follow.

Every death in season 5

The body count starts in the premiere and runs to the last episode:

• Driss (episode 1) — Driss and his partner Zac offer the Pogues passage to Spain while planning to collect the bounty Finch has put on Kiara. When the pair are brought before Finch, he tells them he only has room for one of them in his crew and puts a gun on the table. Zac gets to it first and shoots Driss in the chest.
• Dr. Craig (episode 2) — the metalwork expert known as Medici, hired to authenticate the Blue Crown for Groff. She turns out to be working for Finch. When she demands the payment she was promised, Finch has one of his men shoot her in the head and leaves with the crown.
• Tevi and Roberto (later in the season) — two enforcers for Julio, a drug lord whose stash John B stole, sent after Sarah as leverage. They catch up with John B and Sarah at the docks and have them on the ground at gunpoint when both are shot dead by Dalia, who happens to be there to buy a staff from Sarah's mother.
• Chandler Groff (series finale) — during the hurricane, Groff tries to sail off with the stolen Royal Merchant gold. Kiara sneaks aboard, stabs him, tangles him in the rigging and hoists him up the mast. When the mast snaps, she cuts the last rope holding it, and Groff goes into the sea with it.

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That's five. Every main character who started the season ends it alive.

The ones who almost died

The final season spends a lot of its tension on near misses. Rose Cameron is the closest call: Groff, who has been seeing her, catches her packing up the gold to run and strangles her until she appears dead. Wheezie shoots him in the arm, and by the time he comes back downstairs, Rose's body is gone. She survived.

Kiara gets tied to an anchor and dropped into the ocean, and her friends find her with a phone flashlight. Sarah survives a dream sequence in which John B finds her dead and a medical cliffhanger that resolves at the top of the next episode. Finch, the Corsairs' leader, survives his car plunging off a bridge the Pogues blow up. He's last seen taking the Blue Crown from Kiara and asking whether it worked to raise the dead.

How it ends for everyone else

The finale ends with Kildare evacuating ahead of a hurricane. Pate has said the storm was deliberate.

"We knew we wanted to bookend hurricanes to start and end the show," Pate told Netflix's Tudum.

Rafe turns on a lighthouse beacon that keeps the Pogues' boats off the rocks, then leaves for South America with Sofia. Pope works out where the Royal Merchant gold went down, and John B surfaces with a bar of it. The Pogues use the money to help rebuild the island and the Chateau, where John B and Sarah hold their "official" wedding in front of their baby son, whom they named JJ.

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During a fan Q&A on Reddit hosted by Prime Video, Mike Flanagan told viewers the dream assignment he can’t shake: a new take on Jaws. He said it while fielding questions about his slate — including his upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie and his in-the-works movie in The Exorcist franchise — and didn’t mince words about where he sees opportunity.

“Honestly, I wish to hell I could make a Jaws movie. Another example where no one will EVER get close to the original, but there is a ton of room for improvement on the sequels.”

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 original is basically untouchable, but the follow-ups have long been a punching bag, culminating in Jaws: The Revenge and its infamous “the shark has a grudge” angle. If Flanagan ever got a crack at it, he’d be stepping into a series that looks like this:

• Jaws 2 (1978)
• Jaws 3-D (1983)
• Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Why it tracks

Flanagan’s calling card is character-first horror with a gut punch — The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass are built on grief, faith, and moral rot as much as ghosts. His Stephen King runs (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep) show he’s comfortable honoring a classic while finding fresh angles. That sensibility lines up with what made Jaws work in the first place: relationships and dread, not just teeth.

He’s also in the middle of reshaping other horror touchstones. His Carrie reimagines parts of the mother-daughter dynamic and builds out a larger supernatural framework around its telekinetic heroine — a sign he’s willing to broaden the canvas without trampling what fans love.

For now, Flanagan’s Jaws talk is wish-list stuff — there’s no shark movie of his in development or announced. He remains busy with his new Exorcist film and his Carrie adaptation, which is what brought him to that Reddit AMA in the first place.

Stuart Bloom breaks a device Sheldon and Leonard built and sets off a multiverse apocalypse. Nine episodes of universe-hopping later, he and his friends get rescued by the Golden Age Flash.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe premiered on HBO Max on July 23, 2026, the fourth series in the Big Bang Theory franchise after the original, Young Sheldon and Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage. It was created by Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn and Big Bang co-creator Bill Prady. Kevin Sussman stars as Stuart, the owner of the Comic Center, with Lauren Lapkus as Denise, Brian Posehn as geologist Bert Kibbler and John Ross Bowie as physicist Barry Kripke, all reprising their Big Bang roles. HBO Max renewed it for a second season in August.

The premise

Stuart damages a device built by Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter and Howard Wolowitz and accidentally triggers what the show calls a multiverse Armageddon. He has to fix it while jumping from universe to universe with Denise, Bert and Kripke, meeting alternate versions of the people they know along the way.

Lorre has described it as a science fiction action-adventure comedy and a deliberate change of pace for him.

"Most of my career has been two people sit on a couch and talk," Lorre said.

Every episode title begins with "Spoiler," and every title delivers. The first is "Spoiler: Gary Dies."

Read more: James Burrows saved a key Two and a Half Men casting, Chuck Lorre says

The universes so far

The jumps get stranger as the season goes:

• The apocalypse — a wasteland where Kripke is a warlord running Caltech as a fortress and Raj has been held prisoner for years.
• The AI state — a world where neural chips shock anyone who isn't calm, and alternate versions of Penny and Zack lead the resistance.
• The magic world — science is a crime, Bert turns out to be a powerful wizard, and an alternate Bernadette is a demon.
• The simulation — Stuart wakes up in a psychiatric hospital under Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler before discovering the whole reality is fake.
• The ruminants — a universe where humanity descended from cows.
• The military world — where the group discovers the soldiers chasing them are their own future selves.

The franchise cameos have included Kunal Nayyar, Kaley Cuoco, Melissa Rauch, Mayim Bialik and Wil Wheaton, plus Christine Baranski, Penn and Teller, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Neil deGrasse Tyson as themselves.

The Flash episode

Episode 8 ends with the group trapped inside a comic book by an entity called the Adversary. Episode 9, "Spoiler: We Couldn't Get Green Lantern," released on September 17, reveals they're in the DC universe, specifically Gotham City, where Mr. Freeze (Eric Allan Kramer) is on the attack. Stuart's plan is to find the Flash and use his Cosmic Treadmill to escape.

They're rescued by Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash, played by Andy Ridings, complete with the metal helmet. He takes them home on the treadmill, where they find the Comic Center floating in a void. This is a new version of the character. Grant Gustin, Ezra Miller and John Wesley Shipp are not involved.

The episode title is literal. The writers wanted Green Lantern, but DC said no because HBO's Lanterns was in the works. Penn told Deadline that Lorre was unhappy about it until he and Prady convinced him the Flash fit a multiverse story even better.

Penn on why they picked the Golden Age version: "He's kind of silly."

The writers also leaned on the absurdity of traveling to Central City to recruit a hero against a Batman villain.

The season finale, "Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience," streamed on September 24. Stuart has a second season to keep failing.

Earlier we wrote: Why didn’t Young Sheldon get a Season 8?

Two states: Texas and New Mexico. Montana was played by northern New Mexico, and the cabin Call's men build at the end of the drive is still there.

Lonesome Dove, the 1989 CBS miniseries adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel, follows Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) driving a herd from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. Production started in Texas in April and May 1988 and then moved to New Mexico.

The Texas locations

The town of Lonesome Dove, which McMurtry invented and placed on the Rio Grande, was built on the Moody Ranch, about seven miles south of Del Rio, Texas. The producers chose it for its borderland brush: mesquite, prickly pear and the rest of the south Texas scrub. The ranch also supplied several hundred head of cattle and some of the horses for the remuda.

The rest of the Texas shoot included:

• Alamo Village, Brackettville — Happy Shahan's old-time movie set, which hosted several scenes.
• Austin — listed among the production's Texas locations.

Most of the miniseries was shot at the Moody Ranch.

Read more: How did Gus die in Lonesome Dove? A doctor could have saved him — Gus threatened to shoot him instead

The New Mexico locations

The drive north was mostly filmed around Santa Fe and in the mountains of northern New Mexico:

• Bonanza Creek Ranch and Eaves Movie Ranch — two working movie ranches outside Santa Fe.
• Cook Ranch, Galisteo — another ranch location in the Santa Fe area.
• San Ildefonso and Santo Domingo pueblos.
• Angel Fire and Black Lake — in the mountains of northern New Mexico, where Black Lake doubled for Montana.

Northern New Mexico is where the story's last chapter was filmed: Call's men reaching their Montana grassland, building a cabin and corrals, and settling in for the winter.

The cabin

The cabin from those final episodes survived. John and Charlotte Kimberlin's Hat Creek Ranch in northern New Mexico, which shares its name with the story's Hat Creek Cattle Company, has preserved the mountain meadow and lake as they look on screen. Western Horseman reported that the Kimberlins refurbished the cabin and corrals Call's men build in the closing scenes.

Near Black Lake, at the southern end of the Moreno Valley, the cabin built for the shoot can still be seen from the road, as a photographer noted in 2020.

It sits on private ranch land, so the road is as close as most fans will get.

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Gus McCrae dies of blood poisoning from an arrow wound after refusing to let a doctor amputate his second leg. When the doctor tried to bring in help to hold him down, Gus drew his pistol.

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was published in 1985, and the CBS miniseries aired over four nights, February 5 to 8, 1989, with Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as his partner, Woodrow Call. Directed by Simon Wincer from a teleplay by Bill Wittliff, it won seven Emmys, and Duvall took home a Golden Globe. Gus's death, near the end of the cattle drive from Texas to Montana, is the scene most people remember.

Spoilers for the novel and miniseries follow.

How Gus gets hurt

Gus and Pea Eye are scouting ahead of the herd in Montana when they're ambushed. Gus takes two arrows in the leg. The two men dig into a shallow cave along a creek bank, and Gus works the arrows out of his leg until he passes out from the pain. Pea Eye goes for help.

Then Gus gets lucky. An old trapper, Hugh Auld, finds him, sees how badly infected the leg is, lends him a horse and ties him into the saddle. Gus rides into Miles City, fires his pistol in the air to get attention, asks for a doctor and collapses.

The doctor's office

He wakes in a hot little room to find his left leg gone. The doctor, a drunk named Joseph Cincinnatus Mobley, took it off while Gus was unconscious, without anesthesia. The infection has spread to the right leg, and Mobley wants that one too. Here's how the standoff plays out:

• The refusal — Gus won't allow it, and promises to shoot Mobley if he comes too close.
• The muscle — Mobley brings in a big young man to hold Gus down. Gus levels his gun at him, and the man leaves fast.
• The regret — Mobley wishes he had taken both legs while Gus was out cold. Gus would probably have shot him for it anyway.
• Call's arrival — Call finally reaches Miles City and tries to talk Gus into the amputation. Gus cocks his pistol again, and Mobley tells Call it's too late to try.

Read more: Who is Lonesome Dove based on? Before Netflix's remake, meet the real cowboy who carried his dead partner home to Texas

Strictly speaking, the second amputation was never a sure thing. It offered Gus a chance, against what the doctor saw as certain death without it. Gus chose the certainty.

Call accuses him of vanity. He also tries the practical argument: all Gus ever liked to do was sit on the porch drinking whiskey anyway.

"It don't take legs to do that," Call tells him.

Gus doesn't move.

How he dies

Gus spends his last hours settling accounts. He writes letters to Lorena and to Clara, the woman he loved and never married, and leaves his saddle to Pea Eye. He makes Call promise to carry his body back to Texas and bury it in a grove by the Guadalupe River. Then he closes his eyes. Call sits watching, nods off from exhaustion, and Gus dies while he's asleep.

Mobley agrees to pack the body in charcoal and salt through the Montana winter, amputated leg included, so that Call can haul it nearly the length of the country in the spring. When Call comes back for it, the storage shed has been ransacked and the leg is gone.

In the miniseries, Duvall gives Gus a last line that Wincer still singles out decades later.

Wincer recalled that Gus's final words to Call are: "It's been quite a party."

The trip back to Texas with Gus's body takes up the rest of the story.

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The RAF appears in only a handful of scenes, and they're the ones British viewers remember. The series tells its story strictly from inside an American bomb group, and the British it meets mostly show up as a punchline or a foil.

Masters of the Air, the Apple TV+ follow-up to Band of Brothers and The Pacific from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, premiered on January 26, 2024, and ran nine episodes through March 15. Based on historian Donald L. Miller's book, it follows the US Eighth Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, the "Bloody Hundredth," which flew B-17s out of Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk.

What the show actually shows

The complaints center on a few early scenes:

• The pub — American and RAF flyers trade barbs over pints, and Lt. Curtis Biddick (Barry Keoghan) gets into a fight with RAF men. Miller has said the writers took the fight from Biddick's real history, in which he knocked a man out with a single punch.
• The "philosophies" argument — a moustachioed RAF officer tells the Americans that bombing during the day is suicide. The line sets up the series' central debate between the RAF's night bombing and the American daylight raids.
• What's missing — the RAF's own bomber campaign, which by 1943 had been fighting for years, stays almost entirely offscreen.

Critics noticed. One review syndicated by AOL described the RAF scenes as "a cartoon of anti-Englishness." The historian Luke Truxal, reviewing each episode for the military history site Balloons to Drones, flagged an anti-British bias in the series. British viewers in user reviews and on forums were blunter, with complaints that the RAF was played as buffoons while the Americans won the air war alone.

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Is there a historical basis?

Partly. The disagreement over day and night bombing was real. The RAF bombed at night, the Americans committed to daylight precision raids, and the cost of the American approach is the subject of the whole series.

The pub rivalry is harder to justify as a pattern. Miller himself pointed out that the two air forces rarely crossed paths. The British flew at night, the Americans by day, and their bases sat on opposite sides of Norwich.

"For the most part, they don't meet that much," Miller told Time Out.

The casting irony

The show that rubbed British viewers the wrong way was made in Britain, largely by British actors. Callum Turner, who plays Major John "Bucky" Egan, is from London. Anthony Boyle, who plays navigator Harry Crosby, is from Belfast. Raff Law, son of Jude Law, plays Sgt. Ken Lemmons, and Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa plays Tuskegee airman Robert Daniels. Keoghan is Irish.

Primetimer noted that "most of the command officers are English actors," as are most of the rank and file.

The Hollywood Reporter's review went further, praising the cast while noting how many British actors were doing varying versions of an American accent. The production built a £5 million replica of the Thorpe Abbotts base at Newland Park in Buckinghamshire, shot the airfield scenes at Dalton Barracks in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, with two full-size B-17 replicas, and worked out of Bovingdon Airfield Studios in Hertfordshire.

The British contribution to Masters of the Air was enormous, as long as it stayed in American uniform.

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In the books, it's Cole. Netflix's version has spent three seasons declining to say so, and showrunner Melanie Halsall has been open about doing it on purpose.

My Life with the Walter Boys began as a Wattpad story by Ali Novak and was published in print on March 1, 2014, followed by a sequel, My Return to the Walter Boys. Netflix's adaptation, developed by Halsall, premiered on December 7, 2023, with Nikki Rodriguez as Jackie Howard, a New York teenager who loses her parents and sister in an accident and moves in with the family of her late mother's best friend in Silver Falls, Colorado. Season 2 followed on August 28, 2025, and season 3 on August 6, 2026. A fourth season is already in production.

What happens in the books

Jackie's love triangle is between two of the Walter brothers: Alex, the quieter one, and Cole, his older, smooth-talking brother. Here's how Novak resolves it:

• The first book — Jackie dates Alex for a long stretch. Alex eventually overhears her admitting she has feelings for Cole, and the two break up on fairly mutual terms. Alex even encourages her to spend the summer in New York.
• The kiss — Jackie only kisses Cole after she and Alex have ended things.
• The ending — Jackie leaves for New York, and she and Cole agree they'll be together when she comes back.
• The sequel — My Return to the Walter Boys opens with Jackie clearly committed to Cole. The book's conflict is miscommunication, and by the end the two are together.

So the books land on Cole, gradually and without much doubt.

What Netflix did instead

Halsall kept the shape of the first book's ending and changed nearly everything about how Jackie gets there. In the season 1 finale, Alex tells Jackie he loves her at a wedding, she doesn't say it back, and that same night she kisses Cole while she's still with Alex. Then she leaves for New York without telling anyone.

Halsall told TheWrap that she had the ending in her head early on. Episode 10 was built to make everything look settled, with Jackie finally at home with the Walters and the family wedding going well.

Her stated plan: "then I wanted to blow all that up."

She told Variety that she didn't want Jackie to end up with either brother at that point, and that she went back and forth on it while working to make both boys believable choices.

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Seasons 2 and 3 have kept that distance from the books:

• Season 2 — Jackie comes back from New York wanting to make amends with Alex and take space from Cole. The season ends with George Walter's collapse.
• Season 3 — Jackie and Cole finally date, then split when Cole decides she needs to focus on her future. By the finale, Jackie is single and has kissed Eliot (Naveen Paddock), a childhood friend invented for the show.

Halsall described the Eliot development to Netflix as a turning point for Jackie, a moment when she starts imagining a different kind of partner.

"Maybe this is the kind of guy I end up with," is how Halsall put Jackie's thinking.

Will the show end up where the book does?

Netflix hasn't said. The fourth season is due in 2027. Every season so far has borrowed beats from Novak and refused her conclusion, and the show has now introduced a love interest with no counterpart in either book.

Novak's readers have known how the story ends since 2014. The show seems determined to make them wait at least one more season.

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Wilde left twice. The first time she was off making Cowboys & Aliens with Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, and the show told viewers Thirteen had gone to Rome. The second time she didn't come back.

Wilde joined House in its fourth season in 2007 as Remy Hadley, the applicant known only by her number, Thirteen, during House's search for a new team. The show built her around secrecy and a Huntington's disease diagnosis she received in the season four finale. By 2010 she had a film career running alongside the series, and the two started to collide.

The first exit: a leave of absence

At the end of season 6 in May 2010, Thirteen asked House for time off. Days later, Entertainment Weekly reported the reason: Wilde was taking a leave from season 7 to star in Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens, opposite Craig, Ford and Sam Rockwell, with production expected to overlap the new season by at least two months.

Executive producer Katie Jacobs said Wilde would appear at the start of season 7 "and then she will not be there for a period of time."

Season 7 premiered on September 20, 2010. Thirteen appeared in the premiere, prepared for her leave of absence, and told everyone she was going to Rome. She then missed episodes 2 through 17.

How the show explained it

Thirteen came back in "The Dig," the show's 150th episode, which aired on April 11, 2011. House is waiting for her outside a prison gate. She had spent the back half of her leave in jail, officially for excessive prescribing, and House spends the episode building a spud gun with her while trying to work out the real crime.

• The truth — her older brother was in the late stages of Huntington's disease, the illness that killed their mother and that Thirteen carries too.
• The request — in one of his increasingly short lucid periods, he asked her to end his life.
• The cover story — she used excess pain medication to do it and pleaded to the prescribing charge.
• The fallout — she served six months, rejoined the team and stayed through the end of the season.

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Wilde appeared in episodes 18 through 23 of season 7. Her time away had also produced a run of films, including Cowboys & Aliens and The Change-Up, both 2011 releases.

The second exit: for good

Cowboys & Aliens opened on July 29, 2011, won its opening weekend with $36.4 million, and finished at $174.8 million worldwide against a $163 million budget. In August 2011 it was announced that Wilde was leaving House.

Her final episode as a regular was "Charity Case," season 8, episode 3, which aired on October 17, 2011. House, who is wearing an ankle monitor at this point, keeps calling Thirteen to get her back on his rebuilt team, and she tells him she isn't coming back.

"My film career is thanks to House," Wilde told E! News before the episode aired.

Thirteen made one more appearance, in the series finale on May 21, 2012. Wilde went on to Her, then to directing, starting with Booksmart. Hugh Laurie's send-off at the time held up: she was "obviously headed for great things."

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Speaking during a Q&A at the London Film Festival, Danny Boyle said the planned finale of his revived zombie saga is being paused for now, citing scheduling and money as the sticking points. He pointed to writer and franchise co-creator Alex Garland’s calendar as the immediate hurdle, with financing still to be locked.

“It’s on the back burner at the moment,” Boyle said. “Alex has been off doing his own film, which is a huge project.”

Garland is reportedly tied up on an A24 adaptation of Elden Ring, a commitment that’s keeping him from moving forward on the third movie for the time being, according to Deadline. No new timetable was offered.

Whiplash from last week

The pause comes just days after Boyle struck a far sunnier tone. On September 30, he said Garland had turned in an “exceptional” script for the trilogy capper and teased a substantial role for Cillian Murphy. Earlier this year, Boyle had even floated a tentative 2027 start for filming, a window that now looks shaky.

• Sept. 30: Boyle says the script is in and praises it; Murphy would have a major role.
• Earlier this year: A tentative 2027 production start is mentioned.
• Today: Boyle says the third film is on hold while scheduling and financing get sorted.

Box office headwind

Adding to the complication, Nia DaCosta’s middle entry, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, has underperformed, grossing about $58.5 million worldwide against a reported $63 million budget. That softer result likely makes the final chapter a tougher financial lift.

Boyle still expressed hope the movie will happen once Garland is free and the money comes together. For now, the third film in 28 Years Later: Part III has no production start or release date.

Season 7, episode 6, "The Soup Nazi," which aired on NBC on November 2, 1995. The real soup man found out about it, and he did not take it as a compliment.

"The Soup Nazi" is the 116th episode of Seinfeld and the first episode Spike Feresten got a writing credit on. Larry Thomas plays Yev Kassem, a soup vendor whose broth is so good that customers put up with an ordering ritual enforced by public humiliation. Thomas was nominated for the 1996 Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, and Feresten got an Emmy nomination for the script.

What happens in the episode

The rules are simple and the punishment is swift. Jerry stays in Kassem's good graces long enough to keep eating, George gets his soup taken away for asking about bread, and Elaine chats while ordering and gets banned for a year. Meanwhile Jerry and his girlfriend's baby talk ("Schmoopie") drives George up the wall.

The B-plot pays off the A-plot. Elaine buys an antique armoire off the street and Kramer fails to guard it. The replacement she ends up with comes from Kassem, who says he would rather have destroyed it than let her have it. Inside it she finds his secret soup recipes and threatens to publish them. By the end, Newman reports that Kassem is giving away his remaining soup, closing the stand and moving to Argentina.

Thomas paid the $100 Emmy application fee himself, which makes the nomination the best return on a soup-related investment in the whole story.

The real Soup Nazi

The character was based on Ali "Al" Yeganeh, who opened Soup Kitchen International on West 55th Street in Manhattan in 1984 and ran it on rules his regulars knew by heart. Feresten ran into him while writing for The Late Show with David Letterman, and pitched him to Seinfeld and Larry David only after several other ideas fell flat. Some of the episode's line scenes, including Elaine slapping the counter and telling Kassem he looks like Al Pacino, were things Feresten said he witnessed at the real stand.

Read more: Why did Chuck Lorre reunite with Charlie Sheen? “If he’s sober.”

Yeganeh hated it. He objected above all to being called a Nazi, called the episode unfair, and has referred to Seinfeld as an "idiot clown."

The day Jerry got thrown out

Feresten has told this story for decades, and the details vary with the telling.

• The visit — Seinfeld went to Soup Kitchen International with Feresten and members of the production team, despite Feresten warning him Yeganeh knew about the episode and was angry.
• The timing — some accounts put the visit weeks after the episode aired. In a 2024 interview, Feresten said it was the following summer.
• The confrontation — Yeganeh berated Seinfeld in front of the line, told him to get out and, by Feresten's account, delivered a real-life "no soup for you." In another version, Seinfeld's apology was so sarcastic that it sealed the ban.
• The aftermath — Feresten said the incident made the front page of the New York Post the next day, and the two men never appear to have made up.

Seinfeld did not go entirely without. He later sent an assistant back to buy the soup quietly.

"No one tells Jerry 'No soup for you,'" Feresten told The Hollywood Reporter.

What happened to the stand

Yeganeh closed the original stand in 2004 and licensed his recipes to a franchising company, and by 2010 the flagship was operating as Original SoupMan. He told franchisees to keep Soup Nazi references out of their shops, even as the brand's tagline became "Soup For You!" In 2015 the company signed Larry Thomas to help promote the soups nationally, which means the man who played the Soup Nazi ended up selling the real one's soup.

Earlier we wrote: Why Seinfeld is better than Friends starts with one rule Larry David never let anyone break

In a new People interview, the 27-year-old says life looks very different since her 2025 Best Actress win for Anora—but her mindset hasn’t budged. She credits a lifelong habit of second-guessing herself with keeping the spotlight in perspective.

“I feel like so much has changed, but at the same time, I still feel exactly like I always have in a lot of ways. I’m too much of an overthinker and too self-critical to ever get a big head.”

That grounded approach arrives as Madison moves into Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a sharp turn from Anora’s raw emotional chaos to a real-world story about technology, power, and accountability.

She said the Anora breakout opened doors to “interesting characters” and filmmakers she’s admired for years, and she even name-checked dream scene partners: Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep.

Oscars déjà vu

Madison also shared a surreal moment from the 2025 Academy Awards with USA Today, crediting her brother, Miles Madison, with a pre-show prediction that weirdly came true on live TV.

“He had a dream the night before – it was almost like a premonition of sorts – we were listening to music and then we were dancing in the audience.” “It was so strange because then there was a commercial break, and they put music on, and Colman Domingo was getting everyone out of their seats and dancing. He was like, ‘This is just like the dream I had!’”

Next up for Madison is Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning.