Try telling Londoners that cinema is dead and they will direct you to the BFI Imax cinema on the Southbank, where Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is still playing to sold-out houses nearly three months after its release. But if you’ve been there, done that, 2026 still has some surprises left up its sleeve, and plenty of other titles will be jockeying for your consideration once the Oscar landscape starts to take shape.
For the moment, that race is still wide open; luckily, Deadline’s Contenders Film: London event taking place Saturday at the Ham Yard Hotel is here to help you make sense of an already overcrowded calendar. Our event is a one-stop shop for movie fans, packed with preview clips, star-studded panels and insider insights from behind-the-scenes players.
A good place to start would be two animation world premieres coming to the capital in October. We open the day with Pixar’s neo-noir science fiction mystery Ray Gunn, welcoming writer-director-producer Brad Bird and composer Michael Giacchino to the stage. Later in the day, we’ll have director-producer Travis Knight, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, composer Dario Marianelli and costume designer Deb Cook on hand to present Laika’s magical stop-motion fantasy Wildwood.
Back in the real world, director Danny Boyle will accompany writer James Graham and actor Jack O’Connell for a discussion of their new collaboration Ink, which tells the story of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of British tabloid newspaper The Sun in 1969. From the documentary world, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, with elite ski mountaineer Jim Morrison, will share stories about the making of Everest: The Other Side.
Legendary British director Mike Leigh returns to Contenders with his latest and possibly last film, Tender Loving Care. Starring Widow’s Bay Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn, who will be joining him for the event, it tells the story of a professional carer trying to get her life back on track after a breakup. Similarly, writer-director Guy Nattiv will be joined by Carrie Coon to take questions about The Liberation, their ’80s-set tale of a woman who leaves her family to join an all-female cult.
Being Heumann is the latest from Siân Heder, who last came to Contenders with her 2021 Oscar winner CODA. Joining will be the film’s star Ruth Madeley, who plays real-life American disability rights activist Judith Heumann, and casting directors Bernard Telsey and Adam Caldwell. Afterwards, Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer will take the stage for her drama Gentle Monster, joined by actress Léa Seydoux.
Fresh from their success at the Toronto Film Festival, “Los Javos” — the Spanish writer-director-producer team of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — will present their literary, multi-stranded period drama La Bola Negra with actors Miguel Bernardeau, Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González and Penélope Cruz.
We end with two extremes; first Cruz sticks around to join Florian Zeller with their film Bunker, in which a married couple (real-life partners Cruz and Javier Bardem) hit a rock in their relationship over the husband’s commitment to building a billionaire’s safe room. Then we’re off to outer space to meet the creative team behind sci-fi spectacular Project Hail Mary: cinematographer Greig Fraser and production designer Charles Wood.
In addition, surprise guests — look out for a festival favorite that won a significant award at Cannes — are likely to be in the mix.
It’s going to be quite a day, so follow along with our panel coverage on Deadline.com and on social via #DeadlineContenders. And check back Monday when we launch the event’s streaming hub with all the panel videos.
Below is Saturday’s schedule, with order subject to change.
Contenders London 2026 Lineup
NETFLIX
Ray Gunn
Brad Bird (Writer/Director/Producer) Michael Giacchino (Composer)
Ink
James Graham (Writer) Danny Boyle (Director) Jack O’Connell (Actor)
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Everest: The Other Side
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Director/Producer) Jimmy Chin (Director/Producer/Director of Photography) Jim Morrison (Elite Ski Mountaineer and Film Subject)
BLEECKER STREET / STUDIOCANAL
Tender Loving Care
Mike Leigh (Writer/Director) Kate O’Flynn (Actor) Marion Bailey (Actor)
Siân Heder (Writer/Director/Producer) Kevin Walsh (Producer) Ruth Madeley (Actor) Bernard Telsey (Casting Director) Adam Caldwell (Casting Director)
NETFLIX
Gentle Monster
Marie Kreutzer (Writer/Director) Léa Seydoux (Actor)
La Bola Negra
Javier Calvo (Writer/Director/Producer) Javier Ambrossi (Writer/Director/Producer) Miguel Bernardeau (Actor) Guitarraicadelafuente (Actor) Carlos González (Actor) Penélope Cruz (Actor)
Newsmovieshollywood The Odyssey Review: Matt Damon Anchors Christopher Nolan’s Most Visually Stunning, Emotionally Rich Epic Yet
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The Odyssey Movie Review: Matt Damon as Odysseus delivers the performance of his career. Anne Hathaway lends Penelope a quiet and steely resolve that anchors its emotional core.
The Odyssey Review: Matt Damon Anchors Christopher Nolan’s Most Visually Stunning, Emotionally Rich Epic Yet
The OdysseyA
4.5/5
17 July 2026|English2 hrs 55 mins | Adventure
Starring: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot PageDirector: Christopher NolanMusic: Ludwig Göransson
The Odyssey Movie Review And Rating: In one of the earliest scenes in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope says, ‘In this world, a man does what he chooses.’ This forms the core essence of the magnum opus. This privilege of choice and agency is complex as the hero is trapped between choice and duty.
Plot Summary
Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends years trying to return home, yet he is constantly at the mercy of gods, fate, war, temptation and circumstance. His journey is defined by the tension between personal desire and obligations he cannot escape. That complicated interplay of identity, responsibility, individual will and its consequences lies at the heart of The Odyssey.
Based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey opens with Odysseus having to leave Ithaca to fight the Trojan War to reclaim Helen, the queen of Sparta. After the fall of Troy, his attempt to return home is thwarted by the sea god Poseidon, turning his journey into a grueling ten-year long ordeal packed with spectacular adventures, betrayals and mythological threats.
As they wander the Mediterranean Sea to sail back west, Odysseus and his crew encounter the man-eating Polyphemus, the enchanting but deadly Sirens, the sorceress-witch Circe and the sea nymph Calypso. Back in Ithaca, every night, a house of suitors, including the manipulative Antinous (Robert Pattinson), commandeers the palace and feasts there to win Penelope.
Ithaca has been without king for years and with Odysseus presumed to be dead, Penelope recalls something he told her before he left – if he didn’t return and their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) comes of age, she should decide for herself whether to remarry. To delay her decision and the possibility of remarrying, she tells herself that she would do it only after she finishes weaving a shroud.
But behind the curtains, she quietly keeps unravelling the shroud. For Penelope, ‘a man does what he chooses’ highlights a gendered reality. Men are allowed to leave, fight wars, seek glory and shape their destinies. Women are often left to endure. She waits for twenty years because of decisions made by men – first the Greek kings who launched the Trojan War and then Odysseus himself.
Meanwhile, Telemachus leaves for Pylos and Sparta to learn of his father, who has been missing since the end of the Trojan war. There’s a fraught scene that unravels between Penelope and Telemachus. As her son asserts that the city has been without a king, she argues that she has ruled as the queen and has exercised the power. It’s a clash between authority, gender and legitimacy.
Direction, Visuals And Score
Nolan paints her as not just the ornamental queen consort waiting faithfully for her husband. She’s a political figure in her own right who has kept the kingdom of Ithaca together, maintained order as the men chased glory in Troy and dealt with suitors. But in doing so, Telemachus isn’t reduced to a mere misogynist either.
This is a son who has been waiting as eagerly for the return of his father, the Trojan war hero. He hasn’t met him but has grown up listening to stories about his might. He knows his inheritance is uncertain but that stems from an identity battle. He’s frustrated as his mother’s authority is something everyone benefits from but nobody acknowledges openly.
Back in the sea, Odysseus too is faced with multiple moral and lesser-than-two-evils dilemmas – one among them being choosing to lose his entire ship to a dangerous whirlpool or letting a sea monster devour six of his men. In doing so, he breaks down and succumbs to his sense of self. But these extraordinary emotional complexities, nuances and undercurrents aren’t all that there’s to The Odyssey.
Shot in IMAX cameras, there’s a particular scene at the sea that stands out. It’s a masterclass in framing and portraying a spectacle-driven set piece. The scale and visual grandeur laced with tension and peril is, for the lack of a better word, captivating. After Zeus unleashes a catastrophic storm at sea, the ship is shattered amid intense thundering and lightening.
This sequence is pure cinematic mayhem. The camera rocks, swirls and crashes through the action with the same ferocity as the waves battering Odysseus’ ship. Credit goes to the lighting team for creating a chiaroscuro-like thunder effect. The sequence of complete helplessness and defeat is almost palpable, almost pushing you to the edge of your seat.
In yet another elaborate sequence, Odysseus and his men fight the gigantic Polyphemus, a one-eyed monster inside a cave. Nolan resists the temptation to rush through the spectacle. And gradually, you find yourself completely immersed in this supernatural world. You can barely look away from the screen. At 2 hours 55 minutes, he embraces a deliberately measured pace.
The iconic Trojan Horse episode deserves a mention too. The sequence is depicted in the most cinematic way. The tension comes from the claustrophobia of the warriors trapped inside the wooden horse and Ludwig Göransson’s background score. Here too, Nolan allows the narrative to breathe and the tension to simmer, letting dread accumulate scene-by-scene rather than relying on constant action.
He stretches moments just enough for the audience to feel the weight of what is at stake. By prioritising atmosphere, character and suspense over instant gratification, he transforms familiar mythological episodes into deeply immersive and emotionally charged cinematic experiences. Echoing the sentiment of the internet, The Odyssey is truly peak cinema.
What leaves an indelible impression is that the film doesn’t treat war as a spectacle. The battle sequence where men perish amid flames and devastation, lingers in Odysseus’ mind long after the smoke clears. The images return to him like a recurring nightmare. After breaking Athena’s statue, she starts accompanying him as his figment of imagination. The effect is palpable.
This extraordinary screenplay is further elevated by a string of powerful acts. Damon as Odysseus delivers what may well be the performance of his career. Even in the physically fraught scenes, his vulnerability is what stands out. He brings remarkable restraint to the role, allowing Odysseus’ inner turmoil to surface without ever slipping into melodrama.
Credit must also go to Nolan for resisting the temptation to sacrifice emotional depth at the altar of heroism. Though Odysseus is the quintessential larger-than-life figure, the film never loses sight of his humanity.
Cast Performances
Hathaway as Penelope is like a simmering volcano. She lends the part a quiet dignity and steely resolve that anchors the emotional core of the film. She’s particularly effective in the more intimate moments, conveying longing, loneliness and unwavering determination through the subtlest shifts in expression. Her luminous screen presence will stay with you. Holland as Telemachus brings a sense of sincerity to the part. While Odysseus looms large over the narrative, Holland ensures that his Telemachus isn’t overshadowed.
He gets one of the film’s most rewarding arcs and captures the character’s frustration, vulnerability and quiet resilience with remarkable conviction. Charlize Theron plays Calypso, a nymph, who keeps Odysseus protected in an island for seven years by offering him lotus to ‘cloud his mind and sap his will’. She’s enchanting and the mystery and intrigue that she carries is memorable.
Zendaya as Athena gets a short screen time but leaves an impact and so does Samantha Morton as Circe. Pattinson as Antinous brings an air of unpredictability that constantly keeps you on the edge. He effortlessly oscillates between charm and menace and has a magnetic screen presence even when surrounded by a stellar ensemble.
Nolan also deserves points for his creative liberties – casting black actor Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen, Indian origin actor Himesh Patel as Odysseus’s second-in-command Eurylochus and trans-actor Elliot Page as Greek warrior Sinon. Ultimately, Nolan appears less interested in producing a recreation of Homer and more invested in crafting an interpretation that speaks to contemporary audiences.
Final Verdict
The Odyssey is beguiling, visually breathtaking and emotionally resonant. It’s a monumental achievement. It isn’t just one of Nolan’s finest films but also modern epic filmmaking at its most ambitious and rewarding.
FAQs About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
How long is The Odyssey?
172.33 minutes, that’s 2 hours, 52 minutes and 33 seconds, per its CBFC-certified runtime.
Is The Odyssey based on a book?
Yes, it’s based on Homer’s ancient epic poem of the same name.
Who plays Helen of Troy?
Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy (she also plays Clytemnestra).
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Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is being hailed as a visually stunning and emotionally resonant epic, with critics calling it a monumental achievement and one of his finest works.
Early reviews suggest Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is a monumental achievement, with critics calling it his best film and a cinematic triumph. It is described as visually stunning, emotionally rich, and a filmmaking feast.
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is a visually stunning and emotionally rich epic that reinterprets Homer’s ancient Greek poem. The film’s scale, performances, and ambitious storytelling have been praised, with some critics calling it a cinematic triumph.
Titas Chowdhury is a Special Correspondent at News18 Showsha. She writes about cinema, music and gender in cinema. Interviewing actors and filmmakers, writing about latest trends in showbiz and bringi…Read More
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Netflix research found that 67% of surveyed members internationally expressed interest in visiting South Korea. For the streamer’s Sung Q Lee, the pull lies in the stories set there, rather than the scenery alone.
Lee, Netflix’s senior director of APAC production, made the case at the opening masterclass of Creative Asia, which Netflix and the 31st Busan International Film Festival brought back for a third consecutive year on Oct. 10.
Held at Dongseo University’s Centum Campus, the program was developed with the Asian Film Commissions Network and the Motion Picture Association. This year’s edition added workshops led by Netflix executives alongside masterclasses and industry panels.
Moderated by Busan Asian Film School professor James Bang, the opening session, on how locations shape storytelling, also featured location manager Lauren Cooper and “Perfect Days” co-producer Kunieda Reiko.
Cooper said she first reads a script as an audience member before considering its demands as a location manager, and works closely with the production designer. “Filmmaking is like a team sport,” she said. “You need great flexibility to work with the crew and the story.”
Kunieda quoted Wim Wenders: “The artifice of a story can ruin a film.” The director resists imposing predetermined themes or concepts, she said. On “Perfect Days,” which was shot in 16 days, the story was allowed to develop organically from its locations.
“Location and storytelling are not separable,” Kunieda said, describing production’s role in translating creative ambitions into filmmaking.
Citing the Jeju-set “When Life Gives You Tangerines,” he said universal emotions connect audiences to unfamiliar places.
For the first time ever, the teams at Marvel and Magic worked together to create a brand-new storyline set in the Marvel Universe. By taking the core elements players love about Magic: The Gathering, the team thoughtfully and strategically expressed those design intentions in Magic: The Gathering | Marvel Darkhold Destiny. The narrative unfolds across nearly 30 dimensions and is centered around four main characters—Doctor Strange, Thor, Hela, and Dormammu.
Additionally, this groundbreaking new story will be told in an all-new comic book created in collaboration with Marvel. The comic’s first chapter releases digitally on February 26, and the physical edition releases the week of MarvelDarkhold Destiny’s launchon April 9, 2027. Pre-order it today!
James Gunn’s DC has officially set its second Elseworlds movie, arriving in 2028 alongside Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II, which recently paused production. When Gunn and co-CEO Peter Safran took over DC in late 2022, the DC Studios banner was formed, and under it, two labels were created: the DC Universe, home to DC’s canon films and shows, and the Elseworlds umbrella, which covers the non-canon series and movies. DC now has two upcoming Elseworlds movies after the classification of one major Batman-adjacent film was clarified.
Dynamic Duo has officially been classified as an Elseworlds movie under the DC Studios umbrella and has been given a new September 22, 2028 release date after initially being set for June 30 of that year. Dynamic Duo was first announced by James Gunn in 2024 as a story centered on Batman characters Jason Todd and Dick Grayson. Although Gunn has said from the jump that the film will be Elseworlds, rumors have swirled in recent weeks that the movie would be canonized and brought into the mainline DCU continuity, with one report even claiming its voice cast would reprise their roles in live-action.
However, these rumors have been put to bed. Logan Kim, who voices Jason Todd in the upcoming animated movie alongside Mason Thames as Dick Grayson, confirmed that the film is not part of the DCU canon, definitively saying “No” in an Instagram comment on a fan post claiming otherwise. The post has since been deleted.
The Elseworlds and DCU canon classifications can be confusing for fans, so it’s understandable that some people genuinely thought Dynamic Duo would be canon. The Elseworlds banner has so much in store beyond Dynamic Duo, especially on TV, with a horde of non-canon series either in production or in development at DC Studios.
Exciting Elseworlds Projects in the Works by DC Studios
DC Studios
The flagship of DC Studios’ Elseworlds lineup remains Matt Reeves’ Batman Epic Crime Saga, which began with The Batman and continued with the acclaimed HBO series The Penguin. Robert Pattinson’s version of Gotham exists entirely apart from the DCU, a point Gunn and Safran have repeated since taking over the studio. Although many fans have clamored for a merger, Reeves’ universe will remain independent for the foreseeable future.
The Batman Part II finally entered production in June, with principal photography kicking off at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden near London before expanding to Liverpool and Glasgow. The sequel brings back Pattinson as Bruce Wayne alongside Andy Serkis, Colin Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, Jayme Lawson, and Gil Perez-Abraham.
New additions include Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Brian Tyree Henry, Charles Dance, and Sebastian Koch. Reeves, who co-wrote the script with Mattson Tomlin, has teased that the sequel leans harder into Bruce Wayne than previous Batman films and features a villain never before used in a live-action movie.
The road to The Batman Part II has been quite the journey, with fans having to wait nearly six years between films. The sequel cycled through release dates of October 2025, October 2026, and October 2027 before landing on February 18, 2028, a move made in July to allow more time for post-production.
Production hit another bump this week, with DC Studios confirming filming has “temporarily paused while Matt Reeves focuses on a family matter,” adding that “Matt has the full support of DC Studios and we look forward to continuing the journey soon.”
According to Deadline sources, it’s too early to know whether the stoppage will affect the release date, but it could potentially stall the film once again. If it does get delayed, though, fans do not have to fret. DC still has more Elseworlds projects on the way to keep them entertained as they wait for the Batman sequel.
DC Comics
DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation announced a groundbreaking Batman project at Annecy in June: Absolute Batman. This show’s premise is so intriguing it will guarantee fans don’t miss Matt Reeves’ sequel too much while they wait. An official release date has not been announced, but if it arrives before 2028, it should fill the void left by the sequel’s delay for a bit.
The animated series is an adaptation of Absolute Batman, the bestselling comic from Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta. The book reimagines Bruce Wayne as a working-class kid from Crime Alley rather than a billionaire’s son. The comic launched in 2024 and has sold more than six million copies, with its first volume reaching an 11th printing. Snyder serves as executive producer and showrunner, with Dragotta as producer.
Head of Warner Bros. Animation Sam Register described the full-CG show as “a whole different tone and a whole different take again on Batman,” with early previsualization footage from Stellar Creative Labs showing the hulking hero in front of a burning cityscape.
DC Comics
Announced at the same event, Joker: Laugh Riot is DC Studios’ first-ever anime series. The show is produced in Japan with Sola Entertainment. Director Yasuhiro Aoki, an animator on The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, helms the series, with DC animation veteran Jim Krieg executive producing. The show follows Joker’s crusade through Gotham’s underworld after Batman is killed. Joker, unhappy that someone else murdered his greatest adversary, hunts for the killer using his brutal trademark methods.
There are more Elseworlds animated projects on the way as well. In February 2025, Gunn and Safran unveiled three animated series developed with Warner Bros. Animation. My Adventures with Green Lantern is one of the titles in the lineup, and it follows high school student Jessica Cruz, whose life changes when a Green Lantern Power Ring chooses her as its champion in an ancient space war. The series shares its universe with My Adventures with Superman, the Adult Swim hit that premiered its third season in June, a run inspired by the Reign of the Supermen comics.
With DC Studios whetting appetites for more Green Lantern content via the HBO hit Lanterns, this show should find an audience quickly. The series is currently still in development, and a definitive release date hasn’t been revealed yet.
DC Comics
Beyond this, there are more cosmic characters DC is building stories around, and Starfire is one of them. The character’s titular series will tell the origin story of Koriand’r, the alien princess best known as a core member of the Teen Titans.
The show follows her journey from her home planet of Tamaran into deep space, joined by Crush, Fern, and the magical Princess Amethyst of Gemworld. Fans got their first look at the character’s redesigned costume and her pet Silkie through a promotional banner at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
The Elseworlds slate gets even more exciting with the hero team-up DC Super Powers. The series takes place at the Alliance School for Heroes, where new students Lightning, Flash, Plastic Man, Aquagirl, Green Lantern, and Terra train under Principal Martian Manhunter. This series is set to offer a bold take on some of DC’s most prominent superhero characters.
The Elseworlds show DC Studios has planned that’s closest to the DCU canon is Krypto’s upcoming series. The superpowered canine was introduced in the DCU’s Superman in 2025. His popularity has grown so much that he’s headlining his own show after fronting a couple of animated shorts titled Krypto Saves the Day.
This new series pairs the superdog with a group of aspiring young criminals whose chaotic schemes are slowly transformed by his pure-hearted nature. It’s aimed at younger audiences but should be one of the most entertaining non-canon shows DC has planned.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds launched with a $70 price tag across every platform last year and has received several pieces of DLC content since. Today, SEGA has cut the price of the base version to $40 on PC, Xbox Series S|X, PS5, and Nintendo Switch platforms.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Gets a Price Cut
Most versions of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds are now available for $40, down from $70, while the Digital Deluxe Edition has dropped to $60, which was previously priced at $90.
Screenshot by Prima Games
At the time of writing, the price reduction has reached Steam, Xbox One and Series S|X, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo storefronts, while the Epic Games Store version remains listed at $70. That’ll likely be updated shortly as well.
The Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 versions are also now priced the same. However, the Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade pack remains priced at $10, so buying the original Switch version and the upgrade pack separately would cost $50, more than the $40 Switch 2 edition. Make sure you’re not getting that upgrade pack and are using the correct and updated store link.
Regional pricing also applies on Steam, so it’ll appear a bit cheaper in certain regions.
This price cut is likely tied to the upcoming release of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Year One Edition, which went up for pre-order ahead of its official announcement.
On its store listing, the Year One Edition includes the following content:
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
Season Pass One – 6 premium DLC Packs, which include guest characters, vehicles, courses, emotes, and more from some of your favorite pop culture franchises.
Sonic Prime Pack
35th Anniversary Logo Patch
The six premium packs are a nice bonus, bringing together a substantial amount of DLC released for the game so far in one package. Since Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds continues to receive new content, the price cut makes sense and should make the game more accessible to new players.
Over the last two years, no Spanish company has helped drive Spanish content onto the world stage more than Movistar Plus, the biggest Spanish pay TV/SVOD operator.
Since 2025 alone, Movistar Plus Originals have scored the two top prizes at Series Mania with “Querer” and “Celeste,” has earned two Oscar nominations with “Sirāt,” while “La Bola Negra,” another Original, has emerged as the Cannes Festival’s biggest Oscar contender.
Last week, Movistar Plus garnered International Emmy nominations for Alberto Rodríguez’s “The Anatomy of a Moment” and best actor for Javier Cámara in “Jakarta.”
Such plaudits raise the question of how Movistar Plus moves forward from here. Its key Mipcom titles supply some answers.
Under a new management team — CEO Alfonso Gómez Palacio and contents director Juan Andrés García Romero — Movistar Plus is attempting to reach out to younger audiences. It’s scored one home run, Mipcom title “Many People Need to Die,” the series debut from YouTube-podcast comedian Victoria Martín. A withering take on Millennial angst, it has been an audience and new subscriber driver, says García Romero, noting that Movistar Plus has already ordered a Season 2.
Shot in Catalonia’s heavenly Aran Valley, “Killing a Bear,” another top Mipcom title, underscores another strategic drive: co-production.
Created by Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo (“Crematorium,” “The Zone”), the fact-based wild bear murder mystery that exposes the deep social conflict in the high Pyrenees marks the fourth co-production between Movistar Plus and broadcast network Arte France. Season 2 of “Celeste,” also a Movistar Plus original and another Spanish Mipcom buzz pick, is co-produced with the Mediapro Studio, with the Mediapro Studio Distribution handling international sales.
Movistar Plus‘’’ overseas breakout has rolled off its close relationships with many of Spain’s greatest younger auteurs, giving them the resources to make the films and TV series they envision at a competitive level of across-the-board production values comparable to, for example, France.
On “Celeste” Season 1, ”we were given a marvellous degrees of creative freedom. It could have become a madcap comedy full of gags and jokes made for the broadest of audiences. Instead, we were even encouraged to make a series with light and shade,” says “Celeste” creator Diego San Jose.
That strategy has proved highly successful. In early July, Movistar Plus created waves when it announced that it will double its original Spanish series annual output from eight to 16 titles. “Originals attract more client and generate more engagement,” Movistar Plus noted.
In order to make such series, the pay TV operator has to bring on emerging talent alongside the creatives it already engages. “The Castle,” another new Movistar title at Mipcom, is a case in point: the TV debut of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s longtime co-scribe Isabel Peña as a series co-creator.
“The Castle” shares similarities with “Killing a Bear” and “Celeste.” All three are crime drama-thrillers, the most exportable and ordered of program types, but all three reject tropes of the genre.
“Celeste” turns on a dowdy tax fraud inspector. “The Castle” weighs in like “Zodiac” with sex clubs, detailing the long years spent by a young police inspector to bring to justice a prostitution kingpin. “Killing a Bear” is a “fable” that “uses genre as a vehicle to address the violence born of the deeply polarized conflicts over coexistence we see today,” say the Cabezudo brothers, calling the series a procedural.
Genre provides story tension at a time of general market downturn where series, whatever their hot button issues, must never forget to entertain.
In the months leading up to the end of the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass spoke at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting in Boston about what would remain after the rebellion was defeated. “That enmity will not die out in a year,” he warned. “It will not die out in an age.”
In Ava DuVernay’s new documentary “14th,” constitutional law expert Sherrilyn Ifill recalls Douglass’ words from his speech “What the Black Man Wants.” A distinguished attorney, Howard University law professor and former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Ifill is the closest thing the film has to a narrator. Her invocation of Douglass serves as a refrain, returning again and again to make one thing clear: we are living in one of the ages he predicted.
The Fourteenth Amendment made birthright citizenship the law of the land, ensuring that formerly enslaved people and others born on American soil — like the children of Chinese railroad workers, for example — were citizens. But Ifill astutely explains one of its great failures: Against Douglass’ wishes, the amendment did not explicitly protect the right to vote. Douglass foresaw that leaving Black voting rights vulnerable would give the same people who fought to preserve slavery the opportunity to strip those rights away for generations.
“14th” looks back at history as a necessary playbook for the present. We are living amid the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, widespread voter-suppression efforts and challenges by the Trump administration to birthright citizenship. The message is crystal clear: This isn’t just history. It’s right now.
A companion piece to DuVernay’s 2016 documentary “13th,” which examined the constitutional amendment banning slavery through the lens of mass incarceration, “14th” arrives a decade later during the second Trump administration. It is a maximalist odyssey through American history, guided by leading thinkers including Ifill, Bryan Stevenson, David Blight and Jelani Cobb; commentators such as Van Lathan; and politicians including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jeff Flake and Stacey Abrams. Together they trace how the amendment transformed the country and what is at stake as its guarantees come under sustained attack.
The two films share structural and visual DNA. Both rely on a series of talking heads to tell their stories. However, where “13th” placed its interview subjects against textures associated with prisons and hard labor, “14th” seats its experts in libraries, museums and universities, halls of learning that insist visually on the value of expertise at a moment when expertise itself is under attack.
An animated five-pointed star represents the amendment’s five sections, each point gradually torn away as the documentary charts the erosion of its protections. In this sense, perhaps the most successful part of “14th” is that it performs a real public service. Its first section is also its strongest, offering vital information the filmmakers correctly assume many viewers do not know: who shaped the amendment, how Reconstruction transformed American citizenship and how many of the values we associate with multiracial democracy emerged from the constitutional revolution that followed the Civil War, not from the Constitution signed in 1787.
But “14th” has so much to tell us that its refusal to edit more rigorously works against it in the end. More than 50 talking heads appear. DuVernay clearly wants to reach as broad an audience as possible, incorporating conservatives alongside progressive advocates, politicians, historians, attorneys, comedians and political influencers. The instinct makes sense in this era of hyperpolarization. Yet cinematically, the sheer number of interviewees dilutes the power of the strongest voices.
Did we really need Hasan Piker in his Birkenstocks and wide-leg pants in order to reach young viewers? Probably not. By the time Gen Z political influencer Dean Withers appears for the first time near the end of the doc to deliver a sleepy sound bite that feels destined for the cutting-room floor, you start wondering why DuVernay is introducing another character when so many compelling figures already onscreen could have been reappeared and probably said it better.
Even the captioning of subjects feels oddly inconsistent. Van Lathan is not identified until his second appearance. The same happens with historians Eric Foner and David Blight. These may sound like minor details, but in a work asking viewers to track dozens of people across several centuries of American political history, they add to the cognitive clutter.
Sherrilyn Ifill could have solved much of this. Of the more than 50 interviewees, hers is the voice the documentary can’t help but return to. She grounds “14th,” and one wishes DuVernay had committed more fully to her as a narrative guide, as she speaks in a way that is accessible and engaging. (The study and application of the fourteenth amendment has been her life’s work.) Had the film stayed closer to her, she might have served as the connective tissue carrying viewers through its historical turns and accumulating reasons for despair. Instead, she disappears for stretches before returning with the Douglass refrain. To absorb and be impacted by material this dense, the broad audience DuVernay clearly wants to reach needs someone to hold its hand. Ifill could have been that person.
The larger problem is not simply the talking-head format but the claustrophobia it creates. One of the most welcome sequences follows Devon Henry, the Black contractor responsible for removing Confederate monuments along Richmond’s famed Monument Avenue after white contractors refused the job. I found myself taking an involuntary deep breath when his sequence began. Suddenly, someone was walking. Moving through space without explaining something. For a moment, the movie opened up. Henry’s sequence demonstrates how powerful the documentary becomes when its formal choices carry as much weight as intellectual ideas.
Carla Hayden’s appearance at the Library of Congress offers a similar reprieve. Instead of sitting posed with the camera capturing her face from a side angle — she actually gets the hero shot treatment -— she walks through one of the country’s great repositories of knowledge greeting visitors. The simple act of watching her move provides visual relief and the kind of impact words on their own rarely inspire.
DuVernay does find inventive ways to animate the past though, and the archival material ranks among the film’s greatest strengths. Black life during Reconstruction appears not only in the South but in places we may not immediately associate with Black citizens like New Mexico or Boston. The images capture the extraordinary scope of Black efforts to educate themselves, build institutions and participate fully in citizenship after Emancipation. Archival photographs subtly come to life through animation, giving motion to otherwise static images and drawing a visual line from the people living through Reconstruction to those living now. The effect is simple but powerful: this is the past, but these were ordinary people moving through their own present just like us.
Comedy provides another effective pressure valve. Clips from standup specials by George Carlin, Paul Mooney, Neal Brennan and Hasan Minhaj inject much needed comedic relief about American history. Once Mooney plants the seed of his joke about how unhappy white Americans seemed after slavery the later images of Confederate memorial groups and white crowds at lynchings take on a surreal resonance.
Musically, “14th” feels like a hip-hop rock opera for the end of democracy, or perhaps a plea to save it, propelled by thumping beats. When an instrumental version of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” appeared, for example I instinctively snapped my fingers and thought, yes. But the documentary moved on so quickly that the cue barely had time to land. That moment encapsulates the larger problem with the film: “14th” does not lack compelling material. It just has too much of it.
About two-thirds of the way through its hour-and-forty-minute runtime, I simply could not absorb any more, despite being deeply interested in the subject. The project might have benefited from an episodic structure, perhaps giving each section of the amendment room to breathe. (That is of course easy for me to suggest from outside the realities of documentary financing and Netflix distribution, but the formal choices contribute to unecessarily exhausting ride.)
DuVernay has said she did not want the movie to “feel like medicine,” and the “14th” is energetic, accessible and frequently entertaining. But in casting such a wide net, the film overloads the viewer with information to the point of suffocation. That leads to a certain irony: “14th” arrives in an era that already feels like too much, one in which overwhelm about politics has become part of daily life. The documentary wants to move viewers beyond despair, yet its sheer density risks reproducing the paralysis it hopes to overcome.
By the end, Ifill argues that we are once again standing at an inflection point comparable to the one the architects of Reconstruction faced. The people who emerged from the Civil War had to imagine a fundamentally different country and then write that vision into law. Americans now have an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to debate in good faith what the next iteration of democracy should be, she argues. That may be the most important idea in “14th.” The amendment was revolutionary because it imagined an America that had never existed before.
Which brings us back to Douglass, speaking in January 1865, just over three months before the Civil War ended. “When the tall heads of this rebellion shall have been swept down,” he warned in “What the Black Man Wants,” its leaders might disappear, but the “rank undergrowth of treason” would remain. That spirit, he said, and Ifill wisely recounts, would pass “from sire to son.”
“That enmity will not die out in a year. It will not die out in an age.”
More than 160 years later, “14th” makes the unsettling case that the age Douglass warned us about is still not over. And where do we go from here? That is up to us.
Grade: B
“14th” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Netflix will release it in select theaters on Friday, November 27, and then on Netflix on Friday, December 4.
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The company holds worldwide distribution rights to the film, which will open in theaters across Vietnam on Dec. 25. Directed by Đinh Đức Thiện and produced by K8 Studio and Hoàng Gia, the picture is known locally as “Huyết Thống.”
The story follows a celebrated pediatric heart surgeon whose daughter falls prey to a vengeful ghost. When medicine can do nothing against an age-old curse, he must turn the scalpel he has used to save lives on his own buried sins. The ghost itself has its roots in that long-hidden past.
Award-winning actor Quách Ngọc Ngoan leads the cast. He drew acclaim for his lead turn in Victor Vu’s “The Immortal” (“Người Bất Tử”) and was most recently seen in the hit “The Journey of Heroes” (“Trại Buôn Người”). He is joined by Quang Tuấn, a familiar face in Vietnamese horror who fronts “The Corpse” franchise, and Lan Phương, who appeared in “Phi Phong: The Blood Demon,” the biggest-grossing Vietnamese horror title to date.
“The supernatural is only one half of ‘Bloodline,’” said director Đinh Đức Thiện. “What interested me was placing medicine and spirituality side by side, while exploring what people are willing to sacrifice when someone they love is threatened.”
Hoàng Gia previously led development on “The Corpse 2” (“Quỷ Nhập Tràng 2”). He said the team wanted the film to be genuinely frightening, “while grounding the horror in something deeply human – family, blood ties and the consequences passed from one generation to the next.”
Mockingbird will present the title to buyers and distributors in Busan as part of its newest lineup of Vietnamese films. Phong Duong, the company’s business director, also serves as a co-executive producer on the project.
“Audiences today expect more from horror than a strong concept – they expect quality in every aspect of the filmmaking,” Duong said. “With ‘Bloodline: The Curse Within,’ we see that ambition in the storytelling, performances and overall cinematic experience, and that is the kind of Vietnamese cinema we want to bring to the world.”
Mockingbird works to push Vietnamese and Southeast Asian films into markets outside their home territories. Each year it handles upwards of 60 theatrical releases and more than 100 titles for post-theatrical windows, covering horror, comedy, romance and action. A growing share of its lineup is made up of standout hits and record-setters with appeal beyond their home market.
The first line of the verse in Grimes’ “Accelerando”—“Oppenheimer Barbie”—would suggest this track’s been in storage for a minute, but who am I to tell our most accelerationist pop star to speed it up? Today, she formally announced her first new album in six years, PSY OPERA, in a press release that opened with a newspaper-style dateline (“BUSHWICK, NEW YORK”) and ended with the names of the internet personalities to whom she’ll be granting interviews (Swiftologist and Adam Friedland). “PSY OPERA will cover everything Grimes witnessed as a woman of history during her hiatus from pop music,” it read. It’s so rare that one of these pronouncements is genuinely entertaining—I wish the song had the same juice.
“Accelerando” is a collaboration with producer VADAKIN, whom Grimes once described as “my Atticus Ross.” Its title evokes the accelerating pace of culture and technology and maybe also the accelerating pace of acceleration itself, alluding to the musical notation for accelerating tempo and the title of a noted science-fiction book, inspired by British author Charles Stross’ experience in tech startups during the first explosive boom of the 1990s. Grimes’ “Accelerando,” her press release goes on to explain, refers to “the feeling that the world is accelerating toward new, frightening weapons of war, lethal technologies Grimes saw foreshadowed when she embedded with Silicon Valley leaders.”
I love the rebrand of Grimes’ actual life as “embedded” here—like she held press credentials—and I also love a work of documentary art. “Accelerando” is a song from the allegorical dark side, so there is a shade of Reznor-Ross in that wobbly, arena-scaled rhythm section and melodramatic middle-section slowdown; when you hear Grimes scream you will understand why she named her new imprint Nazgul. But ultimately we’re going up against next-generation weapons with a big-room bass shuffle and some freestyle streamer jabber (“Let’s carnivore/Based, baby/Softcore”). It’s just a little too conventional for a world this twisted.
The Kickstarter campaign for The Film Threat Compendium and Digital Archive hit its $25,000 goal in just 24 hours. With weeks still to go, the campaign is now at more than 180% of that goal, about $45,000, and the focus has shifted to a new set of stretch goals. The biggest of them is a party for backers.
Launched in 1985 as a Xerox ‘zine in Detroit, Film Threat became one of the loudest voices in cult, underground, and independent cinema. It covered the movies Hollywood ignored and poked fun at the ones it didn’t. The Film Threat Compendium is a 300-plus-page collectible book that tells that story through the filmmakers who lived it. It includes new interviews and issue-by-issue profiles commented on by major names in indie film.
The book covers a wide range of filmmakers, including Sam Raimi, Russ Meyer, Clive Barker, John Waters, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, Kevin Smith and David Lynch. It also looks back at some of the magazine’s most notorious stories, including the chaos behind Ren & Stimpy, Roger Corman‘s never-released 1994 The Fantastic Four, the drama around Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and the making of Ed Wood. Readers also get the behind-the-scenes story of the magazine itself: the late nights on deadline, the move from Detroit to Los Angeles, crashing film festivals, and outmaneuvering studio publicists. Longtime Film Threat contributor Glenn Barr is creating an original cover illustration, which has yet to be revealed.
The book comes with a fully remastered Digital Archive of the magazine’s entire print run. That includes the early Xerox issues and the complete run of the Film Threat Video Guide, home to underground renegades like Nick Zedd and Richard Kern. You can read every issue in its original form and search by keyword, issue number, or month and year. That matters to collectors because some rare issues had print runs as small as 500 copies and now sell for around $200 each.
The original $25,000 goal pays for archival scanning, photo restoration, and book design. Because that goal is already met, the campaign has announced its first wave of stretch goals:
• $50,000 : Every backer of a physical reward (a pin or a Compendium book) gets a limited-edition Film Threat bookmark. • $75,000 : An audiobook version of the Compendium with additional stories. The voice talent is still to be announced. • $100,000 : A release party where backers can pick up their books and have drinks with the project team. The date and location are TBD, and the party will happen after the book is published.
More stretch goals will be unlocked if the campaign keeps climbing.
Rewards include the hardcover and paperback editions, printed in full color on premium paper. There is also a deluxe autographed edition with a slipcase, the Complete Digital Archive, and exclusive Film Threat collector pins. Every print backer also gets a digital edition of the book at no extra charge. A rough draft of the Compendium is already complete, and books are scheduled to reach backers in the fourth quarter of 2027.
Coming off a last-minute win over the Colorado Avalanche, the Winnipeg Jets were hoping to keep proving the doubters wrong against Anaheim Friday night.
Instead, they looked slow.
Their power play lacked danger without the injured Josh Morrissey, and it all resulted in a 5-1 loss to the Ducks at Canada Life Centre that dropped Winnipeg’s record to 3-1-1 on the season.
The Jets controlled the play in the first period and held the Ducks to single digit shot totals in all three frames but still saw both their three-game win streak, and their season-opening four-game point streak come to a close.
“The second period – it just seemed like when they got that second one we got scrambly,” said Jets head coach Scott Arniel. “We were aggressive and up on our toes in that first part. We backed off a little bit when their speed was coming. Our execution wasn’t great.
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“I think the chances were 6-3 for Anaheim after two periods. We weren’t getting inside.”
The two teams combined for only 33 shots as the Ducks outshot the Jets 17-16.
Kyle Connor in his 700th career game had the lone marker for Winnipeg, but it came trailing by three goals with only nine minutes left in the third period. His sixth goal of the season tied him for the league lead in goal scoring.
The Jets were 0-for-4 on the power play without their quarterback in Morrissey.
“I thought there was some good chances,” Connor said. “We found the slot a couple times. It would have been great to get one in, a little sloppy. We could have beared down better on the faceoffs and you get that many chances, you know three, four. It doesn’t happen often, especially in a row there. Big chances turn the game and yeah, we didn’t do it.”
RAW: Winnipeg Jets Kyle Connor Interview – Oct. 9
The Jets now get a rare three straight days off after playing five games in eight days to start the season.
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“We got four out of our next five against the Central (Division),” Arniel said. “So, these three days, we don’t have another until a week before Christmas. So, we’re going to take advantage of it. We had a lot of guys that played a lot of hockey here. We need some guys to kinda recuperate and get some rest.”
RAW: Winnipeg Jets Scott Arniel Interview – Oct. 9
It was the first time this season the Jets didn’t score three goals in a game. Cole Perfetti was kept off the scoresheet for the first time this season, ending his four-game point streak.
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The game began with a great flow of play with just one whistle over the first ten minutes, though neither team generated much of an attack during that time.
Shots on goal were 7-1 in favour of the Jets with just over five minutes to go in the first when Anaheim scored on a counterattack.
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The play began in the Ducks’ end when Brad Lambert was erased along the boards and had the puck taken away by Tim Washe, kickstarting a 3-on-2 up the ice.
Washe dished it to Judd Caulfield in the neutral zone, who then slid the puck to Jeff Malott as he burned past Neal Pionk to go in alone on Clay Stevenson. Stevenson stopped Malott’s deke but the rebound came to an unmarked Caulfield in front, who rammed it home before sliding into the net himself.
It was the first NHL goal for Caulfield in his fourth career game, coming at the 14:41 mark of the first.
Winnipeg did not generate another shot on goal in the period but in the final seconds, Adam Lowry laid out A.J. Greer with a big hit along the boards. Travis Mitchell didn’t like that, so he and Lowry dropped the gloves with the Jets’ captain earning a decisive win.
Mitchell was also given an extra two minutes for instigating, giving the Jets 1:46 of power play time to start the second period but they were unable to cash in.
The Jets wound up outshooting the Ducks 7-4 in the first and shots were hard to come by in the second as well, but once again Anaheim’s fourth line found the back of the net on a counterattack.
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After a turnover in the Ducks end, they once again broke up the ice on a 3-on-2. Malott carried the puck across the blue line with Tyrel Bauer slightly out of position, then dished it over to Washe.
Washe had blown past several Jets, including a backchecking Lambert, to get free in front to finish off the Malott pass, making it 2-0 at the 5:20 mark of the period.
Anaheim had a golden chance to make it 3-0 just past the halfway point. After a turnover and a bad line change, Ryan Poehling got a long breakaway on Stevenson and had Greer behind him if he wanted to pass. Instead, he nearly fumbled the puck as he got in close on goal before missing the net entirely with his shot.
Winnipeg earned their third power play look of the game with just under seven minutes left in the second and failed to convert, then got another look with just under three minutes to go but didn’t get a shot on goal.
In total, the Jets got three shots on goal in 7:46 of power play time in the second, and overall, the shots were 6-5 Winnipeg in the period.
The Ducks appeared to put the nail in the coffin early in the third, once again leaving the Jets in the dust in transition, though this time it was their top line doing the damage against Winnipeg’s top line.
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The play began with a bad pass from Mark Scheifele in the Anaheim end, leading to a 3-on-2. Sam Colangelo passed it to his left to Beckett Sennecke as they crossed into the Winnipeg zone, then Sennecke drove it down low before sliding a pass back to Colangelo in front of the net. The Jets defenders did a poor job covering Colangelo, allowing him a tap-in to make it 3-0 with 15:35 remaining.
It took Winnipeg 10:36 to get a shot on goal in the third, but it found the back of the net to cut into Anaheim’s lead.
Dylan DeMelo disrupted an Anaheim pass at the Winnipeg blue line, sending the puck skittering into the neutral zone where Scheifele got to it and sent a cross-ice pass to Connor, springing the sniper on a partial breakaway. He made no mistake as he buried it high past Lukas Dostal for his sixth of the season.
The goal moved Connor, who was playing in his 700th NHL game, into third place on the franchise goal scoring list with his 329th goal, breaking a tie with Ilya Kovalchuk.
But any hopes of a late rally were extinguished with 5:54 to go when Anaheim captain Mikael Granlund beat Stevenson with a long wrist shot that appeared to be deflected.
Winnipeg pulled the goalie out of desperation with over four minutes remaining but very little happened before Nikita Nesterenko put the puck into the empty net with 40 seconds to go.
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Anaheim wound up outshooting the Jets 8-3 in the third.
The Jets don’t play again until Tuesday night when they host the Minnesota Wild at 7:15 p.m.
RAW: Winnipeg Jets Mario Ferraro Interview – Oct. 9
Psychological horror “Arithmadtic,” set in an elite international school, leads a genre-heavy slate that Vietnam’s Bee Entertainment is presenting to buyers at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
Vietnamese films grossed more than VND3 trillion ($114 million) at home in 2025, outperforming international titles in the local market for the first time. Bee is aiming to take that momentum abroad.
Its slate pairs four features, all set for release in 2027, with three long-form TV dramas at various stages of production. The company is using the market to find partners for investment, co-development and distribution, as well as rights licensing deals.
Anh Thu, known for the 2007 Vietnam-South Korea co-production “Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait,” and Lam Thanh My (“Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass”) star in “Arithmadtic,” or “Cong Tru Nhan Chia” in Vietnamese. The film’s campus is styled after the Dark Academia aesthetic. The story centers on a transfer student’s enigmatic bond with a teacher, as a string of unexplained, supernatural incidents cracks the school’s polished facade.
Phuong Tra My, who played the lead in “The Third Wife,” which premiered at Toronto and won the NETPAC Award, joins the cast alongside Chu Anh Tuan, Cong Ninh, Hoang Minh Hung and Dac Thang. The film is directed by Irving Ly, whose short “Close the Eye to See” played BFI Flare and the Korea Queer Film Festival and won a Silver Kite at Vietnam’s 2025 Golden Kite Awards. It opens in January 2027.
Three more features are set for release across 2027. Tran Nhan Kien, who trained at the Asian Film School and took part in the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival’s B.I.G NAFF Fantastic Film School, directs “The Step-Mother.” It follows a boy who has lost his father, as his relationship with his stepmother moves from conflict and misunderstanding to the blurry line between strictness and care. It is dated for the second quarter.
Pom Nguyen directed “The Corpse” franchise, whose first two installments grossed more than VND280 billion ($10.7 million) combined. Next up from Pom Nguyen is “How to Find a Fortune in 60 Days,” which combines action, comedy and family drama, due in the third quarter. Le Ha Nguyen’s “Dealing With a Ghost,” a horror romantic comedy, closes the film slate with a fourth-quarter release.
On the series side, “The Unrecognized Heir,” an 80-episode family drama directed by Trac Huynh Nhat Tan, began airing on VTV9 in December 2025 and has already drawn 1 billion views across social media platforms, according to the company. “A Deal With God,” a 65-episode series directed by Dang Minh Quoc, mixes family drama with comedy and fantasy. Trac also directs “Destined to Find You,” an 80-episode romance now in post-production.
A subsidiary of Bee Comm, Bee Entertainment invests in, produces, releases and sells both Vietnamese and foreign films. Founded in 2009, Bee Comm produces the Vietnamese edition of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and the social-impact program “Mai Am Gia Dinh Viet” (“The Vietnamese Family Shelter”).
A Phnom Penh-set reworking of Kwon Hyung-jin’s 2010 South Korean drama “Wedding Dress” is the lead title for Malaysia’s Abnormal Studios at this year’s Asian Contents & Film Market in Busan, where the company is selling the film ahead of its local release.
The new version centers on Dalin, a single mother who designs bridal gowns and whose devotion to her job has opened a gap between her and her 10-year-old daughter Mina. A terminal diagnosis shifts her priorities, and she sets about readying everything she thinks the girl will need for a happy life once she has died.
The Cambodian adaptation is the first feature from Huang Han, whose earlier work has screened at the Berlin, Busan and Pingyao film festivals. It keeps the core of the mother-daughter story while anchoring it in the day-to-day life and emotional textures of the region.
Also on the slate is “The Hungry One,” Venezuelan horror director Alejandro Hidalgo’s upcoming feature. His credits include “No Voltees” (2024); “The Exorcism of God” (2021), which was distributed in more than 150 countries; and his 2013 breakout “The House at the End of Time,” Venezuela’s top-grossing horror film.
The story follows Emily, a white American woman whose Chinese husband takes her to visit his relatives’ ancestral home in Malaysia over the 15-day Hungry Ghost Festival, when the boundary with the underworld is lifted and ghosts wander among the living. A mounting series of eerie encounters puts everything she cares about at risk.
The film is in pre-production, and its producers are working to close the last round of financing.
The company is also handling “Ali & Ben’s Spicy Meats,” an independent cannibal black comedy-horror from Feisal and Iskander Azizuddin. In it, two friends with nothing to lose become hooked on power after hitting on a winning spicy beef jerky recipe made with human flesh.
From Malaysia comes sci-fi fantasy “Mimpi Kita: Castle in the Air,” which pits a simulated world against a dystopian real one as it asks what children owe their parents. The project took part in the It Project section of the NAFF Project Market at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival this year.
The wider pan-Asian lineup features “Because of You Ka Kui,” a film celebrating Canto rock frontman Wong Ka Kui which, according to the company, has drawn strong fan support in select territories, and “Next Stop, Somewhere,” a drama led by Hong Kong veteran Anthony Wong. From Cambodia comes fish-out-of-water rom-com “Far Away Close to You,” which plays on the might-have-beens of youthful romance.
Other Southeast Asian titles are “The Ghost of Banana Tree,” adapted from a well-known Cambodian folk horror legend; “Silent Murders,” a crime thriller set in Cambodia’s criminal underworld; “KL Love Story,” an ensemble drama about temptation, loyalty and loneliness in Kuala Lumpur’s after-dark scene; and supernatural horror “Her Deadly Eyes.”
Indonesian audience favorites round things out, among them the horror franchises “The Doll,” “Mata Batin” and “Rumah Kentang,” and the rom-coms “Sunshine Becomes You” and the “Eiffel… I’m in Love” series.
Abnormal Studios, a subsidiary of Westec Media Limited, has been acquiring and releasing films since 2020 and has handled more than 400 titles to date. It now puts out around 100 films a year across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Mongolia and Nepal, with recent hits including “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” and “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.”
Tanishaa’s remarks come amid the festivities, during which large crowds gather at the pandals to seek blessings and celebrate the festival.
Tanishaa Mukerji defends Jaya Bachchan against paparazzi.
Actress Tanishaa Mukerji has a request for the paparazzi covering the ongoing Durga Puja celebrations. The actress recently, while addressing the media, asked photographers and reporters not to trouble veteran actress Jaya Bachchan at the upcoming event of Durga Pooja. She also pointed out that some members of the paparazzi deliberately provoke the veteran actress during public appearances.
Speaking to the media at an event related to Durga Puja, Tanishaa said, “I have been seeing you have been troubling her a lot,” quipped Tanishaa.
“I see some of your reporters go and on purpose poke her. So I request, don’t do that at our Durga Pooja.” She also made a light-hearted appeal to the photographers, saying, “Don’t trouble our Jaya aunty, okay?”
Tanishaa’s remarks come amid the festivities, during which large crowds gather at the pandals to seek blessings and celebrate the festival.
She also urged members of the media and the public to exercise caution, avoid pushing and look out for one another amid the rush, and emphasised on the importance of basic courtesy and humanity.
For the uninitiated, Durga Puja holds a special place in the Mukerji family’s festive traditions. Kajol and Tanishaa Mukerji are often seen attending the annual celebrations at Mumbai’s North Bombay Sarbojanin Durga Puja pandal, which has strong ties to the family.
Rani Mukerji, who belongs to the extended Mukerji family, is also regular at the festivities.
Jaya Bachchan has also been a familiar face at the celebrations over the years, and is often seen sharing warm moments with Kajol and the Mukerji family.
Talking about Jaya Bachchan’s equation with the paparazzi, her interactions with them have frequently attracted attention, with the actress often expressing her annoyance over being photographed or approached in public without consideration for her personal space.
She has often been seen objecting to paparazzi by shouting at them and making comments while they attempt to capture pictures.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – IANS)
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Tanishaa Mukerji asked photographers and reporters not to trouble or deliberately provoke veteran actress Jaya Bachchan during the Durga Puja celebrations.
The Mukerji family, including Kajol and Tanishaa, regularly attend the annual Durga Puja celebrations at Mumbai’s North Bombay Sarbojanin Durga Puja pandal.
Tanishaa urged the media and public visiting the crowded pandals to exercise caution, avoid pushing, look out for one another, and maintain basic courtesy.
Chirag Sehgal works as a Chief Sub-Editor in the Entertainment team at News18.com. He has a strong expertise in content creation, digital storytelling and social media strategy. Skilled in covering ce…Read More
First Published:
October 10, 2026, 08:43 IST
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It has been another busy week in entertainment, with familiar television faces making headlines, a Limpopo poet celebrating a major achievement and an international music star facing renewed attention over his prison sentence.
From reality television twists to career milestones, here are five entertainment stories that caught our attention this week.
Caster Semenya’s island adventure comes to an end
Olympic champion Caster Semenya has become the first celebrity contestant to leave Tropika Island of Treasure: Réunion Island. Competing alongside Thando Zwane, Semenya faced a challenging bottle-stacking task that tested balance, patience and teamwork. Although their journey ended earlier than expected, the experience offered a reminder that even sporting champions can find themselves outside their comfort zones when faced with a different kind of competition.
Elaine’s outfit at kota fest sparks debate on social media
South African singer Elaine found herself at the centre of a social media debate after her appearance at the Jozi Kota Festival in Nasrec, Johannesburg, on October 3. The singer’s denim outfit, particularly her very short mini skirt, divided opinion on X, with some fans questioning whether the look suited the image they had come to associate with her music, while others defended her right to express herself through fashion. The conversation also raised questions about why female musicians’ clothing choices can sometimes overshadow their performances and artistry.
Limpopo-born poet Solly “Soetry” Ramatswi has given the province another reason to celebrate after winning the Poetry Africa National Slam Jam with his poem Born Free. Through his performance, Ramatswi explored what freedom means for South Africans born after 1994. His victory comes with a R20,000 prize and an opportunity to represent South Africa at the World Poetry Slam Championship in Japan in 2027.
Reality television personality Vuyokazi Nciweni is returning to Izingane zeS’thembu, bringing a familiar face back to the Mseleku family’s story. Known to viewers through her relationship with Mpumelelo Mseleku, Nciweni has remained a talking point among fans of the reality series. Her return adds another chapter to a show that continues to draw attention to the family’s relationships and personal lives.
Former Backstage star Dini Nondumo takes on CEO role
Actor-turned-business executive Dini Nondumo has stepped into a new professional chapter after being appointed chief executive officer of Compendium, effective October 1. South African television audiences may remember him for his roles in Backstage and Generations. His appointment reflects a career that has extended beyond acting, with more than two decades of executive leadership experience in the insurance and financial services sectors.
American rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs has made headlines again after his projected prison release date was reportedly moved to March 2, 2028. Combs is serving a 50-month federal sentence after being convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. The latest reported adjustment has renewed interest in his legal circumstances and the developments surrounding his time in federal custody.
As the week draws to a close, these stories reflect the different conversations shaping entertainment, from South African talent making its mark to reality television developments and international celebrity news.
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De interface is overzichtelijk en spellen zijn gerangschikt met herkenbare iconen, zodat ook op een kleiner scherm vlot de correcte titel wordt gevonden. Depositie- en opnamefuncties zijn geheel mobiel toegankelijk, met iDEAL-integratie die naadloos werkt met bankapps op dezelfde telefoon. Geliefde titels als Starburst of Wolf Gold worden getoond binnen enkele seconden en functioneren soepel. Ook grafisch intensievere Megaways-slots presteren verrassend goed op gemiddelde smartphones. Het stroomverbruik bij lang spelen is een aandachtspunt, maar spelers kunnen eenvoudig de helderheid verlagen. De klantenservice is mobiel bereikbaar via een chatvenster dat geen hele scherm overdekt, zodat men tijdens een live spel een vraag kan indienen zonder de actie te onderbreken. Voor tabletgebruikers is de ervaring veel rijker door het grotere scherm, waarbij de layout van het live casino vrijwel vergelijkbaar is aan de desktopversie. Kortom levert Ragnaro Casino een mobiele ervaring die vergelijkbaar is voor het spelen op een computer, en die het mogelijk maakt om op elk moment een geringe inzet te wagen met vooruitzicht op een aanzienlijke uitbetaling.
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Marvel Studios just released a new post-credits scene that sets up Avengers: Doomsdayand may be the MCU’s best stinger in the last 7 years. There’s no denying that the MCU has had a post-credits scene problem in the Multiverse Saga; what was once an avenue to tease the next movie or set up crucial plot points has become an avenue for cameos, shock value, and teasers that have gone nowhere, even years later. That said, Marvel Studios’ recent re-release, Avengers: Endgame Encore, perfectly encapsulated what a great MCU post-credits scene should be with the franchise’s best in years.
It’s hard to argue that Spider-Man: Far From Homedelivered the MCU’s best post-credits scene of all time, ending Phase 3 and the Infinity Saga on a true BANG! The mid-credits stinger truly had it all: a game-changing twist, vital set-up for the next Spider-Man movie, and even a cameo from a Marvel icon.
Marvel Studios
Tom Holland’s Spidey and Zendaya’s M.J. landed in Times Square to catch a breaking news announcement on the jumbotron, delivered by none other than J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle. That in itself was huge as it brought back a beloved actor from Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, but what truly made it work was the contents of that announcement.
The Daily Bugle had obtained a video from Jake Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio, from his final moments, in which he claimed that Spider-Man was trying to kill him to become the next Iron Man before revealing his secret identity.
Marvel Studios
What makes Far From Home‘s post-credits scene even better is that, even 7 years later, its ramifications are still being felt in the MCU. It was only because Mysterio announced Peter Parker’s secret identity to the world in Far From Home that Doctor Strange’s spells became necessary in No Way Home, leading to the loneliness and emotional conflict that defined Brand New Day.
Having established that surprise, significance, and set-up are the three Ss in creating the perfect MCU post-credits scene, it’s tough to argue that Avengers: Endgame Encore‘s mid-credits scene isn’t Marvel Studios’ best in 7 years.
The scene picks up with Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner working on a gamma suppression serumfar underground beneath a military base, where he has placed himself in self-containment since Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But that is all interrupted when Doctor Doom magically enters Hulk’s hideout to collecthim for reasons that will become clear in the next Avengers movies.
Endgame Encore‘s mid-credits scene brought the three Ss of a post-credits scene: there was surprise as Ruffalo wasn’t previously confirmed for the next Avengers movies, significance because an OG Avenger has been forcibly abducted, and set up through the reveal that Doctor Doom is collecting powerful individuals.
Marvel Studios
Endgame Encore‘s second post-credits scene reveals that the TVA is tracking Incursions and the Multiverse is collapsing. It was certainly exciting to see that information relayed on-screen, but it failed to tell fans anything new, and there was no real indication of what this means for the TVA crew in Doomsday.
Marvel Studios has recently gotten its post-credits game back on track, starting last year with Thunderbolts*,which jumped ahead to Avengers: Doomsday‘s opening and revealed the Fantastic Four’s ship hurtling toward Earth-616. The stinger worked on multiple levels: it offered an update on the New Avengers 14 months later, confirmed their return in Doomsday, and teased Marvel’s First Family just months before their debut in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
The Fantastic Four was another win on that front, as it was the only post-credits scene before Avengers: Endgame Encore that actually featured Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. The 2025 blockbuster strongly hinted that Victor von Doom is from Earth-828, but also that he has plans for the Fantastic Four’s cosmically powered child, Franklin Richards, even though his agenda remained vague.
What Will Avengers: Doomsday & Secret Wars’ Post-Credits Scenes Be?
If Avengers: Doomsday goes down as fans expect, the Phase 6 blockbuster could end with the lights going out on the Multiverse with the final Incursion. If that is the case, the post-credits scene could offer a glimmer of hope for the Multiverse by unveiling Battleworld and God Emperor Doom sitting on its throne.
Alternatively, the stinger could feature some of the characters who will lead Secret Wars after missing out on Doomsday or only playing a minor role. It’s safe to say that audiences would leave the theater filled with excitement if the last thing they saw was Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine meeting for the first time, perhaps alongside Tom Holland’s Spidey as well.
Unlike Endgame, Marvel Studios has marked Secret Wars as a new beginning for the MCU, and its post-credits scene ought to reflect that. The X-Men reboot will launch Phase 7 in May 2028, six months after Secret Wars, so it makes sense for the stinger to tease that in front of what is sure to be a huge audience.
Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey will reportedly return in Secret Warsbefore taking center stage in X-Men, making her the obvious choice to lead the scene. Perhaps Marvel Studios could unveil Jean Grey’s first meeting with Christopher Abbott’s Charles Xavier and offer a sneak peek at his mutant school in the MCU.
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The platform often launches time-limited promotions and offers tied to specific events or holidays, providing additional opportunities for players to boost their bankrolls. A loyalty program further incentivizes continued play, rewarding loyal customers with exclusive perks and benefits. Carefully reviewing the promotional calendar and understanding the terms of each offer is essential for maximizing value.
Welcome Bonuses: Incentives for new players upon initial deposit.
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inatogel provides a selection of secure and convenient payment methods for depositing and withdrawing funds. These typically include credit and debit cards, e-wallets, and bank transfers. The availability of specific options may vary depending on the player’s location. Processing times for withdrawals can differ based on the chosen method, with e-wallets generally offering faster payouts compared to bank transfers.
The platform emphasizes secure transactions, employing advanced encryption protocols to protect financial data. Before initiating a withdrawal request, players may be required to verify their identity to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. Clearly understanding the withdrawal policies and processing times is crucial for a smooth and hassle-free experience.
Navigating Withdrawal Procedures
Withdrawing funds from inatogel requires adherence to specific protocols. Firstly, players must meet any outstanding wagering requirements associated with bonuses claimed. Secondly, the platform employs rigorous verification procedures to ensure the security of transactions and comply with regulatory standards. This may include submitting copies of identification documents such as passports or driver’s licenses. It’s vital that these documents are clear and legible to avoid delays in the withdrawal process. Once verified, the withdrawal request is processed, and funds are typically credited within a specified timeframe depending on the chosen payment method. It is always recommended to check the platform’s FAQ section for the latest information on withdrawal policies and processing times to ensure a smooth and efficient experience.
Customer Support and Assistance
inatogel offers dedicated customer support channels to assist players with any queries or issues they may encounter. These typically include live chat, email support, and a comprehensive FAQ section. A responsive and knowledgeable support team is essential for providing a positive user experience. The availability of 24/7 support is particularly valuable for players in different time zones.
The quality of customer support is often a key differentiator between online casinos. A platform that prioritizes prompt and helpful assistance demonstrates a commitment to player satisfaction. Players should feel confident that their concerns will be addressed efficiently and professionally. Efficient customer support builds trust and contributes to long-term player loyalty.
Live Chat: Instantaneous support for immediate inquiries.
Email Support: Suitable for detailed issues requiring a comprehensive response.
FAQ Section: A resource for self-service assistance with common questions.
In conclusion, inatogel presents a compelling online casino experience, characterized by its user-friendly interface, diverse game selection, and commitment to security. While responsible gaming and understanding platform policies remain paramount, the features and benefits offered by inatogel position it as a viable option for those seeking both entertainment and potential rewards in the digital casino realm. Players should carefully consider their individual preferences and risk tolerance before engaging in any online gambling activity.
Neither the 2011 Oscar-winning biographical drama The Social Network nor the 2026 follow-up legal thriller The Social Reckoning paint Mark Zuckerberg, the tech billionaire who founded Facebook and has grown it into the world’s most influential social media platform, in a particularly flattering light. While The Social Network focused more on the creation of Facebook and the people Zuckerberg is alleged to have betrayed en route to making it a global touchpoint, The Social Reckoning places him in more of a supporting role as a near-mythical (and diabolical) figure. Both movies go to great lengths to remain cinematic and engaging, but in doing so they both also fail to capture the reality of Zuckerberg’s family life.
David Fincher’s 2011 smash hit The Social Network fictionalizes a great deal about the tech magnate in its portrayal, although it did famously nail his real-life wardrobe. The Social Reckoning focuses more on the duo responsible for leaking damning details about Zuckerberg’s algorithm choices to the world, and thus never even attempts to humanize him (in fact, it demonizes him). Although they did it differently, both movies omit the most important person in Mark Zuckerberg’s life.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife Is Conspicuously Absent From Both ‘Social Network’ Movies
In reality, Mark Zuckerberg has been married to his wife, Priscilla Chan, for over 14 years. They were wedded the day after Facebook’s initial public offering on May 19th, 2012, and have since had three daughters. Priscilla Chan graduated from Harvard in 2007, and pursued a career as a pediatrician until 2017. She now works as the co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the for-profit charity LLC that is funded by 99% of the wealth from Chan and Zuckerberg’s shares in Facebook.
Chan is never once mentioned in either The Social Network or The Social Reckoning because she was never a part of what either film was trying to accomplish. The Social Network and set out specifically to portray Zuckerberg as a socially awkward loner, and used that to frame his desire to create Facebook. In that movie, it was asserted that the social media platform’s creation was intended to impress women and help him gain entry into the social circles he may not have otherwise had the social skills for. The Social Reckoning depicts Zuckerberg less like a human being and more like a robot, detached from humanity and singularly focused on growing his platform.
Neither depiction is really correct, and the inclusion of his wife would have skewered both of them in different ways. Chan and Zuckerberg met at a party at Harvard as students in 2003, which would completely undo Zuckerberg’s character motivation in The Social Network. The inclusion of a wife and implication of a loving family would be equally devastating to his portrayal in The Social Reckoning, and make it harder to paint him as an unfeeling and callous tech genius.
Rooney Mara’s ‘Social Network’ Girlfriend Character is a Fabricated Departure From Reality
Sony Pictures Releasing
Not only did The Social Network omit Zuckerberg’s wife entirely, who he was already dating when most of the events of the movie occurred, it outright replaced her. In an effort to give Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg a sort of inciting event as motivation for him to pour his energy into Facebook, director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin created a fake girlfriend for Zuckerberg: Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara in the movie. It’s her rejection that inspires Zuckerberg to move forward, and while that made for an effective solution in portraying the man as an arrogant, jilted loner in search of romantic connection, it isn’t accurate to reality.
Ironically, The Social Network‘s incredible success has made that version of events, where Zuckerberg is a wounded dweeb seeking revenge on the world with the power of code, the one that most people believe is real. Despite Rooney Mara’s Erica Albright never existing in any way, she is what large swaths of the public think of as opposed to Zuckerberg’s actual wife. The notion that he is a member of a stable family and loving relationship doesn’t fit that lone wolf, tortured genius persona that Fincher and Sorkin wanted to achieve in either The Social Network or The Social Reckoning, so it was omitted entirely or replaced.
What Mark Zuckerberg Has Said About His Wife in Real Life
a young man and a woman sitting on a table in a bar in the film the social networkSony Pictures Releasing
One of the primary points that the real Mark Zuckerberg has commented on publicly in relation to The Social Network is the movie’s completely inaccurate portrayal of his romantic life. Zuckerberg has specifically noted that he has been dating his now-wife since 2003, months before Facebook was ever born, and that his main motivation to create Facebook was out of sheer fascination and desire to build something from the ground up. Zuckerberg has even publicly specified that the Lil Jon song “Get Low” was playing when they first met, and he worked with T-Pain to create an acoustic version of the song for his wife, which can be found on Spotify.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Zuckerberg labeled the changes made in The Social Network “hurtful” in a public Q&A, particularly surrounding his motivations in building Facebook. As of this writing, he has not opined publicly on The Social Reckoning, although actor Jeremy Strong claims he reached out to Zuckerberg about approaching his portrayal respectfully and got a response, although he hasn’t shared what it was. While there are justifiable reasons for Priscilla Chan to be omitted from both Social movies (they are in fact movies, not documentaries), that simply doesn’t reflect the reality of Zuckerberg’s relationship with his actual wife.
Cyberleek has returned with a 25-minute video of apparent Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay, ending with a pitch for support for an unspecified gaming project. The appeal is the notable turn: the video suggests collected money would help fund the project, but gives no target or clear details about how contributions would be made.
Cyberleek returns with 25 minutes of GTA 6 footage
Video Games Chronicle (VGC) says it viewed the footage and that it appears authentic, but is not sharing it. The clip revisits the Thrillbilly Mud Club event seen in GTA 6’s first official trailer, with Jason and Lucia buying clothes, meeting dirt-racing competitors, and Jason entering a race against bikes and cars.
After the race, Jason spends about 14 minutes fully nude. The footage also shows him taking a car to a custom garage for upgrades and new decals before entering a street race; later, a tank appears and is dropped into a river. It is unclear whether that sequence involves a cheat or an alteration to the development build.
The video ends with Lucia, topless and wearing a thong, running up a tower and preparing to jump. None of these unusual details confirms what players will see in the finished game: the leaker may have altered the build, and the footage does not establish whether the nudity or other sequences will appear in the retail release. That uncertainty is part of the wider GTA 6 leaks and rumors conversation, but this clip should not be treated as a feature reveal.
The video appears to make a funding appeal
At the end, Cyberleek describes a gaming-related project unrelated to Rockstar that would require expensive hardware, months of setup, and years of full-time work. The message says collected money would go toward the project, but does not identify what it is, state how much it needs, or explain a specific way to contribute.
Take-Two’s investigation remains unresolved
Take-Two said in late August that its investigation to identify Cyberleek was rapidly evolving. It issued subpoena requests involving Microsoft and Discord, followed by requests involving X and YouTube; re-uploads of earlier clips accumulated millions of views.
The latest upload does not show that the leaker has been identified or that the investigation has concluded. For players following the story, the open questions are whether more footage will surface and whether the nudity, tank sequence, or other material reflects the finished game, developer tools, cheats, or changes made to the build.
Crystal Lake, which is the first official installment in the Friday the 13th franchise since 2009, is mere days away from its premiere on Peacock on October 15. The show, which is set to drop all eight episodes of its premiere season on that date, is a prequel following the exploits of Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), the mother of the franchise’s hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees.
This will be the franchise’s most thorough exploration of the character of Pamela, who was the killer in the original 1980 Friday the 13th.
The production company behind the Peacock series is A24, the independent studio that has had a hand in creating a wide variety of modern cinema’s biggest critical and commercial hits, including Everything Everywhere All At Once, Backrooms, and Moonlight. While they are behind considerably fewer television series than movies, they have contributed a number of notable programs, including HBO’s hit teen drama Euphoria, Netflix’s anthology dramedy Beef, and Prime Video’s coming-of-age comedy Overcompensating.
While a Friday the 13th series has been in development hell since the early 2000s, the current incarnation of the series was originally announced in 2022 with Pushing Daisies and Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller at the helm. However, he parted ways from the project in 2024 when A24 opted to go a different direction.
Brad Caleb Kane, a writer and executive producer on It: Welcome to Derryand Black Sails (in addition to being the singingvoice for Disney’s Aladdin), eventually stepped into the role. The show was shot in New Jersey between June and October 2025, with multiple episodes apiece directed by Michael Lennox (Derry Girls, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast), duo Celine Held and Logan George (Caddo Lake), and Quyen Tran (Ahsoka, The Pitt, The Testaments).
Where Crystal Lake Falls on the Friday the 13th Timeline
The Friday the 13th canon is a tricky thing, and has been essentially that from the very beginning. The original movie was never intended to have a sequel, and it ties up every imaginable loose end: former camp cook Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) has been decapitated by camp counselor Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) after killing her friends as part of her plot to prevent the reopening of Camp Crystal Lake, where her young son Jason (Ari Lehman) accidentally drowned while two counselors were paying more attention to one another’s bodies than to the boy in the lake.
‘Friday the 13th’ (1980)Credit: Paramount Pictures
While Jason did technically appear in the film, both in flashbacks and as a zombie dragging Alice under the water in a scene that was probably a nightmare, he was canonically a dead child as far as original screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean S. Cunningham were concerned. In fact, he was so dead that he had been so since 1957, long before the events of the movie.
However, 1981’s Friday the 13th Part 2 needed a killer, and the filmmakers landed on Jason. They attempted to patch over the fact that a now-adult Jason was stalking around wearing a sack on his head (he didn’t get his famous hockey mask until the third installment) by saying that Pamela only thought he had drowned. Instead, he grew up in the woods (somehow without running into his mother, who stalked through them practically non-stop), nursing violent tendencies that were stoked by witnessing the decapitation of his mother.
It seems that CrystalLake is attempting to thread that same narrative needle, following Pamela dealing with her grief and rage while also presenting Jason both in flashback as a child (Callum Vinson of Chucky season 3) and, reportedly, as an adult (Zachary Branch, a stunt double on Stranger Things) prior to the events of the original movie. The trailer suggests that the main thrust of the action takes place in the summer of 1971, which is 14 years after Jason’s “drowning” and nearly a decade before the events of the original movie (which takes place in “The Present,” but is generally assumed to be set in either 1979 or 1980).
What Other Friday the 13th Characters Appear in Crystal Lake?
It seems that Crystal Lake will spend a considerable amount of time in the late 1950s, because the camp counselors Barry (Phoenix Parnevik of Bel-Air) and Claudette (Danielle Kotch of Sinister) will have recurring roles in the series. These characters (who were portrayed by Willie Adams and Debra S. Hayes in the original movie) are the counselors whose dalliance led to Jason’s “death” in 1957, and they are the first victims in the movie’s prologue, which takes place in 1958.
The series will also feature the recurring character Ralph (Nick Cordileone of Warrior), the younger version of Walt Gorney’s “Crazy Ralph,” who appears in the first two movies as a harbinger of doom warning prospective counselors about the “death curse” at what everybody has come to call Camp Blood.
‘Friday the 13th’ (1980)Credit: Paramount Pictures
Another Friday the 13th legacy character, Dorf (Cameron Scoggins, who has done ADR voices for Caddo Lake and The Exorcist: Believer), will be part of the main cast opposite Linda Cardellini’s Pamela. Dorf is the Crystal Lake police officer played by Ron Millkie who briefly interacts with the main cast of the original movie.
While the IMDb listing for Crystal Lake cannot be considered to be 100% reliable until the show actually premieres, it does hint at a few more legacy characters who will appear opposite the cast playing new characters (which includes William Catlett and Devin Kessler as Levon and Briana Brooks and Gwendolyn Sundstrom as Grace).
These listings include Daniel Stewart Sherman (The Beauty) as Enos (Rex Everhart), the truck driver who later gives the ill-fated camp cook Annie (Robbi Morgan) a ride to Camp Crystal Lake; Bernadette Quigley (Mr. Robot) as Trudy (Dorothy Kobs in the original), the diner waitress who Annie asks for directions; and Dan Thompson (Life & Beth) as Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer in the original), who grows up to purchase Camp Crystal Lake, only to die while trying to refurbish it.
The real Camp Crystal Lake will also make its grand reappearance in the new series. While the camp is a key setting in the majority of the original movie’s sequels, it was generally portrayed by different summer camps or various constructed sets over the years. This is because production on the sequels generally took place in different states (and, in some cases, Canada).
However, for the production of Crystal Lake, they actually shot certain scenes at the still-operating Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, the New Jersey camp where the original movie was shot, and which still features the iconic swimming dock seen in the 1980 classic.
Are you excited to check out Crystal Lake when it premieres? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Figuring out what to wear with leggings is a key part of the millennial existence. If you’re over the age of 30, the athleisure staple has likely carried you through every stage of your life, from high school to working from home. Even as your tastes changed, your favorite leggings remained a constant. The way we style them, however, has evolved. They’ve gone from something to wear to the gym or around the house to a street-style hero—with the right high heels and gold accessories, of course.
While the critical eyes of Gen Z might have briefly made us question our lifelong allegiance to the wardrobe staple, that was a blessing in disguise: Now, in 2026, we’re much better at wearing leggings. Whether you’re dressing for the gym, the office, or a dressy evening, it’s easier than ever before to make leggings look downright chic. (Even Zoomers will approve of the formulas below.) Read on for insider-approved outfit ideas to help settle what to wear with leggings—and keep you right on trend for fall 2026.
Next, you can look at your actual hair volume. If mom passed down her finer strands, there are ways of inflating and boosting what you’ve got to fakethickness, which is where styling and cuts come in.
Here are some pro recommended answers for the question of how to get thicker hair…
Style mindfully.
Traction alopecia (hair loss that happens when you style your hair too tightly) and product buildup can impede healthy hair growth, so it’s important to style mindfully. “From a styling perspective, we can avoid techniques that can put strain and injury on our follicles to avoid the possibility of thinning or even scarring on the scalp surface,” says Teresa Richardson, a trichologist at Fulham Scalp & Hair Clinic. “Avoid extensions, tight braids and ponytail hairstyles, weaves, or wigs if you really want to reduce tension and avoid the thinning and breakage which, if left untreated, can lead to traction alopecia.”
Likewise, brush gently. “Brushes with long, flexible plastic prongs are best,” Kingsley says. “Boar-bristle brushes can scratch both the hair and scalp, and cause substantial accumulative damage.” Just be sure, if you’re using heavy styling sprays and products, that you deep-clean those brushes regularly.
A haircut, Cavalcante says, can make all the difference too. “I always tell clients that sometimes the right shape matters more than another product. Blunt cuts, soft layers in the right places, and adding movement around the face can instantly create the illusion of fullness,” he says. That, paired with lifting the roots during your styling routine by blow-drying your hair upside down, can pump up the volume.
Keep it clean.
If your scalp is covered in dirt, excess oil, and debris, it’s going to make it really hard to get your follicles to do their job—we know we can’t concentrate on being productive if there’s dirty laundry strewn all over the floor. “Keeping your scalp comfortable and clean is so important, as this creates a healthy scalp environment, allowing your hair follicles to produce and grow healthy hair at an optimum rate,” says Richardson. “We would recommend washing your hair at least once a week and more frequently if your hair gets greasy or itchy quicker.”
Just when you thought there was no way The Great British Baking Show could ever recapture the joy of its golden years, the Netflix hit tweaked its own recipe and became, once more, our favorite fall cozy watch. After Dame Prue Leith announced she was retiring from judging the series last winter, producers quickly moved to make one of Great Britain’s greatest food stars of all time Paul Hollywood’s new foil. Nigella Lawson hasn’t just seamlessly slid into her new position, but she’s reinvented it. Unafraid of Paul’s ice blue stare, Nigella has been quick to speak up whenever she disagrees with the king of the Bake Off tent. Not only that, but the current crop of bakers are universally delightful and the challenges have been lovely so far.
Crimson luck within plexian casino and intense gaming sessions
Modern digital entertainment has undergone a massive transformation, shifting from physical venues to sophisticated virtual environments. Many enthusiasts seek out platforms that offer not just games, but a sense of atmosphere and reliability. The pursuit of high stakes and adrenaline often leads players toward specialized hubs like plexian casino, where the mechanics of chance meet high-end digital design. These spaces are designed to cater to various psychological needs, ranging from the casual desire for distraction to the intense drive for significant wins. Understanding how these systems operate requires looking beyond the surface aesthetics into the core software and the logic governing the outcomes.
The complexity of modern gaming platforms lies in their ability to balance user engagement with mathematical integrity. Every spin, every card dealt, and every dice roll is governed by advanced algorithms that ensure fairness while maintaining the thrill of the unknown. Players today are more informed than ever, looking for transparency in odds and speed in transaction processing. As the industry evolves, the distinction between a mere website and a comprehensive gaming ecosystem becomes clearer. High-quality platforms invest heavily in server stability and interface fluidity to ensure that the user experience remains uninterrupted during peak usage times.
The Mechanics of Virtual Probability and Fairness
At the heart of every digital gambling experience is the concept of randomness, which is not actually random in the human sense but rather a highly controlled mathematical distribution. Software developers use specialized tools to ensure that every outcome is independent of the previous one, preventing any predictable patterns from emerging. This mathematical rigor is what builds trust between the operator and the participant. Without this foundation, the integrity of the entire platform would vanish, leading to a rapid loss of the user base. The implementation of verified random number generators is the industry standard for maintaining this delicate balance.
Algorithmic Integrity in Modern Gaming
The logic behind digital outcomes relies on complex equations that simulate true physical randomness. When a player interacts with a machine, the software processes a seed value that determines the result instantly. This process happens in milliseconds, making the interaction feel immediate and organic. Developers must constantly audit these systems to ensure that no biases are introduced through hardware malfunctions or software bugs. Such audits are essential for maintaining the reputation of a digital gaming establishment. By adhering to strict mathematical models, operators can provide a level of consistency that mirrors traditional physical gaming environments.
Furthermore, the technical infrastructure supporting these algorithms must be robust enough to handle massive amounts of data simultaneously. Every click and every bet is recorded and verified against the RNG output to prevent discrepancies. This dual layer of verification—the generation of the result and the subsequent logging of the action—creates a secure loop. This loop is vital for both the player's peace of mind and the operator's regulatory compliance. As technology advances, these systems are becoming even more sophisticated, incorporating encrypted pathways to protect the data integrity of every individual session.
Feature Type
Primary Function
User Benefit
RNG Engine
Generates unpredictable results
Ensures fair play every time
Encryption Layer
Protects sensitive data
Secures financial transactions
Latency Control
Minimizes input delay
Provides smooth gameplay
Audit Logs
Records every single event
Enables transparent reviews
Maintaining this level of technical excellence requires constant vigilance and significant capital investment. It is not merely about having a collection of games, but about creating a stable environment where the rules of probability are applied without exception. When players enter a high-tier environment, they expect the math to be as flawless as the graphics. This expectation drives the continuous improvement of gaming software across the entire sector, pushing the boundaries of what digital simulations can achieve in terms of realism and fairness.
Diverse Gaming Categories and User Preferences
The variety of available entertainment options is a key factor in determining the longevity of a gaming platform. Different users are drawn to different styles of play, ranging from the high-speed action of video slots to the strategic depth of table games. A well-rounded ecosystem must provide a wide spectrum of volatility and pace to satisfy these varying tastes. Some players prefer the quick dopamine hits of repetitive motion, while others find satisfaction in the slow, calculated tension of a long-form card game. Providing a balanced mix is essential for capturing a broad demographic of enthusiasts.
The Psychology of High Volatility Games
High volatility games are characterized by infrequent but potentially large payouts, creating a specific psychological profile for the player. These games are often preferred by those who enjoy the tension of a long buildup followed by a sudden climax. The emotional rollercoaster of near-misses and sudden wins keeps the engagement levels high. However, this style of play requires a disciplined approach to bankroll management, as the dry spells between wins can be significant. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for any player looking to navigate these high-intensity environments effectively.
Strategic betting options allow for customized risk levels.
Beyond the thrill of the win, the visual and auditory elements of these games play a massive role in player retention. Modern developers use cinematic soundtracks and high-definition animations to create an immersive world. This immersion makes the digital experience feel less like interacting with a machine and more like participating in a narrative. When the theme of a game aligns with the player's interests, the sense of presence is significantly amplified. This intersection of art and mathematics is where the most successful digital gaming products reside.
Navigating Financial Transactions and Security Protocols
Financial security is the cornerstone of any successful online gaming operation. Players must feel absolute confidence that their deposits are secure and that their winnings can be withdrawn without unnecessary friction. This necessitates the integration of advanced payment gateways and multi-layered security protocols. The ability to handle various currencies and payment methods is no longer a luxury but a fundamental requirement. As global banking regulations tighten, platforms must also adapt their internal processes to remain compliant while providing a seamless experience for the user.
Optimizing the Withdrawal Experience
The speed of withdrawal is often cited as a primary metric for evaluating a gaming platform's quality. A slow or convoluted withdrawal process can damage trust and drive users away to competitors. To combat this, many modern sites are implementing automated verification systems that can process requests in near real-time. This requires a sophisticated backend that can communicate instantly with financial institutions and verify the player's identity through automated KYC procedures. Efficiency in this area is a direct reflection of the platform's technological maturity.
Initiate the request through the user dashboard.
Undergo automated identity verification checks.
Wait for the platform's internal security review.
Receive funds via the selected gateway.
Security is not just about moving money; it is about protecting the entire user identity. This includes protecting against phishing attempts, account takeovers, and data breaches. Implementing two-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption are standard practices that every serious operator must adopt. By prioritizing these defensive measures, a platform can create a safe haven for its community. The peace of mind provided by these invisible layers of protection is what allows players to focus entirely on the excitement of their gaming sessions without distraction.
Strategic Approaches to Long-Term Engagement
Engaging with digital gaming over a long period requires a shift in mindset from impulsive action to informed participation. Experienced users often view their time in a platform like plexian casino as a form of structured entertainment rather than a primary source of income. This distinction is vital for maintaining a healthy relationship with the activity. Developing a set of personal rules, such as time limits and budget caps, can transform a potentially chaotic experience into a controlled and enjoyable pastime. The most successful players are those who understand the mathematical reality of the house edge and play accordingly.
Another aspect of long-term engagement is the utilization of platform-specific features designed to reward loyalty. Many systems offer tiered memberships or progress tracking that provides additional value to frequent users. These features are not just about extra perks; they are about creating a sense of progression and community within the digital space. When a user feels that their time and loyalty are being recognized, they are more likely to remain part of the ecosystem. This creates a symbiotic relationship where the player receives enhanced value and the platform benefits from a stable, recurring user base.
Furthermore, the study of game mechanics and odds can provide a layer of intellectual stimulation. While no amount of knowledge can change the fundamental math of a random generator, understanding how different rules affect volatility can lead to more informed choices. Some players enjoy analyzing the history of their sessions to identify trends in their own behavior. This analytical approach adds a different dimension to the experience, moving it away from pure chance and toward a more cognitive engagement with the platform's offerings.
Technological Advancements in User Interfaces
The visual interface of a gaming platform is the primary point of contact for every user. As mobile usage continues to dominate the digital landscape, the transition from desktop-centric designs to mobile-first architectures has become mandatory. A high-quality interface must be responsive, intuitive, and visually striking across all device types. This involves more than just resizing elements; it requires a fundamental rethinking of how navigation and interaction work on touchscreens versus mouse-driven systems. The goal is to minimize the cognitive load required to navigate the site, allowing the user to focus on the games.
Modern interfaces also leverage cutting-edge web technologies to deliver high-performance graphics without sacrificing loading speeds. The use of WebGL and other advanced rendering techniques allows for complex 3D environments to run directly in a browser. This eliminates the need for heavy software downloads and makes the gaming experience instantly accessible. When a player logs into plexian casino, they expect a high-fidelity experience that feels premium and polished. This level of detail in the UI design is a testament to the technical prowess of the development team and directly impacts user satisfaction.
Accessibility is another growing priority in the design of digital gaming spaces. Ensuring that players with different physical or cognitive abilities can navigate the platform is both a moral and a practical necessity. This includes features like high-contrast modes, scalable text, and compatibility with screen readers. By designing for inclusivity, platforms can expand their reach and ensure that the joy of gaming is available to a much wider audience. The integration of these accessibility features into the core design philosophy represents the next frontier of user-centric development in the gaming industry.
Future Directions of Digital Entertainment Platforms
The trajectory of the digital gaming industry suggests a move toward even greater immersion and social integration. We are likely to see the rise of more complex multiplayer environments where players can interact in real-time within shared virtual spaces. This social dimension can add a new layer of excitement, as players can share their experiences and compete against one another in a more direct way. The integration of augmented reality could also play a role, bringing the digital game into the physical world in unprecedented ways, further blurring the lines between reality and simulation.
Moreover, the evolution of blockchain technology and decentralized finance could fundamentally change how transactions and ownership are handled. The possibility of truly provable fairness through public ledgers and the ability to own digital assets as unique items could revolutionize the player experience. As these technologies mature, they will likely be integrated into existing platforms, providing new levels of transparency and utility. The intersection of these emerging technologies with the established gaming industry promises to create an era of unprecedented innovation and variety for enthusiasts worldwide.
For as much change and turmoil as the film industry has endured in recent years, its core has not changed: it’s still a business driven by hits, and everyone is looking harder than ever for the next big breakout. The question on everyone’s mind is where you’re supposed to find them in 2026.
Attendees at IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking Summit in Los Angeles on October 17 will get an answer to that question when our Pitch Me panel convenes Hollywood decision makers to break down their process of vetting pitches. Panelists from the representation, production, and distribution sides of the equation will join IndieWire Editor-in-Chief Brent Lang for a conversation about the search for hits and what separates the truly special projects.
Panelists include:
Erica Lee (President of Production and Partner, Thunder Road)
Julien Levesque (Agent, Gersh)
Ayo Kepher-Maat (VP of Acquisitions and Productions, Independent Film Company)
Rachel Shane (Head of Film and Television, Madison Wells)
IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking Summit will take place at Penske Media’s headquarters at Lumen West LA. The all-day event will feature a wide-range of panels and networking opportunities centered around the ideas, people, technology, and skills that shape storytelling today. Other programming includes
Detailed strategies alongside bubble bet casino offer rewarding gaming adventures
The world of online gaming is constantly evolving, with new platforms and experiences emerging regularly. Among these, the concept of a bubble bet casino has gained traction, offering a unique blend of chance and strategic gameplay. This approach deviates from traditional casino experiences, focusing heavily on creating a dynamic and potentially rewarding environment for players. It’s a space where informed decisions, coupled with a bit of luck, can lead to significant gains, making it increasingly popular among both seasoned gamblers and newcomers alike.
This type of gaming isn’t simply about placing bets; it’s about understanding the underlying probabilities and adjusting strategies accordingly. The ‘bubble’ aspect refers to a continuously shifting set of odds and potential payouts, challenging players to adapt quickly and capitalize on momentary advantages. This guide will delve into the specifics of this gaming model, outlining strategies, providing insights into maximizing potential winnings, and exploring the overall experience that a bubble bet casino offers. Understanding the nuances of a bubble bet casino can significantly enhance your enjoyment and prospects of success.
Understanding the Core Mechanics of Bubble Bet Systems
At the heart of a bubble bet casino lies a system designed to create a fluid and adaptable betting experience. Unlike static odds found in traditional casinos, the probabilities within a bubble bet environment are dynamic, influenced by player activity and pre-defined algorithms. These algorithms constantly recalculate potential payouts based on the volume of bets placed on specific outcomes, ensuring that opportunities can arise and vanish quickly. Essentially, the ‘bubble’ represents a constantly changing landscape of risk and reward, demanding a proactive and informed approach from players. This core mechanic differentiates these casinos significantly from their established counterparts. It necessitates a departure from set strategies, embracing flexibility and real-time assessment.
The Role of Algorithmic Control
The algorithms governing a bubble bet system are carefully designed to balance risk and reward, ensuring both player engagement and the long-term sustainability of the casino. These systems don’t inherently favor the house or the player but rather aim to create a competitive environment where skillful betting can yield positive results. Understanding the general principles behind these algorithms – such as the influence of bet volume on payout multipliers – is crucial for any player hoping to gain an edge. While the precise calculations are proprietary and often kept secret, public explanations often address the broad concepts. Successful play involves recognizing patterns and predicting how the bubble might shift based on observed trends. It's a dynamic interplay between chance and calculated risk.
Bet Type
Typical Payout Range
Volatility
Strategic Approach
Low-Risk Bets
1.1x – 1.5x
Low
Consistent small wins, building a bankroll.
Medium-Risk Bets
1.6x – 3x
Moderate
Balanced approach, capitalizing on moderate shifts in the bubble.
High-Risk Bets
3x – 10x+
High
Targeted bets on significant bubble fluctuations, requiring precise timing.
The table above presents a simplified overview of common bet types and associated characteristics. Recognizing the balance between these factors is key to developing a personalized strategy.
Developing a Winning Strategy for Bubble Bet Casinos
Success in a bubble bet casino relies heavily on developing a robust and adaptable strategy. Unlike traditional casino games, where established probabilities allow for relatively static betting approaches, dynamic odds require a more nuanced and responsive methodology. A key element involves careful bankroll management, ensuring that players can withstand inevitable losses and capitalize on favorable opportunities when they arise. This is not to equate success to guaranteed winnings, but to leveraging calculated risks for the greatest possible outcome. The unpredictable nature of the 'bubble' demands a willingness to learn, adapt, and refine one’s approach continuously.
Bankroll Management and Risk Assessment
Effective bankroll management is paramount in any form of gambling, but it’s particularly crucial in a bubble bet casino environment. Players should establish a predetermined budget for their sessions and strictly adhere to it, avoiding the temptation to chase losses. A common rule of thumb is to risk no more than 1-5% of your bankroll on any single bet. Furthermore, a thorough assessment of the potential risk associated with each bet is essential. Consider the current state of the bubble, the recent betting trends, and the potential payout relative to the risk involved. Diversifying bets can also mitigate risk, spreading your capital across different outcomes and increasing your chances of securing at least some return. Understanding your risk tolerance is also paramount.
Set a strict budget before you begin playing.
Never chase losses; accept them as part of the game.
Diversify your bets to spread risk.
Start with smaller bets to understand the bubble’s dynamics.
Regularly review and adjust your strategy based on results.
Employing these strategies can significantly contribute to a more sustainable and potentially profitable gaming experience. Ignoring these principles can quickly deplete your resources and lead to disappointment.
Recognizing Patterns and Identifying Opportunities
While the bubble bet system is designed to be dynamic and unpredictable, astute players can often identify patterns and opportunities by closely monitoring the betting activity and payout fluctuations. Paying attention to trends, such as the sudden surge in bets on a particular outcome, can indicate a potential shift in the bubble and present a favorable entry point. However, it's important to distinguish between genuine patterns and random fluctuations – a nuanced task that requires practice and experience. Don’t assume a pattern that seems likely will appear; rather, wait to see if the pattern develops and maintain a realistic outlook.
Utilizing Statistical Analysis (Basic Level)
Even a basic understanding of statistical analysis can be valuable in a bubble bet casino. Tracking the frequency of different outcomes, calculating average payouts, and monitoring payout volatility can provide insights into the overall behavior of the system. This information can then be used to inform betting decisions, identifying potential value bets and avoiding unfavorable situations. However, it’s crucial to remember that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results; the bubble is constantly changing, and what worked yesterday might not work today. Statistical analysis should be used as one tool among many, not as a foolproof predictor of success. Focus on recent data to predict upcoming fluctuations.
Track the frequency of different outcomes over a defined period.
Calculate the average payout for each bet type.
Monitor payout volatility to assess risk.
Identify potential value bets based on statistical discrepancies.
Continuously update your analysis as the bubble evolves.
Consistent application of these steps can reveal subtle advantages.
The Psychological Aspects of Bubble Bet Gaming
The dynamic nature of a bubble bet casino can be emotionally taxing, as players are constantly confronted with shifting probabilities and the potential for both significant gains and rapid losses. Maintaining emotional control is, therefore, essential for making rational decisions. Avoid impulsive betting driven by frustration or overconfidence, and stick to your predetermined strategy. Recognizing and managing your own biases – such as the tendency to overestimate your chances of winning – can also help you avoid costly mistakes. The excitement of quick wins can easily lead to overexertion, and the frustration of losses can lead to irrational choices.
Future Trends in Bubble Bet Casino Technology
The world of online gaming, and specifically the bubble bet casino sector, continues to evolve rapidly. We can anticipate further advancements in algorithmic technology leading to even more dynamic and responsive betting environments. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is particularly promising, potentially enabling personalized betting recommendations and more sophisticated risk management tools. Furthermore, we may see the emergence of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences that immerse players in a more realistic and engaging casino environment. These changes will likely further blur the lines between the physical and digital worlds of gaming. The future will involve increasingly sophisticated platforms and richer user experiences.
The key to long-term success in this evolving landscape will be a commitment to continuous learning and adaptation. Players who are willing to embrace new technologies and refine their strategies will be best positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that lie ahead. The focus will continue to be on providing a unique and engaging gaming experience, attracting a wider audience and establishing bubble bet casinos as a significant force in the online gaming industry. Staying informed about these developments is crucial for any serious player.
Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico has been racking up endorsements from the likes of Don Henley and the Chicks ahead of the November midterm elections. Now, the state representative has landed the official seal of approval from Texan native Willie Nelson. The two were photographed together backstage at Nelson’s Fourth of July concert this year, and the country maverick features in a new Talarico online campaign video. “I’ve gotten to know James Talarico,” Nelson says in the short clip. “He’s a good man, who will be a good senator for the state of Texas. Please vote and vote for James Talarico.“
Also hopping aboard the Talarico train: Yo La Tengo, who’ll play a benefit concert in Austin on October 27. The entry fee is a $100 donation to Talarico’s senate campaign, and the show will be capped at 500 people. Check out the poster below.
Both Nelson and Yo La Tengo have extensive histories of political engagement. YLT’s goes all the way back to 2004, when they performed at a benefit for John Kerry’s presidential campaign; they also offered to play private acoustic shows in 2024 in exchange for donations to the Harris/Walz Democratic ticket. Nelson enthusiasticallysupported former Texas state representative Beto O’Rourke during his 2018 senate bid and 2022 gubernatorial run—both of which he lost. So of course, Ted Cruz has taken to X to snidely remark, “Willie’s music is great, but historically, this has been the beginning of the end for Democrat campaigns in Texas….”
Two sessions at the forum spoke directly to brewing concerns in the heart of our moviemaking town: one, is AI taking over and two, can anyone in Los Angeles afford to live here, let alone make a movie?
Let me spoil it with the TL;DR that our panelists hold a lot of hope for both concerns, and surprise: it comes down to human relationships and partnerships. Connecting with collaborators, connecting with audiences, connecting with new ideas and perspectives from a diversity of backgrounds… basically everything that Film Independent stands for.
So let’s dig in. Reality Check: AI in the Workplace brought together three industry professionals and an economist, moderated by journalist Carolyn Giardina. Patrick Adler kicked things off with a rousing overview of creative jobs in California and how AI tools are affecting jobs on a broad scale. Speaking as a founding partner of Westwood Economics, his team published a report on the 118,000 creative jobs lost in California since 2022. The report is doing detective work on what differentiates this change in California from the rest of the country, where industries adopting AI tools have actually seen growth in the human workforce. Adler surmised that as AI tools have become more involved in some jobs, more people have been required to manage and implement those tools. But the unique factors of recession and livability for California and Los Angeles specifically could play a role.
Harry Yoon (Editor, Spider-Man: Brand New Day) recognized how AI has made it more streamlined and less tedious to complete “soul-crushing” tasks like transcription or building out new concepts with sound design and ADR drafts to test out new lines, leaving humans to do more of the fun stuff. Mathew Cullen (Founder of Mirada Studios, Motion Theory) has also found that work is streamlined through the use of AI, but that clients tend to be misinformed about what AI can actually do. No matter what they’ve heard, you can’t just prompt your way to a cinematic and artistic result – the role of human experience, human skill and human interaction is still vital.
Reality Check: AI in the Workplace
As a writer on the other hand, Ruth Fowler (Writer, Rules of the Game, Little Disasters) finds that gainful employment has always been challenging, but in the reality of AI involvement she’s being asked to do more free work – take more meetings, create more development documents – before knowing if she’s landed the job. But beyond the usual hustle to get work that covers a year’s salary, she wonders if AI is making writers even more isolated than usual. The experience she has gained from getting notes and pushback from fellow humans only translates to Claude if she trains it to; a newer writer may not benefit from that critique. Meanwhile, busyness and overwhelm make soliciting feedback from humans as difficult as ever.
Yoon and Cullen echoed concerns about what brings humans together at work, as the same tedious tasks AI handles might previously have functioned as training ground for an intern. The mentorship space is being affected, as Cullen reflected on starting his company in 2003 and training up new people. “My intern at the time is now the head of creative at my company. I think about all those interns, and I think about all those people that you know were sort of there, and you’re kind of creating that space for them to show up and figure it out.” Cullen has seen receptionists go on to be producers and directors that have won Emmys, all from the osmosis of being around imaginative people, seeing future possibilities up close.
There were also takeaways that could be used when audience members got home. VFX supervisor and Creators Coalition on Artificial Intelligence founder Jim Geduldick just launched the CCAI site, which includes useful tools for filmmakers like an AI terms glossary, and an impact survey and visualizer and be found here.
The panel tackled concerns about AI changing job descriptions and how much cost savings will matter, especially now that it’s more expensive to hire domestically versus overseas – even London is cheaper than Atlanta. Cullen accepts the encroachment of AI technology but doesn’t like it. Even so, he asserted that the creative business has never been more exciting or more challenging. “From short-form to long-form to interactive form to experiential … longevity is living in that river of change, you know?”
Meanwhile as so much production work moves offshore, how much cheaper is it as an independent filmmaker to take your film abroad? Crossing Borders: The International Landscape for Indies brought together five filmmakers to swap stories and highlight pros and cons for taking your production global. While the US does not currently have any international co-production treaties, our panel highlighted the importance of finding partners in the country that interests you. And by partners, Anna Różalska (EP for Who Will Write Our History and Co-Producer of Arbitrage) means true believers in the project – like-minded collaborators who want to see the story succeed. When shooting a project in Lithuania, Różalska described asking multiple companies to read the script and suggest a budget. Ultimately her choice was motivated by the ideas presented. “It wasn’t about eventually the budget, but about a company that really cared about the project … we could really tell they were very much involved.”
Crossing Borders: The International Landscape for Indies
Shih-Ching Tsou (Director/Producer, Left-Handed Girl) is from Taiwan but lives in New York and had never made a film in her home country. So partnership was key. “It’s not really that exotic, because it’s really scary,” she says of trying to prove herself and her vision in the Taiwanese film industry. “People will look at you and say … ‘I don’t think you know what to do,’ right? So you kind of have to jump in there and kind of prove to them, like this is the way.” Communication and trust are key elements to any partnership, and Munir Atalla (Head of Production & Acquisitions, Watermelon Pictures) asserted that international relationships are no different.
Claire Brooks (Executive Director, Association of Film Commissioners International) shared with passion about the practicalities of identifying potential locations and making the most of the local film commission – even within the United States. “They provide free location services,” Brooks explained. “Some of them will read your script. Some of them have access to funding opportunities – not through their office, but through their national bodies.” And those that don’t can point you to the right place. Miura Kite (President of Global Content, Maria Farinha Films) has partners at a French production company and the two companies bring shows to each other, taking the lead based on who pays for what. “Once you do find people you love working with, try to maximize it in any way.”
In addition, moderator Tatiana Kelly (Producer, The Catcher Was a Spy, Cut Throat City) guided the panel through high level thoughts on attracting foreign investment, selling the finished project worldwide, the marketing potential of attaching stars, and keeping an open mind for the long view – “Talk to people,” Tsou suggested, “you never know who you’re gonna meet.” Brooks told a story about cultural alignment, and how The Substance earned a tax incentive from France because Demi Moore’s character cooks a French dish in one scene. “Read the details,” she summarizes on the importance of knowing what a given region is looking for when considering investment. Also not to be overlooked is cultural differences, unique aspects of local film industries and traditions, and holidays. If France is on vacation for the month of August, that will impact your production schedule.
“Travel a lot,” Różalska recommends. “I think the only way to really like connecting with people from different countries is through understanding their culture.”
While it’s easy to romanticize opportunities that are farther afield, panelists advised taking all considerations into account. Public financing can take 2-3 years. If tax incentives are refunds on expenses already incurred, then consider the interest on those expenses until you get paid. Brooks recommended getting a regional film office involved as soon as possible so they can help discern how the numbers will play out in real time and money. “When are you getting that money and how long are you carrying that loan, and is it worth it?”
Różalska lives in LA, going back and forth to Europe to make films. She was optimistic about the potential for great international film partnerships. “You all live in Hollywood and the whole world is looking up to you,” she said with a smile. Her European origins taught her the value of treaties and the amazing opportunities to collaborate across national borders. “I do believe the best way to make films is to really find different ways to collaborate and really take what’s best from both worlds.”
Maybe the same can be said for AI.
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Another whale shipped out of Marineland has died at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.
The aquarium says Caspian, a 27-year-old female beluga, died on Wednesday despite efforts to save her.
It’s the sixth animal from the closed Niagara Falls, Ont., theme park to die after a massive relocation of whales and dolphins over the summer.
Four other belugas and one dolphin from Marineland have died since they were moved out of the former tourist attraction.
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Shedd says Caspian had not been eating properly and blood samples showed abnormalities in her electrolyte levels. The park added that her blood had become “dangerously acidic.”
The aquarium says those findings helped the veterinary care team understand how sick the beluga was, but they did not establish a cause of death.
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Shedd says Caspian was on life support for nearly four hours before she died.
Shedd recently performed necropsies on Peekachu and Rain, two other Marineland whales that died there, and concluded that they had chronic, pre-existing diseases.
Shedd and four other aquariums in the United States and Spain helped Marineland relocate all 30 of its belugas and four dolphins over the course of six weeks this summer.
Marineland had said it was running out of money and could no longer care for the last captive whales and dolphins in Canada.
A beluga named Jelly Bean and a dolphin named Echo died at Oceanografic Valencia in Spain after the move.
EXCLUSIVE: A number of recent injuries on the set of Season 10 of ABC‘s 9-1-1has put the production’s safety protocols under scrutiny again.
Deadline understands that four performers, including star Oliver Stark, have sustained stunt-related injuries to varying degrees in recent months. While the incidents do not seem to be connected, the unfortunate timing does highlight the challenges with making a stunt-heavy show like 9-1-1 on a broadcast network schedule.
A spokesperson for 20th Television, which produces the series, declined to comment for this story.
In late August, Stark broke his ankle while performing a stunt and required surgery. Sources close to production say that production continued in the wake of the incident and Stark has since returned to work. While reports of the injury surfaced online, the details of the incident have not yet been shared.
Sources tell Deadline that the stunt involved a firefighter swinging from a car over a set piece to the ladder truck. We understand that, during rehearsals, a stunt double sprained an ankle performing the same stunt and declined medical treatment, so no injury report was submitted to production.
On the 9-1-1 set, production sources say it is typical for stunts to be practiced first with heavyweight bags so the stunt coordinators and other crew members can better understand the necessary weight distribution, etc. Then, the set piece is rehearsed with stunt doubles to work out any issues before the actors come in for their own rehearsal.
In Stark’s case, we’re told the mechanics of the stunt were adjusted after the stunt double was injured. Sources indicate that, still, Stark rolled his ankle over another performer in the scene.
Two other injuries followed in subsequent weeks. In one incident, a stunt person injured their arm on a piece of the set that had jagged metal on it, requiring a hospital visit and stitches. Within the last two weeks, another stunt performer was sent to the hospital after a stunt gone wrong. Sources close to production say the hospital trip was “precautionary” after an “awkward landing” on a platform designed to simulate a ground collapse resulted in a broken rib and minor compressed lung. It’s unclear whether this performer has returned to work.
All SAG-AFTRA signatories, including 20th Television owner Disney, are required to follow certain on-set safety protocols. Stunt performers and coordinators are required to complete a general safety and injury prevention program in order to remain eligible for employment on union productions.
The standards and practices for set safety are developed by Contract Services’ industry wide safety committee. The general guidelines for stunts task production management with ensuring they “allow enough time for rehearsals, training, equipment preparations, and inspections,” per the company’s latest stunt safety bulletin. Contract Services also has more detailed guidelines for specific stunt work.
Typically, the stunt coordinator leads all stunt-related preparations including script review, planning, site selection, preparation, testing, rehearsal, modification, and recommendation of the qualified personnel and equipment to be utilized to perform the stunt. The first assistant director is responsible for holding an on-set safety meeting prior to any stunt work so all involved personnel can see a walk-through of the maneuver and discuss protocol in detail. Another safety meeting is required if there are any “substantive changes” to the stunt.
A concentration of injuries on a single season of television doesn’t necessarily indicate negligence, especially on a high-octane show like 9-1-1. However, it is ambitious for a series like 9-1-1 to pull off massive stunt sequences on a regular basis given the restraints of working within the relatively tight production schedule required of broadcast shows, making it more likely for problems to occur.
Two years ago, a crew member died from a cardiac event while driving home from set after the workday ballooned to 14 hours due to complications with a controlled burn that was being used for a stunt. Still, a production source told Deadline at the time that 9-1-1 was “one of the safest that I’ve ever worked on.”
Director Jeff T. Thomas has worked on dozens of television episodes and music videos, some featuring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Melissa Leo. But with AI, his feature debut is nigh.
Thomas, under his moniker “Jeff Synthesized,” took home the $2.5 million “Future Vision XPRIZE” last month with the AI-generated proof-of-concept trailer for “The Gifted.” The trailer — made under the prompt of depicting “a future worth building toward” within three minutes and judged by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, novelist Neal Stephenson, Google‘s Mira Lane, Salesforce executive John Zissimos and ‘Star Trek’ steward Rod Roddenberry — follows an 11-year-old boy who builds an AI version of his late mother who rebuilds his late mother that quietly begins saving lives, captured through various moments.
Now, with the win, Google and Range Media Partners (through their 100 Zeroes initiative) will help develop the trailer into a full-length feature.
It’s a story partly inspired by Thomas’ own childhood, having lost his mother at 14 due to an undiagnosed brain tumor. But having to navigate designing a hopeful film, one devoid of an antagonist that also heralds a positive view of AI, was a challenge in its own right.
But Thomas hopes the project can be a vehicle for that positive view of AI, both narratively and as a production tool, even as many in Hollywood remain fearful about its impact on jobs and some in the general public worry about its world-ending potential.
“I wanted to follow a character that became obsessive, compulsive about trying to bring his mother back,” he tells Variety. “In the movie that we’ll see, she admits to not being his actual mother, but she does actually end up helping him, helping the world, and hopefully this will be something that will be imitated by technology people, and we can actually do some good in the world.”
The participants — roughly 2,500, with the top five making it in front of the judges — were not required to use AI, but the fact that many of the final submissions was “evidence that AI is preoccupying people’s thoughts,” Tyson tells Variety.
Tyson says he found the trailer a “clever construct” in how it flipped people’s general fears about the technology’s “all-knowing” nature into a tool that connects people to help each other. His fellow judges agreed. “The choice of the number one was unanimous,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean he’s eager for completely AI-generated films, saying people flock to movies because “we want to see what humans can do” and that audiences will demand “human creativity, not machine creativity.”
“[AI] will raise the bar on creativity,” he says. “You can’t just be an artist aping the work of other artists because AI can do that. The value of that will drop in the workplace, but something that’s truly creative that comes out of the deepest parts of the minds of someone who dreamt it — I don’t see AI coming for that anytime soon.”
For Roddenberry, he says he wanted to see a project that could be “the next ‘Star Trek,’” one that left audiences believing the world the three-minute trailer presents is one they could aspire to.
“Is [the story] believable? No,” he admits. “It’s make believe. It can’t connect it exactly to reality, but I think it’s just a beautiful story of how technology, especially something like AI, which is so feared today, can have a positive message in it.”
It’s a philosphy Range subscribes to, CEO Peter Micelli says, investing in the prize to both showcase how people are using AI tools within the film industry and source new stories from contestants across the world. While the eventual “roughly $10 million” film will not be AI generated, he says, it’s a technology that could mimic the look of a film that costs 10 times that figure.
“This reality is here,” Micelli says. “This tool is very, very powerful. And I would be more concerned about us not being involved in these things because we need to be on the ground floor so we can advise our clients and partners that are established in Hollywood on [how] this is a reality, and everyone needs to be aware of what it is.”
Not that Thomas plans on making an AI film, promising his eventual movie will only utilize it as a tool. But he also doesn’t want those in the industry to write off AI as an end-all killer of creativity, pointing to his use of it while directing episodes of Amazon’s “House of David” series and his own experimentation with AI models.
“Audiences are still expecting $25 million-looking episodes, but you might have $10 million, you might have $12 million,” he says. “What AI can do is fill in the gaps between those to still provide the audience with something they want and still allow the studios to make the material for what they can afford. So, creatively wise, I think it will make entertainment better, because you won’t be as limited as we have been up until this point.”
YouTube, Twitch, Meta, and X aren’t saying whether they’ll allow the US government to livestream an execution on their platforms. The four companies didn’t respond to The Verge’s requests for comment after an unnamed Pentagon official said yesterday that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of a mass shooting at a Texas military base in 2009, will be livestreamed.
Two platforms responded to The Verge’s inquiries. Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok’s US operations, pointed to the platform’s policies banning “shocking and graphic content,” including “the moment of someone’s death.” Kick, a platform known for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation, confirmed that such a livestream would violate its policies. “If this was livestreamed on KICK, it would breach our Community Guidelines,” Kick spokesperson Audrey FitzGerald writes in an emailed statement to The Verge.
Hasan is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on December 3rd at 2PM ET. YouTube, Meta, and Twitch’s community guidelines suggest that this type of content wouldn’t be allowed on their platforms, but it’s unclear whether they would make an exception for the US government.
Meta, Twitch, and X’s community guidelines explicitly state that violent content involving death isn’t allowed, while YouTube bans content that “encourages dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death.” YouTube says livestreams that “feature someone holding or handling a firearm” aren’t allowed, either. Rumble, an online video platform known for hosting far-right influencers, also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Rodney Muñoz, the Emmy-winning costume designer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, has died. He was 60.
Muñoz died Oct. 2, his friend Joe Dietl announced in a Facebook post. The cause of death was not immediately available, but Dietl said that Muñoz had contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic, was put into a coma and ventilated and had been dealing with health issues ever since.
On Friday, Jimmy Kimmel penned a tribute on Instagram, writing, “Our dear friend and Costume Designer for almost 30 years, Rodney Muñoz, has sadly passed away.”
“Rodney was one of the most talented people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. He was a funny, surly, hard-working man whose tough exterior hid a huge and generous heart. Rodney helped many of us through difficult times. He was a devoted son, brother and Uncle; a great baker and a caring friend. No man saw me in my underpants more.”
Muñoz began working on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2002, and he earned his Primetime Emmy for outstanding costumes for a variety/music program or a special in 2010.
He attended New York University from 1988-93, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in costume design for stage and screen. After his studies, Muñoz joined Late Show With David Letterman, where he worked as a costume designer until 2000.
Before Jimmy Kimmel Live!, he worked as a costume designer on projects including Champions of Magic 2, Can’t Stop Dancing and Popstars and as a wardrobe stylist on Fear Factor. He also worked on the costuming for Dietl’s web series Where the Bears Are.
Muñoz additionally styled Kimmel when he hosted the 2018 Academy Awards.
“We will miss Rodney as he joins his beloved parents in whatever comes next,” Kimmel wrote.
Netflix plans a substantial round of layoffs as the streaming giant faces rising competition and pressure to retain its subscribers, according to people familiar with the job cuts.
The cuts are expected to impact 5% of the company‘s workforce, which could be 800 workers, according to one of the sources who were not authorized to comment. The job losses will affect the creative team including those working on features, the source said.
Netflix declined to comment. The planned cuts are believed to be the biggest at the Los Gatos company since 2022. The news was first reported by news outlet Puck.
Netflix has been under scrutiny from investors over how much time its subscribers spend on the streaming service. View hours rose only about 2% in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier, even as content spending climbed.
“Overall we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” said Netflix co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos at the Bloomberg Screentime event last week.
Netflix has noted how engagement can be measured in different ways. For example, its investment in live programming helps spur significant subscription sign-ups, even though it represents a small percentage of watch time on the streaming service, the company has said.
But some investors remain skeptical about the company’s future growth. Rival YouTube remains the leader in streaming viewing hours in the U.S. on TVs, representing 14.2% versus Netflix’s 7.8% in July, according to Nielsen. Netflix stock has also declined 43% compared to a year ago. On Friday, the stock closed at $70.30, down about 2%.
Netflix last conducted major layoffs in 2022 after the streamer reported subscriber losses for the first time in more than a decade. In May that year, the company laid off 150 workers and dozens of contractors and part-time workers in areas including its social media teams. The following month, it laid off 300 people or roughly 3% of its staff.
Recently, Netflix made changes to its games division. In August, the company closed its Hollywood-based gaming studio Night School and said it was in the process of closing its Helsinki, Finland-based gaming studio Moonloot.
Marvel kicked off the con with a celebration of all things television, giving fans a sneak peek at what’s to come from Marvel Television and Marvel Animation. Head of Television, Animation, Comics & Franchise Brad Winderbaum treated attendees to a special look at some Marvel’s most highly anticipated shows, including Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-ManSeason 2, X-Men ‘97Season 3, and the next three years of Marvel Zombies.
Winderbaum also revealed new details about a brand-new Marvel Television show: Zodiac, a top-secret global spy thriller coming soon to Disney+.
A number of familiar faces also joined the panel, with Defenders Finn Jones (Danny Rand), Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones), and Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock) taking the stage to tease an exclusive first look at the upcoming third and final season of Daredevil: Born Again.
Finally, VisionQuestclosed out the panel with creator Terry Matalas and stars Paul Bettany, James Spader, Ruaridh Mollica, and Emily Hampshire. Not only did they treat fans to exclusive footage, but in a thrilling surprise, they showed attendees the entire first episode of VisionQuest, before its global debut on Disney+ on October 14.
Am I the only one who gets a pit in their stomach whenever Wizards of the Coast announces ‘changes’ nowadays? Wizards of the Coast is switching things up with Magic: the Gathering Play Boosters and Collector’s Boosters once again, and fan reactions are predictably mixed. While some of the changes make sense from a play standpoint, and some are exciting in their own right, there’s also a few ‘business’ decisions that draw eye-rolls at best and outrage at worst.
The Good
We’ll start out with some of the better news from the recent Magic: the Gathering press release! First off—God Packs are making their return after a thirteen year hiatus. We last saw God Packs in 2014 as part of the Journey into Nyx set. The chance of pulling one back then was 1 in 1,000. Wizards of the Coast has improved the odds to 1 in 300 this time around. While the God Packs will no longer include fifteen God cards from the Theros block like the God Packs of yore, they will still consist of all Rare and/or Mythic cards.
Wizards of the Coast
Additionally, it’s cool that Japanese Showcase cards will now occasionally crop up in Booster Packs, not just Collector Boosters. We’re also getting increased drop rates on foil rares and foil mythics for Booster Packs, which I shan’t complain about.
Lastly, we’re getting some general branding changes. In 2024, during the Murders at Karlov Manor block, Draft Boosters and Set Boosters were replaced by Play Boosters. Play Boosters are now bowing out for just Booster Packs. Failing anything else, it does simplify things.
The Bad
Okay, so maybe this is just me, but that ‘you did it!’ card at the front of the God Packs makes me want to scream. No thank you! Give me another playable card, please, not a cardboard pat on the head! While the increased odds of pulling a God Pack are a great boon to players and collectors alike, it should be noted that a pack of 14 Rare/Mythic cards could still equate to a pretty low value pack, depending on the set and cards in question. Just because a card is Rare or Mythic, doesn’t mean it has a high price point, or a great amount of utility in play.
There’s also mounting concerns about changes like this further compromising the secondary card market, and making it a predatory playground for scalpers. Who are these changes for? Us? It certainly doesn’t feel that way. It feels like this is to make sure Hasbro’s shareholders can buy more yachts. How long until things are just as dire as they are for Pokémon TCG players, with the market being largely driven by speculative hoarding?
The Ugly
“How does removing cards make opening Collector Boosters more exciting? We’ll be honest here—it doesn’t. But we do know that most people who open Collector Boosters mostly skip past these cards. Not everyone, but enough of a majority. You can see it in virtually any Collector Booster opening video, where the video practically skips over that section of the booster. Removing them isn’t about shrinking the experience; it’s about making room—in terms of both printing capacity and player psychology—for cards people actually get excited about.” -Blake Rasmussen, Communications Director
Well, that is one hell of a way to spin getting three fewer cards in each pack! While the announcement post goes out of its way to state that none of the changes being made will result in higher Booster Pack prices, paying the same amount of money for less cards, is in fact paying more! I guess one way to make room in a pack is to empty that son-of-a-gun out. This is banana nuts, c’mon.
The blog post seems tone-deaf to the fact that the problem players have with Foils is not, “oh, I got an Uncommon/Common Foil, lame.” I don’t know what influencers are being watched by higher-ups, but from someone within the community, the long-standing problems with Foils is entirely with quality, not the literal presence of the Common and Uncommon Foils in a pack. Foils increasingly come pre-Pringle’d, already curving in the middle when you draw one out of the pack. Often in the secondary market, you’ll see Foils go for less than their basic counterparts. You know what Magic: the Gathering tournament organizers really don’t like you to use? Bent cards.
Also, didn’t they justify raising the price of Booster Packs years ago because they’d started coming with guaranteed Foils? That was a flawed premise to begin with, but now they’re taking that out, and…hold on, let me check my notes again…yes, still charging the same price. It’s almost like they want us to make proxies. Or just play Magic: the Gathering Arena.
Less is Not Actually More…
The world is not exactly in the midst of an economic upturn. While years of mounting prices have excluded more and more players from enjoying Magic: the Gathering to its fullest extent, we seem to be reaching a peak of inaccessibility. Universes Beyond is certainly lining Hasbro’s enormous, well-tailored pockets, but a lot of these changes are making the MTG fanbase that’s been here for years steadily lose faith in the product, or at least the ‘return on investment’ aspect of things.
Crimson Desert’s review scores were lower than expected because the press weren’t given the optimal experience, a Pearl Abyss executive says.
In an interview with The Game Business, the studio’s European CEO Lybee Park was asked why she felt the player response to game was extremely positive but the Metacritic score was 77 (which is not necessarily bad, but perhaps lower than expected).
Park replied that, in her opinion, she didn’t feel that critics were given the optimal version of the game, and also weren’t given enough time to explore it properly.
“I do believe both parties have fair points, especially the critics,” she said. “They had to play a build that was not the exact same version as the launch game.
“Also, they had limited time. Usually the classical approach when they review the game is following the main quest line, but with Crimson Desert, our unique charm is spread all over our in-game world. All those tiny details that are hidden, the freedom to actually explore even further beyond the common expectations.
“So all those unique bits and interesting new, freshened-up bits, I don’t think critics had a fair chance to explore those and experience them while in those reviewing periods.”
Since the release of Crimson Desert in March, developer Pearl Abyss has been continually improving it with patches and updates, including new difficulty levels, storage changes and graphical improvements.
“For platform expansion, the core focus is ensuring that Crimson Desert’s signature graphics, action, and open-world experience are fully preserved, rather than executing a simple port,” the studio said.
“In the case of Switch 2, the game has reached a playable baseline, and we are currently conducting technical reviews regarding performance optimization and quality standard compliance, targeting a release in the first half of next year.”
Skydance‘s CEO Business Leadership Team unveiled on Monday features only Co-Chairs, with everyone in the group sharing oversight of a division alongside someone else. All pairs come from the same side of the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery company (WBD’s Casey Bloys & JB Perrette for DTC and James Gunn & Peter Safran for DC; Paramount’s Dana Goldberg & Josh Greenstein for film) except for one crossover duo: Paramount’s George Cheeks and WBD’s Perrette, who will serve as co-Chairs of Skydance TV.
The move marks the latest shared leadership position for Cheeks and also a new role he has not been in yet — at least by title — as Chief Content Officer of Skydance TV, a unit spanning Skydance’s three TV studios, Warner Bros. TV, CBS Studios and Paramount TV Studios, CBS and about 30 basic cable networks. As Skydance TV Chief Business officer, Perrette will oversee the division’s ad sales, distribution, content sales and international operations.
For a decade now, Harvard Law graduate Cheeks has been the business partner to a creative executive, whether it was as Co-President of Universal Cable Prods. and Wilshire Studios alongside Dawn Olmstead or as NBC Entertainment Co-Chairman alongside Paul Telegdy. Now he is the creative executive alongside Perrette with a title matching that of Skydance DTC Chief Content Officer Bloys, one of TV industry’s most accomplished development executives.
That caps a long evolution for Cheeks that can be traced back to one of his first Hollywood jobs, while having Perrette as Chief Business Officer across DTC as well as TV Studios and linear networks corrects a structural flow that existed at both Paramount and WBD.
The Business Guy
After stints at entertainment law firms Loeb & Loeb and Hansen Jacobson Teller and the BA & legal department of Castle Rock Entertainment early on, Cheeks landed a business and legal affairs job at MTV Networks. There, along with drafting deal memos, he also started doing script coverage for then-top programming executives Tony DiSanto and Liz Gateley.
Cheeks got his first formal assignment on the creative side — and showed his talent relations skills — when, as EVP Business Operations for NBC and Universal TV, he was put in charge of NBC Late Night in 2014. Lorne Michaels took a liking to him (while disliking his predecessor) and took him under his wing, valuing his creative sense by asking for his feedback on writer packages and taking him to auditions.
Cheeks has acknowledged that getting the NBC Late Night gig changed his career, fueling his aspirations to straddle business and creative. He would later be handpicked as the main liaison to NBCUniversal’s other uber TV producer, Dick Wolf, for similar reasons (the procedural king wanted to switch executives), proving that he can work well with top-level talent.
Still, when Bonnie Hammer announced Cheeks and Olmstead’s appointment as UCP co-Presidents in early 2018, she called Olmstead a “talented creative executive” while praising Cheeks’ “business savvy” as “second to none.” Similarly, Steve Burke’s statement about Cheeks’ promotion as NBC Entertainment co-Chairman alongside Telegdy later that year called him “a strategist and masterful dealmaker.”
That is a perception Cheeks carried over in his 2020 move to then-ViacomCBS as President and CEO of CBS Entertainment, with David Nevins initially serving as the division’s Chief Content Officer. That changed in 2021. Overseeing CBS-branded operations in various roles over the past five years — including another shared one as co-CEO of Paramount Global — varnished Cheeks’ creative credentials as he worked closely with such executives as CBS Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach and CBS Studios President David Stapf.
Now Cheeks, who also has been overseeing Paramount’s basic cable networks, will be focusing on programming and marketing content while expanding his portfolio to include Warner Bros. TV, Paramount TV Studios as WBD’s cable brands, leaving most of the business areas to Perrette. (Given his business background, Cheeks is still expected to get involved in some decisions.)
Bundling Linear & Streaming Business Ops
Legacy media companies such as Skydance are faced with managing the transition from linear TV to streaming, and Perrette serving as Chief Business Officer across both direct-to-consumer and linear networks/TV studios will help facilitate that as the two areas have become intertwined in many key areas such as carriage agreements, ad and content sales.
For instance, in affiliate distribution deals for linear networks, carriers increasingly insist on bundling the streaming service. The same goes for ad buyers who package ad time across linear and digital.
And then there is content licensing, which could be a lot more efficient if the studios’ distribution divisions and their sibling streamers are overseen by the same business op executive. For instance, CBS and Paramount+ had been siloed, with Paramount+ automatically asking for exclusivity on virtually all CBS series. A holistic approach would help determine whether certain shows need to stream exclusively on Paramount+ or, based on their engagement and other metrics, they could be licensed to other platforms too, bringing in revenue that can be used to produce more shows.
Straddling both areas will also give the business executive in charge more ownership over next-day CBS series to better integrate them into the platform alongside the Paramount+ originals. (CBS fare, a big viewership driver in-season, is expected to stay largely on Paramount+ until the streamer’s merger with HBO Max is completed within the next couple of years.)
Additionally, the new streamlined structure with Perrette across both linear and streaming business ops makes for simplified and expedited decision-making. At WBD, where he was CEO of global streaming, it was a quartet of executives collaborating on these decisions: Perrette, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Bruce Campbell and President of International Gerhard Zeiler.
‘The Odd Couple’ 2.0?
In addition to being the only cross-company pair in the top Skydance executive echelon, Cheeks and Perrette share another distinction — Cheeks is the only former Paramount Global and Perrette the only former Discovery executive in the group.
As for compatibility, both are bringing in good track record. Perrette already has his successful partnership with Bloys, and Cheeks has showed that he could work with anyone.
Cheeks joked about it when asked in 2019 how he gets along with Telegdy, a flamboyant, larger-than-life personality.
“We literally could not be more different. It’s like Casting 101: ‘Let’s cast this dude and that dude and they’re so different, they’re an odd couple,’” he said at NATPE.
Cheeks clearly impressed Hollywood moguls with his performance as he keeps getting cast as half of executive couples.
A court has turned down a bid from Julia Ormond’s lawyers to issue a bench warrant for the arrest of CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz, who walked out of a June deposition after being prodded about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
New York state court justice Adam Silvera found on Thursday that Ovitz shouldn’t be held in contempt of court, though he was ordered to complete the questioning.
During the deposition, Ovitz was asked about his continuing association with Epstein after the disgraced financier’s conviction for sex crimes. At one point, he stopped engaging. “I’m not going to discuss anything about Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. “You can ask all the questions you want, you’re going to get no answers.”
The inquiry related to Ovitz’s assertion that he would’ve cut ties with Weinstein had he known about the former movie mogul’s history of sexual misconduct. Ormond, who rose to prominence in the ’90s after starring in Legends of the Fall, First Knight and Sabrina, had claimed that CAA’s top brass turned a blind eye to Weinstein’s crimes and failed to warn her about him before a 1995 meeting that led to her being assaulted. Ovitz was CAA’s chairman in the period immediately preceding the alleged incident.
In the deposition, Ovitz said he would’ve investigated any allegation of sexual misconduct by Weinstein against one of his clients. Asked what he would’ve done if the claim was substantiated, Ovitz replied that CAA “surely wouldn’t have done business” with him.
“I didn’t like his methodology of business,” Ovitz added. “He was a bully and — and he and I got into it multiple times. I talked to him as little as possible.”
Lawyers for Ormond then turned to Ovitz’s relationship with Epstein. Tensions flared when Ovitz was questioned about whether he continued to associate with the disgraced financier after he learned that Epstein was convicted of sex crimes. He stood up from his chair, pointed at Ormond’s lawyer and said, “I’m done with this. OK? You are out of line.”
In Thursday’s order, the court said that Ovitz “inappropriately terminated” the questioning. “Ovitz is warned that proper deposition procedures must be followed,” Silvera wrote.
Still, the judge stopped short of issuing a bench warrant since Ormond’s lawyers weren’t sufficiently impaired by Ovitz leaving the deposition before it ended.
“The decision makes clear that Mr. Ovitz was not entitled to storm out of the deposition, and that he is not above the law,” said Kevin Mintzer, Meredith Firetog and Effie Blassberger, lawyers for Ormond, in a statement. “We look forward to resuming the deposition and trust that Mr. Ovitz will behave himself.”
Jeffrey Mitchell, a lawyer for Ovitz, stresses that his client “has nothing to do with the Ormond case, her claims or events that happened after he left CAA in 1995.” He adds, “At the deposition, it was [Ovitz’s] view that Ormond’s lawyer Kevin Mintzer was being intentionally abusive and trying to smear his name and he left as a result.”
CAA has also maintained that the case doesn’t concern Ovitz, whose legal fees are being paid for by the agency.
Friendly communications between Ovitz and Epstein surfaced earlier this year when the Justice Department released a trove of materials on the disgraced financier. The emails from 2012 showed that the pair planned to meet at Epstein’s Manhattan home and off the coast of St. Barts.
With the upcoming U.S. midterm elections less than a month away, CNN is putting its weeknight primetime anchors on Sunday night.
Beginning Sunday, October 11, at 8 p.m. ET, the network will rotate its primetime anchors each weekend as they host special editions of their shows during its Midterms 2026: Countdown to Election Night coverage.
CNN NewsNight host Abby Phillip kicks off the rotation, which will feature a familiar lineup of newsmakers, reporters, analysts, experts, and more to break down all things election in each edition of the primetime special.
Following Phillip, other weekends include coverage from Laura Coates and Kaitlan Collins. The final Sunday before the midterm elections will have two specials, with Erin Burnett at 6 p.m. ET and Anderson Cooper at 8 p.m. ET.
Regular Sunday night anchor Jessica Dean will take over from Cooper at 10 p.m., closing out the evening with a two-hour edition of CNN Newsroom.
“Every election is shaped by the issues and conversations unfolding well before Election Night. These specials will bring together CNN’s trusted anchors, reporters in the field, and experts to help audiences make sense of what’s at stake, hear directly from the people driving the conversation, and understand the forces shaping the midterms,” said Charlie Moore, svp, primetime programming.
In addition, the two-hour specials, airing on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español, and streaming for subscribers, will include an interactive element: viewer feedback, where the audience can engage with the anchor and panelists in real time at cnn.com/EngagePolitics.
The NCISfranchise is finally back on the 2026 TV schedule, and it’s better than ever. Tuesday night not only saw the season premieres of original and NCIS: Origins, but also the series premiere of new NCIS: New York. It also marked the return of some old fan favorites. Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, and LL Cool J are all back in the franchise, and I’m pleased to report that it was a smart idea.
Deadline reports that the NCIS franchise saw a 39% uptick in audience from last year’s Tuesday premiere, averaging 5.49 million viewers. This included Weatherly’s much-anticipated return to NCIS, which saw his character Tony DiNozzo getting a major job upgrade. The Season 24 premiere brought in 6.45 million viewers and is the series’ most-watched episode since the Season 21 finale in May 2024. That is a 21% increase year-over-year.
Meanwhile, LL Cool J’s return as Sam Hanna in the franchise’s newest spinoff also saw some pretty great numbers. The premiere of NCIS: New York reached 5.62 million viewers in the 9 p.m. hour, which is up 53% year-over-year in the time period over Origins, which occupied the timeslot during its first two seasons. It was pushed back to the 10 p.m. hour to give New York the NCIS launching pad. New York also stars Scott Caan, but instead of reprising his Hawaii Five-0 character, he plays a new character, NCIS Special Agent Nick Schaeffer, despite crossovers with NCIS: LA.
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Last but certainly not least, NCIS: Origins also saw a rise in viewership from last season. The Season 3 premiere raked in 4.39 million viewers in the 10 p.m. hour, up 20% compared to its second season premiere in the 9 p.m. hour. It’s also up 56% from NCIS: Sydney’s premiere in the 10 p.m. slot last year. I’d take a good guess that it’s partly due to the fact that Harmon is once again portraying Leroy Jethro Gibbs. He’s made appearances in the first two seasons of Origins, but he’s set to be in all 10 episodes of the prequel’s third season, and fans are clearly happy.
Considering how nostalgic NCIS’ fall lineup is, I can understand why all three shows are doing so well. You have the return of three fan-favorite characters, two of whom have been around for over 20 years, and the other just kicked off a brand new series. It is really fun that all these returns are happening at the same time, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Clearly, CBS knew what it was doing.
The only thing that would make this even better is if a franchise alum were to return for NCIS: Sydney when the new season premieres early in 2027. However, you never know what could happen. Sydney has yet to have a proper crossover because of where it takes place and the show films in a different country, but it’s always possible. For now, catch NCIS, NCIS: New York, and NCIS: Origins Tuesdays on CBS beginning at 8 p.m. ET, or streaming with a Paramount+ subscription the next day.
‘Friday the 13th’ (1980)Credit: Paramount Pictures
