Entertainment

Few directors have had a better year than this 39-year-old Oakland native, whose 2025 cemented his place in the uppermost tier of blockbuster auteurs. After proving himself an expert steward of franchise fare with “Creed” and two culture-shifting “Black Panther” movies, Coogler notched an even more significant hit this year with “Sinners,” an original crowd-pleaser he wrote about twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who open a juke joint in a Jim Crow-era Mississippi that’s beset by vampires.

Powered by strong reviews and premium ticket pricing, “Sinners” became the highest-grossing original live-action movie in 15 years, topped only by Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” which he made in between his second and third Batman films. “Inception” helped tee up the rest of Nolan’s career, and with Coogler now similarly positioned between his second and third “Black Panther” films, a comparison feels irresistible.

But Coogler isn’t inclined to dwell on such things. As we walked past the school facade from “Abbott Elementary,” he recalled a meeting at Warner Bros. while making “Creed.” He sat at a long table packed with executives eager to impress him, Jordan and Sylvester Stallone, a producer and co-star on that “Rocky” spinoff. Coogler got through the heady meeting by relying on the mental compartmentalization that had been drilled into him as a college football player.

“I can’t engage with it as the kid whose dreams were to come to Hollywood and make movies,” he said. “I have to engage with it as a professional shepherd of the story.”

As a reminder, MAC Cosmetics is owned by Estee Lauder. Ronald Lauder, who together with his brother Leonard Lauder inherited the Estee Lauder company, is the president of the World Jewish Congress, and chairman of the Jewish National Fund, and is a zionist with extremist views and financially and politically supports Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

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Originally, Bell voiced Mary Magdalene for The Truth and Life Dramatized Audio Bible, a New Testament audiobook released in 2010. A producer tied to the Bible audiobook has since partnered with Gulfstream Studios, which is licensing “The Life of Jesus Podcast” to Fox Faith, according to publicly available information.

What’s more, the audio Bible includes the same celebrity names that are now being touted in Fox’s press release, including Brian Cox, Sean Astin, Neal McDonough, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, and Julia Ormond. While some of the actors have been open about their Christian faith, Cox, who is voicing the role of God, has previously called Fox News “the devil.” A rep for Rhys-Davies also confirms to Rolling Stone that the actor only learned of the “repurposed” project earlier this week.

Original Naked Gun director David Zucker has gone back on the attack over the recent reboot starring Liam Neeson, after appearing to soften his tone in the wake of its release.

In an interview with Woman’s World, Zucker said that Seth MacFarlane, producer on the new Naked Gun and previously director and co-writer of the Ted movies “totally missed” the spoof-comedy style that Zucker, along with collaborators Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, made famous in Airplane! and the three original Naked Gun films.

“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style – and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently. People started copying it, like [producer] Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.”

He added: “It can look like we’re just throwing stuff up against the wall to see what sticks, but we’re not. There’s thought behind it.”

My god, what have we become as a society?

Labubus could be headed to the big screen. Sony Pictures has acquired the screen rights to the plush toy sensation and is in early development of a feature film which, if successful, would anchor a new franchise.

The deal, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, was signed this week between the Chinese toy makers and Sony Pictures, whose animation division is fresh off the global success of KPop Demon Hunters. No producer or film-maker is attached to the project yet, and it’s still unclear if the film would be live-action or animated.

The toys, designed by the European-based artist Kasing Lung and initially sold as part of a line of monster figurines by the company How2 Work, first took off in south-east Asia in 2019, after they were marketed by Chinese retailer Pop Mart. The popularity of the dolls, which Lung says were inspired by Nordic fairytales after moving to the Netherlands from Hong Kong as a child, has been fueled by social media posts of live unboxings that showcase rare collections, as well as their adoption by prominent celebrities.

OK, well I guess there's some backstory, but ...

Just this week, Sony and Mattel announced that they had partnered for a film based on the game View Master.

is View-Master a game? I seem to recall it being clicking between still images.

Don't get me wrong, it was cool. But god help us if this gets released in 2D.

Kim who? Ah, right ... famous for being famous. I don't miss that ex.

I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevents any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong. The new series from Ryan Murphy, All’s Fair – starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Niecy Nash as the founders of an all-female law firm delivering divorce-y justice to incredibly rich but slightly unlucky women under the azure skies of California – is terrible. Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible. While I try to get my thoughts in order after bearing witness to the first episode, I’m going to give you a few direct quotes, so you can see why I’m struggling.

“Let’s put the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork’.”

“My flight was turbulent and so is my mood,” says Liberty (Watts) to a man barring her way to a client.

“He’s wolf-like in his possessiveness,” says a client of her husband.

It’s so awful, it feels almost contemptuous.

the hell they going to show on MTV now?

Movie stars have been on a journey this fall, and it hasn’t been especially big, bold or beautiful. Actually, on second thought, maybe there is something bold about the way audiences have rejected, in quick succession, new movies collectively starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Channing Tatum, Kristen Dunst, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen and none other than Daniel Day-Lewis. This group of actors that would constitute an especially star-studded Oscars broadcast couldn’t muster a single hit among them. Even Leonardo DiCaprio must accept his status as the exception that proves the rule: his movie One Battle After Another is heading toward a respectable $200m worldwide – and all it took was one of the biggest stars in the world with support from familiar faces Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, a multiple-time Oscar nominee directing with an Imax-sized budget, and almost universally rapturous reviews. Put all that together in an adult-driven drama and maybe you can outgross, and lose somewhat less money than, Disney’s Snow White remake. (One Battle is unlikely to turn a profit on its theatrical release.)

Meanwhile, movies such as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, The Smashing Machine, Roofman, After the Hunt, Good Fortune, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Anemone had no such constellation of exciting elements forming in their orbit alongside their stars. Some of them couldn’t even manage particularly great reviews. But that used to be what movie stars were there to provide: some kind of baseline level of interest in a movie, even if it wasn’t getting best-of-year reviews or boasting cutting-edge spectacle. None of the aforementioned stars are expected to perform with the superhuman consistency of Tom Cruise between 1986 and 2006 or Will Smith between 1996 and 2016. But there used to be a certain number of dramas and comedies that would make $50m or more in the US every year as a matter of course, the ones with stars tending to have an advantage in that respect.

My god, are those some long grafs. It's at least tangentially brought up later in the piece that seeing a movie is really fucking expensive when you're also paying $7/pound for 80/20 ground beef.

There's more bleeding red neon than imagined coming out of Disney's Tron: Ares. Deadline has learned from sources that the third chapter in the 43-year old videogame matrix protagonist story actually cost $220 million net, not the reported $170 million to $180 million that was floated out there.

At a $160 million box office threshold Tron: Ares triggers $72.2 million in worldwide theatrical rentals, $37.6M in global home entertainment, close to a $100M in global home television, with an extra $5 million from airlines for a total of $214.8M in revenues. Put this up against the $220 million net production cost shot with Vancouver, Canada tax credits, a $102.5M global P&A spend with stunts at San Diego Comic-Con, touring light cycles, a laser light Nine Inch Nails concert at the LA premiere which closed down Hollywood Blvd, $10.8M in others costs and $14.2M in residuals which gets you to total costs of $347.5M. That gets us to a $132.7 million loss.

Exclaimed one astute talent rep on why it was game over for Tron: Ares at this October's box office, "There was no specific vision, to be honest. The idea that Disney would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a Jared Leto film that is a franchise that hasn't worked in four decades is insane."

Many would like to throw tomatoes at Disney for the casting, that there's zero audience attraction for the likes of Leto, Lee, etc. First, despite tabloid headlines about Leto's alleged behavior, such noise doesn't factor into moviegoers' decisions to buy or not buy a ticket. It could be argued that they're not even in the know of the Air Mail feature. Tron is the star at the end of the day. Had the fan faithful declared it was a better movie than the last, perhaps we'd see an expansion of the audience and some box office momentum, rather than falling short of its $40M domestic opening projection with $33.2M. Moviegoers gave Tron: Ares the same CinemaScore as Tron: Legacy, a B+, which indicates there was no reason to have any FOMO. Definite recommend was an OK 57% on Screen Engine/Comscore's PostTrak; a score in the mid sixty percentile to seventy-plus range indicates a hopeful tentpole has electricity. Tron: Ares was older skewing with 70% over 25 indicating both the Gen-X and Legacy millennial fans showed up, however, as far as making new fans, Tron: Ares had very little appeal from the 13-17 crowd who showed up at 6%. While the Gen X core Tron fans gave Tron:Ares a very high 71%+ definite recommend, the 18-24 set gave it the lowest of any demographic at 44%. Not good.

I’ve never met a billionaire before. And this isn’t how I imagined it would go. Don’t get me wrong: his brightly lit Manhattan office is pleasant, but not unusual. The pipes are scalding hot. As his assistant leads me through to the meeting room, I’m fairly sure I can spot discarded paper plates from pizza slices poking out of the kitchen bin. In other words, it is similar to most of the city’s workplaces.

I’m here to meet Jim McKelvey, somebody Forbes will tell you has roughly £1.3bn to his name from co-founding the payment app Square. Jim is straight off a flight from Tokyo, I’m told. He enters the room and shakes my hand politely, but soon seems agitated. I’m not sure whether it’s his lack of sleep or if this is just how people who make more money during power naps than you earn annually deal with potentially having their time wasted. In other words, I’m going to have to ease my way in gently.

“So, I Googled you on my way in,” I say, “and it turns out you’re a billionaire.” He agrees. “I worked it out,” I continue, “and it seems like £1m to you is the equivalent of £20 to me. So please can I have a million pounds?”

It is over quite abruptly.