A weekend fire at the Fairview homeless encampment in Penticton, B.C., has renewed concerns about public safety and prompted more calls for immediate action to mitigate the risks.
On Saturday evening, fast-moving flames erupted at the site along a busy stretch of Highway 97.
Black plumes of smoke billowed in the sky while sounds of exploding propane tanks filled the air.
“It was actually very alarming,” said Jenifer Stewart, who happened to be driving by at the time. “I was actually concerned that there was going to be an explosion and really felt like the cars needed to be out of the proximity.”
No one was injured, but Penticton’s fire chief said the danger was significant, particularly because of the propane tanks involved.
“This year we had some pretty intense fires down there,” the chief said. “The reason this one was a little bit more serious is just the propane tanks that were bleeding off at the time.”
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No one was injured but Penticton’s fire chief said the blaze was potentially dangerous because of the propane tanks involved.
“This year we had some pretty intense fires down there,” said Mike Larsson, the city’s fire chief. “The reason this one was a little bit more serious is just the propane tanks that were bleeding off at the time.”
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But city officials say their ability to address safety concerns at the encampment is limited because the site is located on provincial land.
“We’ll respond to any emergency incident, including fires down there and that’s what our role is,” Larsson said.
Nearby business operators have repeatedly raised concerns about the risks posed by the encampment to both property and lives.
“What else has to happen?” asked Luke Bradley, truck sales consultant, “You don’t want somebody to die but like, is that what it takes? I don’t know. I hope not.”
Injunction to clear Penticton encampment
In February, the province launched court action seeking an injunction to dismantle the encampment.
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However, the case was put on hold to allow encampment residents time to secure legal representation.
According to the province, the matter is still moving through the legal system although no court date has been set.
“The city is supporting the province for all their preparation for the hearings, the court hearings and we’re supporting the province in that position in the courtroom,” said Penticton Mayor Julius Bloomfield.
The Ministry of Transportation told Global News it has staff on site around the clock to monitor and report fire concerns.
It also said residents have been offered fire mitigation supplies, including fire-retardant tarps, fire blankets, fire extinguishers and solar lanterns.
Still, many residents and business owners say more needs to be done, including providing better support services for people living at the encampment.
“This encampment is not safe where it is for themselves, those that are in the encampment and the motorists and people going by,” Stewart said.
Known for sourcing archival pieces for celebs and insiders alike, Corvino is expanding her once appointment-only showroom into a fashion warehouse designed to bring her finds and new brands together on May 31 in New York City.
“The NY Archive Collective really feels like the culmination of years of world-building,” she tells ET.
The NY Archive/Instagram
“I wanted to create a permanent space where your childhood Barbie dream house meets your grown-up Sex and the City fantasy. From the zebra couches to the pink shelving lined with archival designer shoes and bags, every detail is intentional,” the entrepreneur adds.
And while Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe still dominates mood boards, Corvino’s storefront will feature a rotating selection of curated vendors, allowing shoppers to easily mix trends from the past and present.
“The Collective allows us to create an entire fashion ecosystem,” she explains.
The NY Archive
“It’s a place where people can complete the outfit, whether it’s with jewelry, shoes, bags, vintage slips, contemporary pieces, 1930s blouses, or Y2K skirts.”
For summer 2026, the New York native already knows which staples shoppers should be hunting for.
“I’m obsessed with slips from the ’30s through the ’60s, wrap skirts, terry cloth looks, capris, sequins, and beading for this summer,” she says.
The NY Archive/Instagram
“People want to sparkle again in pieces that feel individual and glamorous.”
And when it comes to getting dressed, Corvino has the perfect recipe.
“Getting dressed should feel like making a sandwich. Keep one layer simple and classic and then add something outrageous or unexpected,” she advises.
The NY Archive/Instagram
“The magic happens when you mix timeless basics with pieces that carry personality and history. If everything is archival and statement-making all at once, it can start to feel costume-y,” she continues.
Her go-to combination: “Vintage denim, a white tank top, a vintage jacket, a mini bag and very broken-in Chanel ballet flats.”
“I’m deeply sentimental, so even the imperfections become part of the story for me. The more memories attached to a piece, the more meaningful it becomes,” she notes.
“The Daily Show” laid into Donald Trump over the president’s new $1.8 billion slush fund intended to support his allies, blasting it as a tax on those who didn’t participate in the Jan. 6 riot.
Host Ronny Chieng weighed in on the news during Tuesday’s monologue, where he claimed Trump was “playing 5D chess with corruption here.”
“So Donald Trump, the man, is suing the IRS, which happens to be headed by Donald Trump, the president, which then reached a settlement with the Justice Department, headed by a man named Donald Trump, to create a slush fund controlled by, you guessed it, Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s so blatant and corrupt that it’s actually fine. I mean, I want to be mad, but I’m also kind of impressed.”
He added: “Trump figured out how to be both the Karen and the manager. Like, no one has ever done that before. This guy is playing 5D chess with corruption here. I mean, I bet he’s building the ballroom just so he can do a slip and fall.”
Yet, after sharing that Trump intends to use the money to help “the victims of the Biden administration,” including those charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Chieng suggested the rest of the country was being punished for not participating in the riot.
“Hold on. So our taxpayer money is going to the people who did Jan 6? So effectively, the rest of us are being taxed for not doing Jan 6?” he said. “Well, if I knew that, I would have gone there. Wait. I mean, I was there. I just remembered. Didn’t you see me? I was the guy in the video, doing this. ‘Election!’ Anyway, Venmo me.”
Watch Chieng’s full monologue above.
“The Daily Show” airs weeknights at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa to make a film that feels like something both new and expansive for him, just as it also contains the same passionate attention to detail that ensures nobody could have made this film in this exact way other than him.
An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Honobu Yonezawa, “The Samurai and the Prisoner” sees the prolific modern auteur offering his own personal stamp on the historical epic. But in the same way that the recent “Chime” and “Cloud” are thrillers that are also much more than their easily appointed genre terms, so too is this. Rather than a detriment, the unwieldy and unclassifiable nature of the film is what makes it worth getting lost in.
It’s a sweeping yet intimate film, taking on big questions facing 16th-century Japan by filtering them through a series of characters mostly just talking in rooms or out in some rather stunning landscapes. It’s mysterious yet earnest, playing almost as if the best parts of a “Knives Out” film were transported back in time, and with characters all grappling with what the right thing to do is. It’s full of shots that are often defined by bursts of violence that are also measured and wonderfully composed, with some of the tableaus Kurosawa creates almost resembling paintings.
Running nearly two and a half hours and spanning multiple seasons, it’s also something that frequently feels like a staging of a play. With extended shots of characters discussing the painful details of war, murder, family and legacy, it’s easy to feel the weight of history bearing down on each of them. Yet, it’s also a film that feels like it’s constantly hurtling onwards, as, for every scene that Kurosawa lets play out for several unbroken minutes, many others get sliced and diced together in rapid succession. Even when there are some more jarring moments that don’t always cut together as cleanly as you’d hope for them to, there’s always some new sequence looming just around the corner that Kurosawa is setting his sights on.
Premiering Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, the film opens with text that lays out the state of this tumultuous era — in a time that is about to be further upended. The one attempting to navigate this is Lord Murashige Araki (Motoki Masahiro), who has risen against the cruel Nobunaga Oda and is currently facing attacks within his own castle. Things start to get dire when a series of murders, all of which initially seem almost impossible, start to occur.
Intent on figuring out who is doing them and why, Murashige takes on the role of detective to get to the bottom of it. One early scene sees him trying out various potential possibilities of how someone could have landed a fatal blow against someone, but left no evidence of the weapon that they might have used. It’s riveting to watch just as it proves to only be the beginning. Even when he gets to what he thinks is the truth, another strange death will soon occur, and he’ll have to continue investigating just as the broader war continues to remain a present threat.
Without tipping off anything, one key part of the film seems to be that, for all the ways that Murashige is dedicating himself to getting to the truth, he is always missing something. He’ll get close, maybe even very close, only to still find whatever he is searching for slipping through his fingers. He continually goes down to the dungeon to consult with the film’s titular prisoner Kanbei Kuroda (Suda Masaki), a strategist that he is using as a hostage and refusing to kill despite him begging him to so his son doesn’t face consequences over him being believed to be a traitor. Their conversation becomes, in many ways, the heart of the film, but they also could very easily be the others’ downfall.
As the two engage in longer and longer dialogues, often centered around the killings, though increasingly about other topics as well, you start to get the sense that Murashige doesn’t have anyone else he can really talk to. When this is pointed out to him, he rejects this a bit too strongly, making clear that for all the strength he puts forth, there’s still much about what is happening that is rattling him. When he makes a discovery that challenges his power and the harm that can come from how men, even those supposedly trying to fight tyranny as he is, wield it, it’s we as an audience who are subsequently rattled.
It’s then the way that Kurosawa merges the personal and the political, the procedural and the profound, that makes “The Samurai and the Prisoner” into something that feels incredibly urgent despite it all taking place hundreds of years ago. There’s little in the way of action, save for a couple of more brief sequences that still are incredibly well-staged, and it’s one of the director’s more talky films. It could easily lose people in this, but there’s a rhythm to it that makes it impossible to look away.
Because no matter what is playing out, be it a massive battle or a small conversation, Kurosawa shoots the hell out of all of it. In each mesmerizing move of the camera or precisely-framed shot, he draws us in closer and closer until we can practically feel the grass under our feet while he simultaneously keeps his sharp eye on the bigger picture. From the stunning opening all the way to the closing frames as the characters wander off one final time, it’s a remarkable, restrained and ultimately riveting film that earns every moment and then some.
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the series premiere of “In the City,” streaming on Peacock as of May 20.
Picture the intro to “The Sopranos,” substitute Tony for an anxious-avoidant Italian woman exiting a hellish decade-long relationship, brighten up the score, and you have the opening beats to “In the City,” the much-ballyhooed “Summer House” spinoff.
“In the City,” which premiered Tuesday night on Bravo following the Season 10 finale of “Summer House,” revolves around Amanda Batula, Kyle Cooke and Lindsay Hubbard, three cornerstones of the aforementioned Hamptons-set series, as they navigate their lives in the not-so-mean streets of Manhattan. Amanda, 34, is the estranged wife of Kyle, 43, the founder of a canned cocktail company inexplicably called “Loverboy” that is hemorrhaging money; Kyle is her recently-dumped husband, who chose to pursue a DJ career in his 40s both to spite Amanda and to funnel money his struggling company; and Lindsay is a former publicist and single mom to a ridiculously cute baby girl, Gemma, whose palatial apartment would make Nancy Meyers blush.
There are other assorted cast members sprinkled in, such as former “Summer House” star, founder and president of something, Danielle Olivera, and her Irish live-in boyfriend Eoin; occasional “Summer House” cast member Andrea Denver, a really, really, ridiculously good-looking Italian model, and his wife Lexi; Lindsay’s pals Yvonne and Georgina; and Kenny Martin, an insufferable venture capitalist who immediately emerges as the villain of the show, and is joined by his lovely-seeming girlfriend Whitney, a former “Bachelor” contestant who should run for the hills.
Other than plenty of expected scenery-chewing from Lindsay, who clocks Kenny the moment she meets him, and the most awkward “anniversary” date you’ve ever seen between Amanda and Kyle, who still seems incapable of accepting accountability for his deplorable behavior toward his semi-spouse (even ditching couples-therapy sessions), the main takeaway from the pilot comes in the opening scene.
But first, some background. The 10th season of “Summer House” saw Amanda and Kyle’s four-year marriage on the verge of complete collapse. Amanda was beyond checked out, barely acknowledging her husband’s presence, while Kyle threw violent temper-tantrums left and right because he doesn’t know how to deal with his emotions, even saying “fuck you” to Amanda twice in front of their housemates. In January, Amanda and Kyle publicly announced their separation in a joint statement; the Season 10 finale of “Summer House,” meanwhile, features them separating and Amanda staying in a hotel for a few days. On March 31, two months after their separation announcement — and following weeks of online rumors and speculation — Amanda and Westling “West” Wilson, 31, a content creator, friend to Amanda and Kyle and overall hypebeast, announced that they were a sorta couple. That West had previously dated Ciara Miller, one of Amanda Batula’s BFFs who still harbors feelings for West, made it a particularly thorny scenario.
Following a montage of news reports about the separation and the coupling, “In the City” opens on April 9, as cameras picked up nine days after the Amanda and West announcement to capture the aftermath. Kyle is doing the dishes, and Amanda enters. He warmly greets her, asking, “Have you eaten? You’re looking skinny. I’m worried about you…,” to which she replies, “I’m worried about me, too.”
Amanda has long suffered from depression, some of which was documented on “Summer House,” and has been cast as the backstabbing friend (or “Raquel/Rachel”) in this imbroglio, which the internet has dubbed “Scamanda.” The amount of vitriol aimed at Amanda versus West has been wildly disproportionate, in my estimation. West is the one who served as a shoulder to cry on for Amanda, and took advantage of a deeply vulnerable woman who’d recently exited a traumatic relationship. Amanda should have shown more transparency and grace toward Ciara, who dated West years prior, but also likely viewed West as a fun, unserious post-breakup fling (at least initially). This mess should really be called “Westgate.”
The two move over to the couch and begin by discussing their split. “I know we’ve been able to somewhat keep in touch through all this, and like, I want to be there for you, but I also want to take an opportunity to, like, clear things up. Because I look back at the summer and it looked like you were done with me,” opens a visibly annoyed Kyle.
“And that’s what’s so frustrating, is I gave our relationship everything I had because I wanted the relationship to work so badly,” Amanda replies, tearing up. “And the idea of not existing with you in my life was so impossible for me to wrap my head around, and it’s what made it so hard to call it quits, which is why it got so fucking messy, because I was so afraid that once we ended things we would just be out of each other’s lives forever, and I couldn’t handle that.”
The giant cast of “In the City.”
Kareem Black/Bravo
Kyle presses on. “But I’m gonna be honest: I can pinpoint these instances during the summer and fall where I’m like, damn, she wasn’t just one foot out, she was fully out the door,” he says.
“I was done to an extent. I was tired. I had nothing left in me to fight, but I was still trying to give it everything I had,” Amanda reiterates.
And then Kyle addresses the real elephant in the room: Amanda and West. “Can you honestly say, though, that right through Thanksgiving, for that matter, even if it was an emotional affair with West…” he says, before Amanda cunningly cuts him off. “Nothing was happening! I was so committed to you throughout the whole fucking thing, and all I wanted was to make it work, and for you to even question my faithfulness in any capacity just really fucking hurts, because that’s not the type of person that I am! Like I would step out on you or cheat? I’ve been cheated on by you.” (I think it’s fair for Kyle to question the timeline, but he also did cheat on Amanda a bunch throughout their relationship, so he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on.)
“I had a one-night stand…” responds Kyle defensively.
“Kyle, you made out with someone while we were married,” Amanda says. “There’s a video.”
Bringing up the video stops Kyle in his tracks, and his reaction screams guilt. He switches gears from defensive ex to sympathetic one.
“I know you’re not a bad person,” he says. “I think you were reckless and thoughtless, if I’m being honest. But in all of this, I’m still trying to be a good friend to you. I mean, I worry about you. I worry about your mental health.”
“It’s not your responsibility, but I appreciate that,” says Amanda. The action then flashes back seven months to September 2025, and to our regularly scheduled programming. For the real fireworks, I guess we’ll have to wait for the three-part “Summer House” reunion, kicking off May 26. The teaser alone is absolute cinema.
“Beaches,” a long-in-the-works stage musical about a decades-long friendship between two women, announced on Tuesday that it would close on Sunday after a disappointingly short Broadway run.
The musical, which opened on April 22 and had been scheduled to run through Sept. 6, is based on Iris Rainer Dart’s 1985 novel. But the material is best known via a 1988 film adaptation that starred Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and featured a Grammy-winning song, “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
The early closing reinforces the idea that this is the weakest season for new Broadway musicals in years. Just six opened this season, compared with 14 last season, and “The Queen of Versailles” has already closed. It is not clear whether any of the four new musicals that are still running — “The Lost Boys,” “Titaníque,” “Schmigadoon!” and “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” — will become profitable.
“Beaches” was rushed to Broadway with a modest cast of 12, a barely there set and a plan to run just 24 weeks and then go out on tour.
That was a change in plans for the show: The producing team, led by Jennifer Maloney-Prezioso, had announced last year “a pre-Broadway national tour,” but when the Shubert Organization offered the show a vacant theater during an anemic season for new musicals, the producers seized the opportunity. They theorized that the sparsity of new shows would be an advantage and that the Broadway imprimatur would lift the title’s fortunes around the country.
The strategy proved to be an unsuccessful gambit, losing investors millions of dollars (the capitalization cost has not yet been disclosed). The show began previews March 27 at the Majestic Theater; reviews were mostly negative. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes said the show seemed “like a corner-cutting rush job” and that the result was “a pervasive, underwhelming blandness in a condescending production.”
Tony nominators were apparently underwhelmed as well: The show did not pick up a single nomination.
Sales have been soft from the start. During the week that ended May 17, 56 percent of seats at “Beaches” were unsold, and the average ticket price, $77, was 36 percent below the industry average. When it closes, the show will have played 28 preview performances and 38 regular performances.
The announcement of the Broadway closing said that “Beaches” planned to begin touring nationally in 2027 but did not provide specific dates or cities.
“Beaches,” about two very different women who meet at the seashore as children and maintain a close but occasionally fraught friendship until one of them tragically dies, was first staged in 2014 at Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., and then in 2015 at Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. The creative team was overhauled, the show was reworked, and another production was staged in 2024 at Theater Calgary in Canada.
The Broadway production, starring Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett, is directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart, and Mike Stoller (who once wrote for Elvis Presley) wrote the music. Dart did the lyrics, and she and Thom Thomas (who died in 2015) wrote the book.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival opened last week, Tuesday, May 12 to standing ovations, emotional tributes, and political commentary as the world’s most prestigious film festival returned to the French Riviera.
Although Cannes is traditionally associated with luxury fashion, celebrity appearances, and high-profile premieres, this year’s opening ceremony reflected a global film industry increasingly shaped by war, activism, and debates around artistic freedom.
Over the next 12 days, filmmakers, actors, and studios from across the world will compete for the coveted Palme d’Or, one of cinema’s highest honours.
From its opening night, however, Cannes signalled that politics and global unrest would remain central to the festival’s conversations.
Acclaimed New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson was among the evening’s biggest honourees after receiving an honorary Palme d’Or for his contribution to international cinema.
The award was presented by Elijah Wood, whose role as Frodo Baggins in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy helped transform the fantasy franchise into a global cultural phenomenon.
Jackson appeared both surprised and amused by the recognition as he addressed the audience inside the Palais des Festivals.
“I’ve never figured out why I’m getting a Palme d’Or. I’m not a Palme d’Or sort of guy,” he said.
The tribute ended with a performance of The Beatles’ “Get Back,” a reference to Jackson’s acclaimed documentary project, built from archival footage of the legendary British band.
Veteran actress Jane Fonda officially declared the festival open alongside Chinese-Singaporean actress Gong Li.
Fonda used her speech to reflect on the role of cinema during periods of political instability and social upheaval, arguing that film has historically challenged injustice and authoritarianism.
“Cinema has always been an act of resistance,” she said.
During the jury press conference, Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty delivered some of the strongest political remarks of the evening by criticising what he described as silence within parts of Hollywood over the ongoing war in Gaza.
For South African audiences, these discussions carry particular relevance because South Africa has remained one of the most vocal international critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
This year’s Cannes jury president, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, addressed the relationship between politics and cinema directly during the press conference.
Park, internationally recognised for Oldboy, argued that films should not be separated from political realities because art has always reflected the social conditions of its time.
“Art and politics are not concepts that are in conflict with each other,” he said.
The jury also includes Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao, Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, actress Ruth Negga, and Hollywood star Demi Moore.
Critics have frequently argued that Cannes options artistic legacy above public controversy, while supporters maintain that the festival remains committed to separating art from personal scandal.
The evening concluded with Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro presenting a restored 4K screening of his acclaimed fantasy drama Pan’s Labyrinth, nearly 20 years after the film first premiered at Cannes.
Del Toro said the film’s themes of authoritarianism and resistance remain relevant in today’s political climate and warned against complacency during periods of rising global instability.
“We are, unfortunately, in times that make this movie more pertinent than ever,” he said.
The festival is already proving that cinema remains deeply connected to global politics, cultural identity, and public debate
For audiences around the world, including South Africa, the opening night demonstrated that modern film festivals are no longer only about entertainment, but also about the social and political conversations shaping contemporary society.
How do Cyber Threat Intel (CTI) teams collaborate within Feedly to increase productivity and reduce blind spots? In this post, we’ll share best practices we’ve observed working with CTI teams across industries and how they’re using Feedly’s newest capabilities to move faster at every stage of the intelligence cycle.
Impact
Saved 66-90% of time spent collecting and sharing intelligence
Analyzed vulnerabilities, threat actors, IoCs and TTPs, up to 70% faster
Discovered new vulnerabilities and threats up to 3 days sooner than other tools
Motivated? Read on.
Collecting relevant intelligence
The volume of cybersecurity articles, reports, blogs, and posts on the open web can seem overwhelming. How do you identify what’s important, focus on the intelligence needs of the business, and avoid wasting time on irrelevant or duplicate information?
Feedly’s Intel Agents (Vulnerability, Cyberattack, and TTP) replace that manual effort with continuous, filtered monitoring across 10,000+ OSINT sources, so your team starts each day already caught up.
Vulnerability Agent
Personalized to your tech stack, the Vulnerability Agent surfaces high-risk CVEs with the context needed to prioritize fast: CVSS and EPSS scores, active exploit indicators, PoC availability, and linked threat actors. Filter by vendor, product, attack vector, and more to cut noise and focus on what actually matters to your environment.
Cyberattack Agent
The Cyberattack Agent monitors attack activity targeting your industry in real time, pulling from 10,000+ sources including SEC filings and regional stock exchanges. Filter by attack type, industry, actors, and malware to zero in on incidents that are relevant and use the “What? So what?” column to triage without opening every article.
TTP Agent
The TTP Agent tracks trending ATT&CK techniques and extracts procedures so you can prioritize threat hunts without hours of manual tagging. Filter by industry, threat actor, or malware family, track behavioral shifts over customizable date ranges, and launch directly into MITRE ATT&CK Navigator to build attack emulations grounded in current adversary behavior.
AI Feeds
AI Feeds remain the backbone of ongoing collection. Powered by 1,000+ AI Models, they continuously scan millions of sources and surface articles aligned to your PIRs with higher relevance and lower noise than keyword searches. Most teams organize AI Feeds into Team Folders by intelligence requirement or stakeholder group, and treat them as the always-on layer underneath their Agents.
Triage and analyze emerging threats
Collecting the right signals is only half the job. Feedly’s Insights Cards and Ask AI help teams get from raw article to finished analysis faster, without switching tools or synthesizing dozens of reports by hand.
Insights Cards
Insights Cards give you structured, continuously updated context on any threat (CVE, Cyberattack, Threat Actor, or IoC) aggregated from thousands of sources into a single view. Instead of piecing together context across tabs, you get the full picture in one place: timelines, TTPs, malware, attribution, severity scores, and source citations. Vulnerability teams use CVE Insights Cards to jumpstart triage; incident responders lean on Cyberattack Cards to quickly assess exposure; threat hunters use Threat Actor Cards to prepare hunts and tabletop exercises.
Ask AI
Ask AI can be ran on top of your AI Agents and Insights Cards as well as AI Feeds so analysts can synthesize intelligence across multiple languages, extract IoCs, TTPs, and CVEs, and produce finished deliverables all without leaving Feedly. Every response is grounded in the Real-Time Threat Graph and cited back to its original sources, so analysts stay in control of what goes into the final product. Teams use it to draft vulnerability briefs, flash reports, threat actor profiles, and executive summaries in minutes rather than hours.
Produce intelligence
Collecting and analyzing threats is only part of a CTI analyst’s job. The other part is producing the reports and briefs that keep your team and stakeholders informed. Whether it’s a daily threat brief, a weekly vulnerability digest, or an executive summary after a major incident, Feedly’s Report Builder and Automated Newsletters help you produce consistent, high-quality intelligence outputs without the hours of manual work.
Report Builder
Creating a threat intelligence report manually can take anywhere from 3 to 8 hours. The Report Builder brings that down to minutes. Start from a Feedly template or upload your own, Feedly Al extracts your sections and replicates your writing structure, then automatically gathers supporting sources and populates each section with inline citations from the Feedly Threat Graph. Every claim is verifiable, which matters when you’re handing a brief to a CISO or an external stakeholder.
You can adjust the technical level of the output for different audiences, collaborate with teammates in the editor, and refine any section in real time with Ask Al, without breaking the flow of your report. When you’re done, export directly to PDF or copy the text to your existing workflow.
Automated Newsletters
Automated Newsletters auto-populate from AI Feeds or Team Boards, with AI-assisted summaries and analyst notes already drafted. Teams set a delivery schedule and let Feedly handle the rest: daily threat briefs for security operations, weekly roundups for the CISO, targeted vulnerability digests for the vulnerability management team.
Deliver intelligence
Sharing the intelligence your team has collected, analyzed, and curated is a key activity of most CTI teams. However, many teams spend hours per day on this part of the process using manual report creation sent through email lists. Feedly makes this easier by providing several ways of sharing the intelligence, from article tagging and Slack integration to fully automated workflows that pass data through the Feedly API to your other security tools.
Team Boards
Team Boards are where analysts curate before they share. Save key articles and Insights Cards to a Board, and configure it to trigger downstream actions automatically with a Slack alert, a newsletter entry, or an API push. Boards work best when named around the audience they serve: CISO, vulnerability team, threat hunters, or incident response.
Integrations and API
The enrichment Feedly extracts (IoCs, TTPs, malware, CVE data, detection rules) can flow directly into your TIP, SIEM, or SOAR via STIX/JSON API, no-code integrations, and MISP support. The time between “Feedly found something” and “your detection rules are updated” can be minutes, not days.
Putting it all together
Leading CTI teams use Feedly across the full intelligence cycle: Intel Agents and AI Feeds for continuous, filtered collection; Insights Cards and Ask AI to move from signal to finished analysis fast; and Automated Newsletters and integrations to get the right intel to the right people without the manual overhead.
The result is a team that spends less time gathering and formatting, and more time doing the analysis work that actually protects the organization.
One of the highlights of the newly released Mortal Kombat II is its script, written by Jeremy Slater. While the movie is accessible for general audiences, it also manages to pack in plenty of references to the complicated lore of the Mortal Kombat video games. Not only are there fun cameos and appearances, but Slater also manages to incorporate the lore into the story, using objects and locations for the games that hardcore fans recognize. It’s this very same loyalty to source material that makes Slater a good fit for DC Studios; he recently said he’d be interested in several projects the studio is developing
In an exclusive interview with MovieWeb, Jeremy Slater discussed his working relationship with James Gunn, as both creatives are credited as story writers on the upcoming Coyote vs. Acme. That collaboration, paired with Slater’s writing on the Disney+ series Moon Knight, makes him well-suited for another comic book project, specifically with DC. When asked, Slater detailed how the leadership at DC Studios is exceptional, and he shared the characters and stories he is excited to possibly bring to life in their cinematic universe:
“James is very aware of which projects they are. Look, I am on pretty strict NDAs on all of that stuff. What I can say is that I am a huge fan of James and Peter Safran, both as human beings and as creatives. I love them both quite a bit. I love what they are building over there. I know some of what’s coming next and it’s incredibly exciting. They know I am a phone call away on everything, whether it’s, ‘Look at this movie. Give us some notes. Read this script. We want you to write a script. We want you to write a scene.'”
David Corenswet stars in ‘Superman’Warner Bros.
As for how willing Slater is to offer his vision for a story or scene, the writer said, “Whatever it is, the answer is always ‘yes’ for those guys. They know who I love over there and what I would be a part of. If the stars align, I hopefully will get to do some fun stuff. But I really can’t announce anything until it’s real.” Gunn has stated in the past that scripts take precedence in pre-production, meaning that even if Slater was attached to anything, it wouldn’t be made official unless it was completed.
Given how well Slater was able to adapt the lore of Mortal Kombat, the writer seems capable of taking on any comic book character for DC Studios. There are several projects in the pipeline for the studio, with Supergirl and Clayface releasing in theaters this year, and the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, slated for summer 2027. Television projects like the Amanda Waller television show and Paradise Lost haven’t had many substantial updates recently, so it doesn’t seem likely that Slater is attached to any of those.
Having already helped guide Marvel’s Moon Knight, it will be interesting to see if Slater ever gets the chance to contribute those skills to a DC character.
Darksiders Warmastered Edition is out now on PS5 and Xbox Series S|X, bringing the acclaimed action title to modern platforms with a few neat upgrades, including native 4K rendering. However, if you already own the remaster on PS4, the PS5 upgrade comes at a cost.
If you currently have Darksiders Warmastered Edition on the PS4, you’ll need to pay $10 for the PS5 upgrade, which includes native 4K rendering support, a brand new photo mode, and a stable 60 FPS experience. If you have the title on Xbox One, however, the Xbox Series S|X upgrade is completely free, giving you the same features as the PS5 release for no additional cost.
THQ Nordic has also announced that the Xbox Series X|S version will be priced at 29.99€ / $29.99, while the Xbox One version will see its price increase from 19.99€ / $19.99 to 29.99€ / $29.99. On PlayStation, the PS4 version will remain available at 19.99€ / $19.99, while the PS5 version will launch at 29.99€ / $29.99. This price difference essentially accounts for the upgrade compensation on Xbox consoles.
THQ Nordic hasn’t provided a reason for why the PS5 upgrade path is paid, which is usually the case for many first-party titles. Updates that simply bump resolution and add a few features shouldn’t be paid, in my opinion, and Xbox users are clearly getting a better deal for the same title.
Image via THQ Nordic
The last-gen remaster already did most of the heavy lifting in upgrading the visuals, and asking for another $10 doesn’t seem fair. Sure, the PS5 version likely includes DualSense features as a bonus, but again, it’s not a significant upgrade based on the description and footage. What’s worse is that if you already own the PS4 version and don’t want to pay for the upgrade, you’ll be stuck on a lower resolution on PS5, even though the console has no issue running the game at 4K.
If you’ve never played Darksiders, $30 isn’t a bad price at all for the Warmastered Edition. It’s a solid action title from the PS3/Xbox 360 era with a fun combat system that continued to evolve throughout the series, but still holds up well today. The remaster does a good job of preserving the original art style while adding just enough visual improvements to modernize the experience. If you’re interested in the series, the remastered has multiple bundles you can choose from that include the sequels as well.
Warner Bros. is in early development on a Rick and Morty movie, with franchise veteran Jacob Hair in talks to direct, Deadline can confirm.
Plot details are under wraps. Dan Harmon, who co-created the Adult Swim show with Justin Roiland, has alluded to plans for a “a super badass” feature-length episode for a number of years.
Set to launch its ninth season this coming Sunday, May 24, Rick and Morty is an Emmy-winning adult animated series following genius, alcoholic mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his anxious grandson Morty Smith as they split time between suburban family life and dimension-hopping adventures across an infinite multiverse.
Roiland voiced both roles before exiting the series in 2023 amid felony domestic abuse charges that were ultimately dismissed. Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden now voice Rick and Morty, respectively.
The show has been on the air since 2013, with Hair joining in 2019, directing numerous episodes and serving as supervising director.
Rick and Morty also features the voices of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, and Sarah Chalke. In addition to the feature, spinoff President Curtis, starring Keith David, is in the works for Adult Swim.
The InSneider was first to today’s Rick and Morty news.
The script is full of incredibly witty dialogue that makes it so memorable, but you can’t forget Stanley Tucci’s entrance right before Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley makes hers. Check out what Emily Blunt had to say about it:
Now, when he said ‘gird your loins’… there were about six other versions that he announced to the room. Do you know my favorite? ‘All right everyone, tits in!’ Didn’t recover for the rest of the day. You were merciless with that.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Blunt revealed that there were multiple alternates of Tucci’s beloved “gird your loins” – including one where he said “tits in” instead. Blunt, who was 22 at the time and was in her second movie ever, just couldn’t keep it together after Tucci said that version of the line to the office of Runway employees.
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While it’s honestly quite effective and probably would have been quoted if they went with “tits in,” there’s something about gird your loins that’s just perfect. As she added:
I actually could barely get through any scene. There is a scene in the film, which I pointed out to Stan, where I’m laughing, and I knew I had to wait until the camera pans off me to him. When he [whistles and says] ‘who’s that?’ It was just getting off me in time and I can hear myself laughing, and I’m pretending to be outraged… And there was not a straight take often. Maybe that’s why they separated us.
It sounds like Emily Blunt was having a blast on the set of The Devil Wears Prada and trying really hard to play her dry character whilst she was finding herself giggling with her costars. It’s good these two hit things off on the set, because at The Devil Wears Prada premiere back in the day, Tucci met Blunt’s older sister Felicity. They would then reconnect at Emily Blunt and John Krasinski’s wedding in 2010, starting to date and they got married themselves two years later.
“Gird your loins” isn’t the only famous line that was changed on set. One of Meryl Streep’s famous lines where she said “everybody wants to be us” was originally supposed to be “everyone wants to be me” after the actress felt that Miranda wouldn’t be “very vain” and the character had a sense of “it’s about this world.”
I’m not a cord-cutter, yet — the economics of internet-only packages still don’t make sense — and I, like you (probably), abhor the fragmentation of sports that has exploded through streaming. The extraneous subscriptions required, never quite knowing what game will be on where, and sometimes even getting subpar presentations of games and matches — I’m looking at you here, Netflix — feels like the opposite of having died and gone to sports heaven, which was the original sales pitch for ESPN. That’s ESPN, the linear cable channel, not ESPN+ and not the new ESPN app.
But I must say, my experience streaming these NBA Playoffs has actually been pretty great — especially when you remember the 2025-26 season has been the first on both Amazon’s Prime Video and Peacock.
Sure, it kind of sucks when you already pay for cable and also have to pay for something like Prime Video to catch a conference semi-finals series. (NBC would be in your linear-TV package in this scenario, so Peacock is a choice here.) But if there is one streaming video service worth paying for, it is Amazon’s — if not for the programming, but for the free, two-day retail shipping that alone is worth the price of admission. Complaints about needing “another streaming service” to watch Prime Video’s NBA package don’t land as strongly as others.
Any real kinks with streaming live, primetime (and big time) sports were mostly ironed out during Prime Video’s earlier Thursday Night Football games. Save for one really bad (because it was overtime) two-minute-long video outage during the first round of the playoffs, the NBA has made a relatively smooth transition to the platform. (The hiccup was a production truck problem, a source with knowledge tells The Hollywood Reporter, and would have happened with any form of delivery.)
Amazon’s 13,000-square-foot, two-story NBA studio — a regulation-sized half court — and its LED floor are best in class; NBA on Prime host Taylor Rooks and analyst Blake Griffin are as well. I personally take much comfort in Ian Eagle, the longtime voice of my New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets, calling the game on the floor. (Who knows when the Nets themselves will next be in these playoffs?)
The NBA on Prime wrapped for the season on Sunday; ESPN, ABC and NBC/Peacock will take it from here. Like Prime Video, Peacock’s growing pains (in terms of live streaming, at least) are mostly in the past thanks to its own primetime NFL rights for Sunday Night Football. There was, however, an audio problem with Monday night’s start to the Western Conference Finals; a Peacock spokesperson did not immediately respond to THR‘s request for comment on the issue. NBC Sports’ most important piece of audio, “Roundball Rock,” helps soften the blow a bit. (All due respect to “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night.”)
It is also worth pointing out that ESPN/ABC has the only other existing primetime NFL package, Monday Night Football, so they’re generally well-oiled too.
Streaming affords most households far more flexibility than broadcast and cable television. In mine, for example, I have four TVs that can stream games and only one is hooked up to linear. That’s not counting the tablets and cell phones. And sure, I could probably authenticate and (try to) stream my box via the Optimum app, but that would require an Apple TV device and a hell of a lot of frustration tolerance. IYKYK.
The NBA schedule, like Major League Baseball and typically unlike the NFL, travels well from East Coast living rooms to bedrooms. Here, West Coast games begin late and can serve as a great bedtime story and, subsequently, white noise. So whether you like to pass out on the couch while passively listening to Spurs/Thunder or you’re already between the sheets, unless you want to spend multiple apps-worth of money monthly on extra cable boxes, it is apps that will tuck you in. I also find that, for however imperfect digital delivery systems can be (like in a storm, for example), they are no less reliable than your average cable box.
For those who still live that bar life, things are a bit more complex than the old days, but any sports or sports-adjacent bar (or restaurant, or casino, etc.) worth its margarita salt should have both linear (broadcast and cable) TV and an EverPass subscription, which nationally carries Apple TV, ESPN+, NFL Sunday Ticket, Paramount+, Peacock Sports Pass and Prime Video (and regionally, Victory+, Chicago sports’ CHSN and New York’s YES).
All of that is not to say that live sports on streaming has been perfected for the fan. So long as there are Peacock exclusives, the Friday Night Baseball package on Apple and Mike Breen not on the mic for New York Knicks games (as also an ESPN employee, he finally will be for the Eastern Conference Finals and potentially the NBA Finals), some percentage of consumer complaints are completely valid. But these NBA Playoffs have been great, and if you don’t agree, just wait until Netflix next flix-ups your favorite sport.
Nicholas Galitzine may have seen all his strict dieting and hard work at the gym pay off to transform into He-Man for “Masters of the Universe,” but he didn’t mind when that training came to an end.
“I had to go into a movie three weeks later where the director said, ‘I need you to not look the way you look right now, so eat what you want, stop weightlifting,’” Galitzine told me at the “Masters of the Universe” premiere Monday night at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. “I said, ‘That is music to my ears. I’m not going to do anything for three weeks.’ And I’ll tell you, it’s depressing. It takes so long to put on, [but] it’s so quick to come off.”
So what did his non-training meals look like? “I was like, ‘Macaroni cheese,’ but you don’t even want to know,” Galitzine said. “It was sickening.’”
Nicholas Galitzine says it was “sickening” what he had to eat to change his body again for another role after getting into intense shape to play He-Man in “Masters of the Universe.” pic.twitter.com/la4vDhmNN6
Director Travis Knight explained why Galitzine was perfect for the part even before seeing the physical transformation. “It’s a very daunting ask to ask any actor and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the most powerful man in the universe.’ That means boulder shoulders. That means giant biceps. That means rippling pectorals and six-pack abs. Who wants to embrace that?” he said, laughing. “But my man Nick, he completely embraced what that means. And that meant he had to transform his body. Nick is an extraordinary actor…But no one’s ever really seen him as an action hero.”
He added, “I knew Nick had all the qualities that you needed to bring a character like [He-Man] to life. He has vulnerability, he has charisma, he has charm, he’s very funny and then he had to transform his body.”
When asked about possible “Masters of the Universe” sequels, director Travis Knight insisted, “I think we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because we approach all these things as if we have one chance of telling a story and we put everything we had into it.”
That said, he added, “If the world wants more, we’ve got more stories to tell.”
Arriving at the premiere, Camila Mendes, who plays Teela, looked at her image on one of the giant posters lining the purple carpet. “It’s pretty effing cool,” she said. “I feel like I’m pinching myself. I’m thinking a lot about little Camila tonight, who never imagined. This is such a rare opportunity, I’m just trying to soak it in. I never thought I’d be premiering a massive film at the Chinese Theatre. It’s just so surreal. You never know if these things are going to happen again, so I’m just enjoying it. I’m being present.”
Camila Mendes says it’s “pretty effing cool” seeing herself on the “Masters of the Universe” billboard and that she’s thinking a lot about “little Camila” tonight. pic.twitter.com/083C0QXi6u
Galitzine only recently saw the “Masters of the Universe” billboards. “I’ve been shooting this tiny little indie movie, and have had no time to myself, and so I haven’t been out and about, and I kind of thought, ‘Oh, well, they must have just not started putting the He-Man posters up,’” he said. “Yeah, cut to me flying into L.A., and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a little bit overwhelming.’”
Meanwhile, in other Galitzine news, he briefly touched on “Red, White & Royal Wedding,” the much-anticipated sequel to “Red, White & Royal Blue.” Galitzine returns as England’s Prince Henry with Taylor Zakhar Perez reprising his role as the son of the U.S. president (Uma Thurman) and Henry’s boyfriend.
“It’s so rare that you get to return to something, so it felt like a really wholesome experience,” Galitzine said. “You’re getting to work with Taylor and Uma again, and Lena Headey [is] joining us. I had a great time filming it.”
See more photos from the “Masters of the Universe” premiere below.
Nicholas Galitzine and Dolph Lundgren
Variety
Camila Mendes and Alison Brie
Variety
Dolph Lundgren, Morena Baccarin, Camila Mendes, Nicholas Galitzine, Travis Knight and Idris Elba
Warner Bros. new specialty label Clockwork is in exclusive negotiations for a North American deal for starry Western “The Brigands of Rattlecreek,” directed by Cannes jury president Park Chan-Wook. The long-gestating project is set to star Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei.
Clockwork is already ticking along after announcing at CinemaCon that it had acquired Sean Baker’s “Anora” follow-up “Ti Amo!” in April. The budding label will also release Ken Russell’s “The Devils” in October after the Cannes premiere of the restored version. Clockwork is led by former Neon executive Christian Parkes.
“The Brigands of Rattlecreek” is described as “an iconic tale of vengeance and retribution set in the American West.” A synopsis of the project explains: “A capstone of the themes Park Chan-wook has plumbed across his entire body of work to date, the film is an emotionally explosive and visually stunning meditation on the consequences of violence, the value of family, the power of memory, and the true cost of life.”
McConaughey has been associated with the project for several years: After the script was selected for the Black List in 2006, Amazon acquired rights to the material and was eyeing him to star in 2019.
WME and CAA rep the project, while Patrick Wachsberger’s 193, a Legendary company, is representing international sales.
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.
After five years between games, the sixth main “Horizon” installment in one of the best racing games for Xbox is available to download and play right now. If you’re a fan of the “Forza Horizon” series, then you’re going to be excited for “Forza Horizon 6” from Playground Games and Xbox Game Studios.
Ready for download, the racing game “Forza Horizon 6” for Xbox Series X/S is included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for subscribers only. The subscription service goes for $22.99/month on Amazon. However, you can buy a physical copy of the game for $69.98 from the retail giant too.
Not a subscriber? Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is a service for Xbox and PC that allows you to download and play as many games as you’d like from the platform’s extensive library with hit titles, such as “Starfield,” “Death Loop,” “MLB The Show ’24,” “Halo Infinite,” “Forza Motorsport,” “A Plague Tale: Requiem,” “Final Fantasy VI” and other games.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft console’s subscription service comes with Xbox Cloud Gaming for select games and online multiplayer for immersive and cooperative gaming experiences.
Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios
‘Forza Horizon 6’ on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate
For Xbox Series X/S and PC
Xbox
Limited Edition ‘Forza Horizon 6’ Xbox Wireless Gaming Controller
Release date: Tuesday, June 2
“Forza Horizon 6” is Japanese-themed with a stylized Tokyo as the game world’s main city. In fact, the map is the largest in the franchise, while the installment features a dynamic weather mechanic that changes with the season. The racing game also brings back the wristband system with players having to complete races, events and stunts to unlocking better and faster cars.
Available to play now, “Forza Horizon 6” is ready for download for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers at $22.99/month, or buy a physical copy for Xbox Series X for $69.98 on Amazon. In the meantime, watch the trailer for the video game, below:
In addition, “Forza Horizon 6” comes out for Sony PlayStation 5 later in 2026.
You might know Domhnall Gleeson from a number of very big-name movies in which he has appeared. They include his General Hux in a couple of Star Wars pics, his Bill Weasley in a couple of Harry Potters, Oscar winner The Revenant, Ex-Machina and any number of others. But now this Irish actor has settled in with hit Peacock comedy The Paper, a mockumentary-style show in the tradition of The Office that shared The Paper creator Greg Daniels in common. Gleeson, son of actor Brendan Gleeson, plays Ned Sampson, the new editor of a small-town Ohio newspaper called the Toledo Truth Teller, which is followed by the same documentary crew that did The Office. It already has been renewed for a second season.
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Gleeson joins me for this edition of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side, where we talk up The Paper and why Gleeson thinks it is the perfect fit for him and also discuss his wildly varied and successful career. It includes numerous other movies, even a recent Taylor Swift video and two anticipated upcoming movies including Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastards and the Sundance hit The Incomer.
To watch our conversation and get the “actor’s side” of things from Domhnall Gleeson, just click on the link above.
Join me every Tuesday and Thursday this Emmy season for a new edition of The Actor’s Side and every Monday and Friday for a new episode of Behind the Lens.
Sir Tom Courtenay is 89 years old and telling a story about the day Alec Guinness showed him the script for a peculiar science fiction film he wasn’t quite sure about.
“He seemed uncertain about it,” Courtenay recalls. “But there was something he could smell in it.” The film, of course, was Star Wars. It made Guinness fabulously wealthy.
This is what a conversation with Tom Courtenay is like: an almost offhand tour through the entire span of postwar British cinema and theater, conducted by a man who was present for most of it.
He worked with David Lean on Dr. Zhivago — where he watched Lean hide behind a hotel pillar in Madrid to avoid having to speak to Rod Steiger. He stepped into the role of Billy Liar on stage after Albert Finney originated it, and was compared to Finney relentlessly; then, in 1983, he made a film with Finney that turned them from professional rivals into best friends.
He met Judi Dench at the Old Vic straight out of drama school. He bonded with Guinness on the set of Zhivago and stayed in touch for the rest of Guinness’s life. Queen Elizabeth II told him, at his knighting in 2001, that Manchester audiences might be better than London ones.
The occasion for all of this is The Dresser, Peter Yates’s 1983 film adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s play, which brought Courtenay his only Oscar nomination and which is the subject of this week’s It Happened in Hollywood.
The film casts Courtenay as Norman, the devoted, slightly fey dresser to a declining Shakespearean actor (Finney) touring England during the Blitz. It remains one of the most purely pleasurable two-hander performances in British film history.
Courtenay had done the stage version before the film. He and Finney, who had orbited each other for two decades without becoming friends, discovered on set that the film’s central dynamic — two roles written, as Courtenay puts it, “to make people not friendly” — had the opposite effect.
“We became best friends working on it together,” he says. Finney loved to tease him about his indifference to technical filmmaking. “If there’s a black hole, he’ll find it,” Finney would say, affectionately, about Courtenay wandering into shadows.
The film’s climax — a long, unbroken scene in which Norman falls apart after the actor’s death, finally undone by years of devotion that went unthanked — was shot in a single take at director Peter Yates’s insistence.
“He said, ‘Now go away, lie down, don’t think about it.’ And then they lit it, and I came and did it,” Courtenay recalls. The focus drifts slightly at one point. Yates kept it anyway.
What makes Norman work, Courtenay says, is something quite simple: “He loves the actor more than he loves himself. That’s the key to the part.”
It’s a formulation he returns to when describing his character in his most recent film, Queen at Sea — directed by American filmmaker Lance Hammer and co-starring Juliette Binoche — which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year and earned Courtenay an acting prize.
In that film, he plays a man fighting to keep his dementia-stricken wife at home against his stepdaughter’s wishes. Two films, four decades apart, animated by the same principle: a love that asks nothing back and gives everything.
Courtenay turned down most of Hollywood when it came calling in the 1960s. He was the face of British New Wave — the Jean-Paul Belmondo of British cinema — and could have parlayed that into something considerably more commercial. He passed.
“I felt the only way I’d develop as an actor would be on the stage,” he says. “I probably overdid it. I overdid my turning things down.” He waited out the production of Dr. Zhivago in a kind of genteel agony, watching Lean search for the right weather and grow his daffodils. He made do with the company: Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness.
He has no regrets about any of it, or if he does, he wears them too lightly to notice. At 89, he is still accepting parts he likes, still charming film crews who tease him about his football club, still winning prizes.
Queen at Sea is expected in UK art houses this September, timed for awards season. He doesn’t know yet about a US release.
“If I didn’t get on the stage while I was young,” he says, “I wouldn’t have learned how to act. It’s one thing to have some talent. It’s another to make the best of it.”
There’s a LOT — and I mean, A LOT — of great TV shows these days, so to help with your summer planning, I’ve rounded up 33 shows that are premiering or returning in May through early August 2026:
This list does not include shows that are in the middle of their current seasons, like Hacks, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Your Friends & Neighbors, The Boys, and more. This list also only contains scripted TV shows. You can check out our spring TV preview HERE.
Want to know what shows (and movies) to watch every single week? Sign up for our Screen Time newsletterhereto get movie and show recommendations delivered right to your inbox.
Tom Kane, a prolific voice actor whose signature roles included Master Yoda in a number of animated “Star Wars” shows as well as Professor Utonium on “The Powerpuff Girls,” has died. He was 64.
Kane died Monday from complications of a stroke he suffered in 2020, his representative Zachery McGinnis confirmed to The Times. The voice actor’s death was announced on social media by his talent agency, Galactic Productions.
“From his unforgettable performances in Star Wars to countless animated series, documentaries, and games, Tom brought wisdom, strength, humor, and heart to every role he touched,” reads a statement posted Monday on Galactic Productions’ Facebook page. “His voice became part of our lives, our memories, and the stories we carry with us. … Though his voice may now be silent, the characters, stories, and love he gave to the world will live on forever.”
Kane first joined the “Star Wars” franchise through video games in the 1990s, voicing droids, Imperial officers and rebel pilots in installments such as “Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire” and “Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.” He would go on to voice other characters, including the iconic protocol droid C-3PO, Jedi Master Yoda and the bounty hunter Boba Fett, in various games over the years.
He continued to voice Yoda in animated “Star Wars” shows, first in “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” Genndy Tartakovsky’s series set after the events of the 2002 film “Episode II — Attack of the Clones,” in which Kane also voiced C-3PO.
But Kane’s most notable “Star Wars” role was as the narrator of the 2008 film “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and the subsequent series of the same name, where he kicked off each adventure as the spoken version of the classic “Star Wars” opening crawl to set the stage for the story that followed.
“Tom loved ‘Star Wars,’” Dave Filoni, Lucasfilm’s president and chief creative officer, said in the studio’s tribute to Kane. “Fans may best remember him as the voice of the animated Yoda, but truly his voice was the spirit of the Clone Wars. His opening narration introduced an entire generation to the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy getting viewers ready for another adventure far, far, away.”
“When I was first starting out as a director I was fortunate to have someone as legendary as Tom there to help me learn and guide me towards what the actors needed. Very Yoda like indeed,” Filoni added.
Besides his “Star Wars” roles, Kane’s credits also include the devoted valet Woodhouse in “Archer,” the mutant Magneto in Marvel video games, the prim and proper head of house Mr. Herriman in “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” and the flamboyant villain Him in “The Powerpuff Girls.”
Kane said in a 2014 Reddit AMA that “The Powerpuff Girls’” Professor Utonium, who combined sugar, spice and everything nice — along with chemical X — to create the super-powered kindergartners, was the character he most identified with.
“He’s a dorky dad who loves his kids,” Kane wrote in a comment. “That’s pretty much me.”
Tara Strong, who voiced Powerpuff Girl Blossom, described Kane as “Brilliant. Giving. Funny. Supportive. [And] Kind.” in her tribute.
“They say there’s no such thing as a perfect man… those people never met [Tom Kane]. I’ve never in my life met a sweeter soul or a better human being,” Strong wrote in a Monday post on X. “I’m beyond grateful for all the hours we spent together in the booth, and so grateful we got to see him again recently… hug him tight and tell him how much we love and miss him.”
“I love you, Professor. You were the best dad, the best human, and I feel so honored to have known you and called you my friend,” she added.
Born April 15, 1962, in Overland Park, Kan., Kane began his voice acting career at age 15 doing commercials in his hometown of Kansas City, according to IMDb. In addition to his work in games, film and television, Kane has lent his voice to announce awards shows, including the 78th, 80th, 83rd, 84th and 90th Academy Awards broadcasts, as well as on attractions at Disney Theme parks.
“I’m also glad that his characters and voice will live on in many ways,” Filoni said in his tribute. “Wherever you go there’s always a chance that Tom is the voice you hear guiding you through Disneyland or a galaxy far, far away.”
Kane is survived by his wife, Cindy, and their nine children, six of whom joined the family through adoption and fostering.
Unlike Avengers: Doomsday, which has had to ramp up its marketing campaign ahead of its December 18, 2026, release date, Avengers: Secret Warsis a clean slate. Marvel Studios is keeping all of its Secret Wars cards close to the vest, especially when it comes to the movie’s cast. A few actors have confirmed that they will return after Doomsday, but plenty of surprises are sure to be in the works.
One report claims that Tobey Maguire is having the red carpet rolled out for him a final time as he helps put a bow on the Multiverse Saga. But having the original movie Spider-Man return is as easy a lay-up as Marvel Studios will ever have, as it ensures major brownie points. There’s another hero who’s finding himself in the headlines that doesn’t have as clear a path to success: Blade.
Insider DanielRPK recently reported that Kevin Feige and Co. plan to include Blade in Secret Wars (via Cosmic Marvel). And that’s all the information he had, meaning his role in the movie’s events is a mystery. A logical theory is that Blade will appear for a brief cameo, showing him doing his part to fight Doctor Doom or another threat to his reality.
But the real mystery isn’t what Blade will be doing in Secret Wars but rather who will be playing him. Of course, Mahershala Ali has been attached to the role for many years, even appearing off-screen in Eternals‘ post-credits scene. However, all the behind-the-scenes issues with the Blade movie have made it harder to buy stock in his version of the character.
Marvel Studios
The last time Blade appeared in live-action, Wesley Snipes brought him to life in Deadpool & Wolverine. He and Ryan Reynolds buried the hatchet and delivered a memorable action sequence that had audience members grinning from ear to ear. The reactions to Snipes’ return were overwhelmingly positive, to say the least, leaving Marvel Studios with a difficult choice.
With veteran actors like Maguire and Hugh Jackman back in the fold, the powers that be could easily offer Snipes the same deal. The only problem with going down that road is that it pulls the rug out from under Ali and his long-gestating project. And Marvel Studios has already made a habit of ignoring the supernatural corner of the MCU.
Blade Deserves A Real Future In The MCU – And Avengers: Secret Wars Could Promise It
Blade’s appearance in Eternals is part of a long list of moments that the MCU is waiting to pay off. It just so happens that many of its bunkmates also cover dark and spooky ground. For starters, the Disney+ series Moon Knight, despite having a passionate fanbase, is in limbo. The show’s final episode set up more adventures for the titular hero, but nothing has come to fruition.
Dane Whitman, Blade’s scene partner, is similarly waiting on the sidelines for his next opportunity. Eternals didn’t find the success Marvel Studios was hoping for, and the MCU has been very careful about integrating parts of its story into other projects.
Ali’s Blade doesn’t have the same type of baggage. And yet, he can’t seem to catch a break. Secret Wars can make things right by choosing Ali’s version of the character over Snipes’. That way, there’s no confusion moving forward about who holds the keys to the Daywalker’s kingdom.
Marvel Animation
There’s also precedent for the Eternals version of the character interacting with MCU heroes. In the animated series Marvel Zombies, Todd Williams did his best Ali impression as he voiced a version of Blade who became Moon Knight. The hero fought alongside Kamala Khan, Shang-Chi, Yelena Belova, Red Guardian, and others against an undead Scarlet Witch who was trying to steal the power of the Infinity Stones from the Hulk.
Since Doom is sure to be an even bigger threat than Wanda Maximoff, Blade should have no trouble finding a way to be helpful, especially if the rumors are true and many of Doomsday‘s heroes are dead or lost in the multiverse. Putting Blade at the front of the pack will also help build trust between him and the audience. Once the dust is settled and the multiverse is back in one piece, everyone will be on board with seeing more of the vampire hunter on the big screen.
DC Studios’ Man of Tomorrow is reportedly recasting a key SnyderVerse superhero. James Gunn’s DCU has already recast numerous heroes and villains from Zack Snyder’s DCEU/SnyderVerse on the road to assembling its own Justice League. After Superman introduced the Justice Gang, which many have speculated will one day evolve into DC’s premier superhero team, DC Studios has already added three Leaguers to Man of Tomorrow, igniting hopes that the 2027 sequel will lay the groundwork for the next live-action Justice League.
According to a post on Patreon by scooper Daniel Richtman, James Gunn’s DCU is expected to introduce Martian Manhunter in Man of Tomorrow, based on a casting grid. The shapeshifter was played in the SnyderVerse by Harry Lennix, where his introduction in Zack Snyder’s Justice League came as a major twist.
Lennix featured in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman as General Calvin Swanwick, eventually stepping up to become the United States’ Secretary of Defense. Later, Zack Snyder’s Justice League revealed that Swanwick was actually Martian Manhunter in disguise all along.
Warner Bros.
While J’onn J’onzz is, of course, a green-skinned Martian, his human disguise in most modern adaptations is as a Black man. DC Studios has thus far cast two Black male actors in unconfirmed roles for Man of Tomorrow: 57-year-old Andre Royo from The Wire and 41-year-old Sinqua Walls from Teen Wolf.
Based on Richtman’s latest DCU scoop, there is a high chance that Royo or Walls is playing the rebooted Justice League icon, although which, if either, may not be revealed until Man of Tomorrow hits theaters in July 2027.
Martian Manhunter’s DCU Debut All Links Back to Brainiac’s Arrival
Recently, Andor star Adria Arjona boarded Man of Tomorrow, reportedly playing Maxima, the warrior queen of the planet Almerac. With Lars Eidinger’s Brainiac arriving to cause trouble on Earth in the 2027 blockbuster, perhaps Almerac has already fallen victim to his intergalactic knowledge collecting before the movie.
Some have speculated that Brainiac was involved in Krypton’s destruction in the DCU, especially as DC Studios already revealed the first look at its Bottle City of Kandor. Fans could get more clues as to what caused Krypton’s destruction as soon as next month in Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El.
Typically, Martian Manhunter leaves his world as the sole survivor of a genocide that wiped out his green-skinned kind. If J’onn J’onzz does appear in Man of Tomorrow, the DCU could link that conflict back to Brainiac, thereby giving him a motivation to come to Earth and join other heroes in taking on the genius big bad.
As the cast of Man of Tomorrow continues to grow, it has become increasingly clear that the DCU blockbuster isn’t exactly a simple Superman sequel, but rather a Justice League-level crossover event. That said, the League is yet to assemble in the DCU and may not until the latter moments of Man of Tomorrow or beyond.
“There’s an absolute wealth of racing, exploring, and collecting to do here, and that’s before the inevitable live-service updates start adding even more content. Few games are as essential as this.”
The following games will be added to the service across the two weeks:
Remnant II (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Winter Burrow (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20 Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
Luna Abyss (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – May 21 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
Escape Simulator (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – May 26 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Echo Generation 2 (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – May 27 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – May 27 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Crashout Crew (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – May 28 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
Kabuto Park (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – May 28 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Final Fantasy VI (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – June 2 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Jurassic World Evolution 3 (Cloud, Xbox Series X|S, and PC) – June 2 Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
Jesse Watters isn’t known for his athletic prowess, but he may be a hit with streaming sports fans all the same.
When Fox Corp. initially launched its new Fox One streaming service in the fall of last year, executives steeled themselves for a wave of sign-ups by cord-cutters who were eager to stream the company’s popular fall football package. After pigskin season ended, these people reasoned, activity might dwindle for a little while.
Instead, Fox executives have been surprised to see football fans stick around for a chance to check out Fox News Channel programs like “Jesse Watters Primetime” and “The Five.”
During the company’s recent fiscal third quarter “over half of the viewership on Fox One” came from people watching news, said Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s CEO, on a call with investors. He added: “We’re really not seeing a tremendous amount of churn within Fox One to date, so we’re very pleased with that.” Fox has not released subscriber totals for the nascent service.
Fox’s efforts to cater to a digitally savvy cohort to boost the fortunes of its news operations will no doubt be watched by other mainstream TV-news outlets. Versant’s MS NOW plans to launch a new subscription offering that will aim at its “community” of users, executives from the company said during a recent investor call. Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN estimates that its digital users are about a decade younger than viewers of its mainstay cable operation. The company says subscribers to its new subscription offering are “pacing ahead” of targets.
All this work comes amid projections suggesting cable subscriptions will likely continue to erode. Subscribers at all three of the nation’s biggest cable-news outlets are poised to drop between 7% and 9% between the end of 2024 and the end of 2026, according to Kagan, a market-research firm that it part of S&P Global Intelligence.
New concepts abound as TV-news kingpins work to meet younger viewers in new environments. Trey Yingst, the Fox News foreign correspondent, offers dispatches via TikTok. Steve Kornacki, the NBC News polling guru, holds forth via a streaming “Kornacki Cam” during primaries and other races that might not pre-empt programming on the NBC broadcast network.
Fox News Channel remains powerful in the modern media ecosystem, but like its rivals, has in the past been seen as attracting an older consumer more acquainted with linear TV viewing. Now Fox News may be getting a wave of interest from a younger cohort.
“We’ve clearly captured some of these customers that were either sports fans and now starting to watch news or news fans who were watching sports,” says Pete Distad, CEO of Fox’s streaming operations. “We have typical news customers coming back three and a half times a week and they are watching 10-plus hours of Fox News Channel.”
Executives estimate the average age of Fox One subscribers is “younger than the traditional cable customer,” says Distad, adding that the typical user is “not as young as a mobile-social-first Generation Alpha. It’s a little bit older than that.”
Fox One has begun rolling out new features aimed at spurring news audiences to check out even more, says Amit Dudakia, the streaming outlet’s senior vice president of product.
The streaming outlet currently offers mobile users the chance to watch news segments identified by a specific subject of interest. “We’re now providing customers the ability to just really quickly jump back and see what the topics are they might have missed and quickly get to those moments,” he says. Such an option allows users to find segmented tied to particular areas of interest, rather than having to fast forward through an hour or two of a linear program to find a moment. “What we have seen is incredibly promising in that users who are engaging with those topics go on to watch a lot more,” he adds.
Executives are also testing Fox One “playlists” keyed around a certain subject, which line up vertical video around anything from talk of the economy to the ongoing U.S. conflict with Iran.
One feature called “Ask Fox” allows users to tell Fox One what types of content they may be interested in and then be given a sort of guide to what is available. “It’s really hard for a user to come in and discover and engage with content when all you see is just endless carousels of thumbnails, and you have to then rely on imagery and a description to help drive a user to watch that piece of content,” says Dudakia. “What we believe is that users really care more about topics and events.”
Fox One is likely to use plans tied to the company’s rights deal to show the coming World Cup to help broaden the way they highlight news content to subscribers, says Distad. “You can imagine that some of that technology that we’re building around the World Cup that will allow you, for example, in a single view, to see information and scores and data about what’s going on for your particular team or for the match,” he says. “We intend to take that and apply it to other big events from the news perspective. You can imagine midterms will be a very big moment for us.”
Fox News’ Watters may want to start memorizing a few NFL stats.
Storm King Comics has announced that Cathedral, the first original graphic novel from legendary filmmaker John Carpenter, is set for an August 4, 2026 release – and the synopsis brings to mind elements of Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness!
Story
Carpenter wrote Cathedral with producer and editor Sandy King and writer Sean Sobczak. Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna provided the artwork, which is colored by Ryan Winn and lettered by Marshall Dillon. Here’s the synopsis for the 120-page graphic novel:
The middle of downtown Los Angeles sets the scene for John Carpenter’s Cathedral, where an abandoned cathedral stands, fenced in and ignored by the world around it. The preoccupied passers-by have long since ceased to notice the dilapidated church in their midst, never mind sensing the danger and centuries old evil trapped inside its walls.
A gruesome murder one late night pulls the structure into the spotlight, triggering a police investigation into the loss of one of their own. Lieutenant Christine Marks, along with detectives Paul Hernandez and Steve Mayfield, must enter the church in search of the monster that murdered her father. Every step takes them deeper into the belly of the church revealing the mystery of an ancient evil imprisoned within.
Carpenter is also working on a Cathedral album, so fans will be able to listen to the music he had in mind for this story while reading the graphic novel. UPDATE: The first track from that album is now online:
Carpenter made the album with frequent collaborators Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, and each track aligns with a chapter of the graphic novel. Fangoria reports that the album will be released by Sacred Bones on August 7th.
Statements
Carpenter provided the following statement: “I saw it in a dream: a nightmare landscape deep underground filled with monsters too weird and sinister to exist in daylight. I knew instantly I had to get these things out of my head and into everyone else’s brains.“
King added, “We have a saying at Storm King, ‘Every dream should be a nightmare.’ By reading Cathedral, you can take John’s dream and let it become your next nightmare.“
Will you be adding John Carpenter’s Cathedral graphic novel to your collection? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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Keke Palmer has always been That Girl. But with her latest look, she has fully entered her It Girl era. The actor-singer-podcaster-producer is currently promoting her latest film, Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, a wild shoplifting comedy, and its retail milieu means the press tour is a chance to play around with some exciting fits. And oh, she’s playing around.
On May 18, Palmer stepped out in New York City wearing so many 2000s trends she could have come straight out of a glamorous time machine. The soft pink makeup is a little Destiny’s Child, the space buns are a tad Spice Girls, and the magenta side-tie blouse is the Going Out Top of our dreams. Add in her hoops, the floral cute clips, metallic shoes, and stack of bangles on each arm, and Palmer is ready to party.
But the real piece de trandaissance is the jeans. My first thought? Lizzie McGuire would have killed for those jeans. You remember the episode.
Noah Wyle says The Pitt shouldn’t have a night shift spin-off. HBO Max‘s popular TV series star has now explained why.
Noah Wyle explains why The Pitt Night Shift spin-off may not happen
Speaking on the A Lot More podcast, Noah Wyle (who plays Robby in the show) explained why The Pitt doesn’t need a night shift spin-off anytime soon. “I said off-handedly the other day that I think we’re getting enough night shift. And I think you want more, but you’re getting what I think is appropriate.” According to him, “I still don’t think you need more night shift. Those are great characters. It’s a wonderful energy.”
Wyle suggests the show works well as it is for now. While he didn’t necessarily rule out the idea of an expansion, he believes it is too early to have more of The Pitt. “You don’t want to bleed it off into other narratives and franchise it out, because I think you kind of dilute the potency a little bit and you get everybody overfamiliar with the arena to where it loses a little bit of its specialness.”
Alongside Wyle, The Pitt also stars Tracy Ifeachor (Quantico, Treadstone), Patrick Ball (Law & Order, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and Katherine LaNasa (The Campaign, The Frozen Ground).
Image Credit: HBO Max
Other key cast members include Supriya Ganesh (Grown-ish, Fresh Off the Boat), Fiona Dourif (The Master, Curse of Chucky), Taylor Dearden (Breaking Bad), Isa Briones (Star Trek: Picard, Goosebumps), Gerran Howell (Catch-22, Suspicion), Shabana Azeez (Birdeater, Metro Sexual), Shawn Hatosy (The Faculty, Alpha Dog), and Ayesha Harris (Daisy Jones & The Six, This Is Us).
Seasons 1 and 2 of The Pitt are currently streaming on HBO Max. Both have received critical admiration, and the show is expected to land multiple nominations at the 2026 Emmy Awards.
A press screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s Cannes Competition film Bitter Christmasat the Bazin theatre on Tuesday evening was evacuated part way through due to a medical emergency of one of the attendees.
Deadline was alerted to the incident by our critic Stephanie Bunbury that the 6:15PM press screening had been disrupted some 15 minutes into the seance.
During ironically a hospital sequence in the movie, loud yelps were heard from an elderly moviegoer in the Bazin. Per our eyewitness, the person collapsed in their seat, eyes closed. Those sitting nearby surrounded him as the feature continued to run. Soon after, the Bazin ushers ordered the audience to leave and the screening was abandoned.
Social media posts by journalists who were also in the room reported that they too heard a loud scream from a man seated in the middle of the auditorium who appeared to suffer some sort of seizure.
The social media reports also say that medical authorities were called to the scene, but others on the ground inform us that they didn’t arrive soon enough. “It was a muddle and it seemed as though the festival didn’t have any protocol in place for such an emergency,” said one attendee.
No further details are available. Deadline has reached out to the festival for an update on the situation, or whether the screening will be rescheduled.
The Bazin cinema is situated inside the Palais des Festivals and principally hosts press screenings for the films in the main competition. This evening’s screening for Bitter Christmas was timed to the world premiere of the pic in the Grand Theatre Lumière where Almodóvar received a standing ovation upon entrance.
Felicity Lott, an elegant British soprano who gave radiant performances of Mozart and Strauss at many of the world’s leading opera houses, and was equally acclaimed as a stylish, wide-ranging recitalist, died on Saturday in the Sussex region of England. She was 79.
Her death, in a hospice facility, was from cancer, her manager, Sue Spence, said. Ms. Lott lived near Brighton, a city on the coast in Sussex.
Tall and self-possessed, with an air of wit and sophistication, Ms. Lott was ideal for parts like the introspective Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Countess in his “Capriccio” and yet another wistful Countess, in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”
“What Lott has going for her,” the critic Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe in 1999, “is intelligence, musicianship, curiosity and a voice that is as fresh and as clear as a mountain stream. She disappears inside whatever she is singing.”
Over the course of a career that lasted more than half a century, Ms. Lott appeared with the Royal Opera in London, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and many other major companies. But she particularly relished performing at the idyllic summertime Glyndebourne Festival in the Sussex countryside, where the artists could rehearse together for weeks with few distractions.
“I like to feel I know exactly what everyone’s going to do on the night, otherwise I feel inhibited,” she told The Times of London in 1987. “I am a spontaneous person in a way, but not on the stage.”
While still a conservatory student in her early 20s, she met the pianist Graham Johnson, and they began a lifelong musical partnership focused on the lieder, or art song, repertoire.
“He would come to play for my lessons,” she told Mr. Dyer in The Globe. “On our own, he made me learn sheaves of songs.”
In 1976, when Mr. Johnson founded the Songmakers’ Almanac, a performing ensemble that specialized in themed concerts, often with literary connections, Ms. Lott was in the group alongside the mezzo-soprano Ann Murray, the tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson and the baritone Richard Jackson.
Through Mr. Johnson and her song recitals, Ms. Lott developed a close association with Wigmore Hall, the intimate venue in London. She served on its board and gave her final master class through its French Song Exchange program last month.
Felicity Ann Emwhyla Lott was born on May 8, 1947, in Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, England, to Iris (Williams) and John Lott, who ran an accountancy practice.
Theirs was a family of amateur musicians. As a child, Felicity learned some piano and violin and took singing lessons.
“I made my first recording when I was 2, on a little machine in a booth in a store,” she told The Globe in 1999. “I sang ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Away in a Manger,’ and it’s bang in tune.” (She added that it might have been the only recording she ever enjoyed making.)
She had an early love for the French language, and studied French and Latin at Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London, considering a career as an interpreter.
But while spending a year near Grenoble, France, she was encouraged enough by lessons with a singing teacher to shift her path, and she earned a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Music in London.
While studying there, she sang roles like Pamina in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Dorabella in his “Così Fan Tutte,” which is often taken by mezzo-sopranos.
“I sang Dorabella because I still couldn’t get the high notes for Fiordiligi,” Ms. Lott said. “It wasn’t until after I gave up smoking that I got the high notes.”
In 1975, she made her debut with a major company, singing Pamina with the English National Opera. Most of her early career was in Europe, though she appeared at Carnegie Hall as the Countess in a sumptuously cast concert performance of “Capriccio” in 1986, and debuted at Lyric Opera of Chicago as Mozart’s Countess the next year.
She made her Met debut in 1990 as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” with Carlos Kleiber conducting. It became her signature role, and she appeared with Mr. Kleiber in a superb run of “Rosenkavalier” performances in 1994 at the Vienna State Opera, recorded by Austrian television.
Her background in French made her particularly sparkling in songs by composers like Ravel, Chausson and Chabrier and operas by Poulenc, Charpentier and Offenbach. In 1996, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She married the music writer Robin Golding in 1973; they divorced in 1982. In 1984, she married the actor and writer Gabriel Woolf. He survives her, along with their daughter, Emily; and a sister, Deborah. (As Mrs. Woolf, Ms. Lott once received a letter addressed to Virginia Woolf. “I know you’re dead,” the letter began, “but I think you’re wonderful.”)
In 2019, Ms. Lott made her London West End debut in the small, touching role of Heidi Schiller in Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Follies.” In 2024, she gave her final opera performances at the Paris Opera, as the over-the-top Duchess of Krakenthorp in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.” Her final solo recital was also in Paris, in May 2025.
While Ms. Lott’s voice was lucid and sensitive, what set her apart were her dramatic gifts and her refined yet warm bearing.
“When she rises from her chair in her tailored suit, you are struck by her height and grace of bearing,” Mr. Dyer wrote in The Globe. “She’s built along the lines of Vanessa Redgrave, and people who have seen Lott’s Marschallin in the video of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ will tell you that she’s an actress in the same class.”
We are currently in a new era of feminist thought. With the dawn of the realization that many of the beauty standards we have come to see as normal are actually deeply rooted in patriarchal standards, a lot of woman-identifying people are starting to see through the facade of the beauty products, the botox, the things that are designed to keep us looking young and wrinkle-free. Women haven’t been allowed to age gracefully or even just exist as they are without some kind of pushback, and our recent media reflects that, namely in films like The Substance(2024) and The Ugly Stepsister(2025). Horror is a great avenue for feminine rage, and both of these films fit the bill.
These two recent releases are a direct commentary on the toxic beauty standards and dangerous plastic surgery trends that are pervading our culture. The Substancedetails a woman in media falling from grace after approaching fifty, and the lengths she will go to maintain her youth and popularity, while The Ugly Stepsisteris a retelling of Cinderella from the ugly stepsister’s point of view, a very normal teenage girl who will do whatever it takes to win the affection of the prince. Both concern dangerous beauty treatments, not unlike some of the injectables and trends that are widely spread within our culture, but brought to horrific heights, with just the right amount of satire.
“No matter what age you are, if you are in a woman’s body, you will be judged.”
Elisabeth Sparkle is the heroine of The Substance. Played to perfection by Demi Moore, she is a former starlet who finds validation from her followers and the men who employ her. When her critics and employers feel she has aged out of being beautiful after turning fifty, Sparkle takes an experimental drug known only as The Substance, which splits her body into two people- herself and the much younger-looking Sue. Eventually, Sue replaces Elisabeth on her morning show and rises to new heights, causing Elisabeth to stop respecting the balance between the two and spend more and more time as Sue, causing her to age rapidly. Eventually, the two merge into one monstrous being and experience public humiliation and death, caused by Elisabeth’s desperate attempts to have it all.
Meanwhile, Elvira is the central character of The Ugly Stepsister, a very normal, if a bit awkward, teenage girl, played with startling sincerity by Lea Myren, who is not comfortable in her own skin. Desperate to go to the famous ball and have the prince fall in love with her, Elvira looks past his degeneracy and blatant misogyny and starts trying to do whatever she can to become beautiful and win his love, with the help of her mother. It starts with getting her braces off, before being subjected to barbaric, antiquated beauty treatments like having her nose broken and having false eyelashes sewn into her eyelids. She goes so far as to swallow a tapeworm to keep her figure trim, despite the negative health effects it has on her body. Eventually, the story of Cinderella plays out, and Elvira is not chosen, causing a massive breakdown that causes her whole body and her whole facade to come crashing down.
Three Toronto police officers arrested after a sex worker was allegedly hurt and sexually assaulted while vacationing in Barcelona will all be paid while they are suspended, the force has confirmed.
The Mossos d’Esquadra, the police force of Catalonia, Spain, previously confirmed three officers had been arrested while travelling in the country, adding that the alleged incident happened in a taxi.
Global News has since confirmed through sources that the three officers are Evan Glennie, Rich Rand and Caglar Yigit.
The three men were arrested on May 15.
A spokesperson for Toronto police said they would be suspended under rules in the Community Safety and Policing Act, adding they would receive their salaries while they are suspended.
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“The Service will explore the breadth of the Act and legal thresholds to consider suspension without pay,” the spokesperson said.
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One of the officers was suspended when they arrived back in Canada. The other two are expected to be suspended when they return home.
Coun. Shelley Carroll, chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, laid down a marker for Toronto Police Services Chief Myron Demkiwin a statement.
“At a time when public confidence must be continually reinforced, people also need to see visible leadership and a clear commitment to strengthening the culture and standards of the Service,” she wrote.
“I expect the Chief and Service leadership to demonstrate the actions necessary to maintain the trust the public places in the Service.”
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said that, if the officers were found guilty, they “should be punished” during an unrelated news conference on Tuesday.
“Public trust in policing is fundamental,” she told reporters. “The police chief has quite a bit of work to earn back the trust of the folks, and also by rooting out any officers that have allegedly committed any kind of wrongdoing.”
— With files from Global News’ Tracy Tong and Aaron D’Andrea
A film adaptation of mystery-adventure video game franchise “Broken Sword” is being developed by game maker Revolution Software, producer Story Kitchen and Disney’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast” screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos.
Created by Charles Cecil, the “Broken Sword” series debuted in 1996 with “The Shadow of the Templars.” The franchise follows intrepid American George Stobbart and fearless French journalist Nicole Collard as they navigate ecclesiastical conspiracy throughout iconic European settings.
Across five titles released over the past 30 years, the “Broken Sword” games have been played by more than 10 million players and is credited as a foundational title for modern-day narrative-driven gaming. Recently, Cecil’s Revolution Software concluded a successful Kickstarter campaign for the latest “Broken Sword” remake project, “Smoking Mirror Reforged,” which raised nearly $1 million against a $68,000 goal.
The “Broken Sword” movie will be written by Spiliotopoulos, whose other writing credits include “The Unholy,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” and “G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes.”
Story Kitchen, which is working on several high-profile video game TV and film adaptations in the works, including the new “Sonic the Hedgehog” film franchise and Amazon’s upcoming “Life Is Strange” series, will produce the film alongside Revolution’s Cecil and his partner, Noirin Carmody.
“Very few franchises of this era have stayed relevant, premium, and loyal to the intelligence of their audience. ‘Broken Sword’ has done all three,” Story Kitchen co-founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence Goldberg said in a joint statement Tuesday. “Our work here isn’t to adapt a game into a film. It’s to move a world that has been building for three decades into the next medium it deserves, working hand-in-hand with the people who built it.”
“Story Kitchen came to this project with a deep passion for the IP,” Revolution Software founder and CEO Charles Cecil added. “That’s rare. The creative conversations have been about translating what ‘Broken Sword’ is, rather than what it can be made to look like. I am hugely excited to be working with Story Kitchen and Evan.”
Sometime after Drive, probably between Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn decided to make movies, plus a few TV series, for the unique viewing pleasure of Nicolas Winding Refn.
This is great news if you happen to be Nicolas Winding Refn, who now directs under the production banner byNWR — proof as ever that he’s turned into his own brand. It’s also great news if you’re one of his diehard fans, reveling in works that have become increasingly mannered and self-indulgent: exquisitely crafted B-movies for the highly select few.
Her Private Hell
The Bottom Line
Hell is the right word.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Midnight Screenings) Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Diego Calva, Kristine Froseth, Hidetoshi Nishijima Director: Nicolas Winding Refn Screenwriters: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
1 hour 49 minutes
But if you’re none of the above, watching a new Refn work can be a grueling experience, making one long for the pre-NWR days when the Danish auteur delivered tightly wound, visually dazzling and punishingly violent genre flicks like the Pusher trilogy, Bronson, Valhalla Rising and of course, Drive.
After a major health scare that nearly cost him his life, the director returns to feature filmmaking following a ten-year absence with Her Private Hell, which premiered as a midnight screening in Cannes. The fact that the film didn’t play competition like Refn’s last three movies gives you a hint of how excessively numbing his latest work is, though you’d have to try and sit through it to see for yourself. To his credit, NWR does give us a warning early on when he has one of his characters only half-ironically claim: “This movie’s gonna be hell.” But that doesn’t make watching Her Private Hell any less hellish.
Set in a fog-filled, computer-generated futuristic netherworld that looks like the backdrop for a music video that aired on MTV back in the late ’80s, the film can best be described as a horror-thriller, though it’s more of a celebration of that genre through Refn’s refined and opulent aesthetic, which leaves no fetishy stone unturned.
The story is easy to follow if you don’t care much for logic. A famous actress, Elle (Sophie Thatcher), is holed up at a towering 5-star hotel while waiting to shoot her latest film, which is called Candy Floss and looks like a new entry to the Star Wars franchise directed by NWR. Deliberately schlocky and over-the-top, the production is a mere backdrop for the psychodrama happening off set between Elle and her costar Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), a girl her own age who’s also unfortunately her stepmother.
Married to the star’s movie mogul father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) — no relation, apparently, to the late New York Dolls guitarist of the same name — Dominique shows up at the hotel and brings Elle’s daddy issues bubbling to the surface, forcing her to confront the many (neon) demons in her life. There’s also an actual demon called the Leather Man, who’s some kind of mythical horror creature preying on lost young daughters, whom he rips apart with his elegant suede-and-rhinestone gloves.
But wait, now we’ve been whisked away to postwar Japan, where a GI named Kay (Charles Melton) roams the streets of Tokyo looking to take on the Leather Man with his bare fists, hoping to rescue his own daughter from oblivion. Who knows how or why we got here, but at least the setting gives Refn an excuse to dish out one gloriously gruesome fight scene between Kay and an extra-large yakuza.
This happens around midway through Her Private Hell, though it’s possible all the non-NWR acolytes will have checked out by then. Both extravagant and extravagantly dull, the film often feels like it’s playing in slow-motion, with the cast laboring to deliver lines (“I am the victim of mist,” “I am made of stardust”) that make little sense to us or them. Melton — whom Refn shoots topless or else decked out in military or biker gear — actually looks like he’s blanking out during one ponderous monologue his character listens to, while Thatcher and Liu do their best to stay engaging as their heroines duke it out.
There are a few good stabs at humor early on and it’s only too bad Refn didn’t give us some more jokes, because nothing on screen should be taken too seriously. What the director does seem serious as hell about is paying homage to all the slasher movies he loves, whether Italian giallo flicks by Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci or the works of Brian De Palma, whose longtime composer Pino Donaggio provides the film’s operatic synth score.
For fans of those cultish works, which had their heyday around the time Refn was growing up and discovering them for himself, Her Private Hell plays like a nostalgic jewel box that literally looks like it was shot inside of a jewel box. The film is stylized to the point of abstraction; the production budget in glitter, tinfoil, transparent plastics, strobes, smoke machines and red or blue lighting gels must have exceeded everything else. Cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck (who shot Refn’s series Copenhagen Cowboy) creates some mesmerizing images out of all that gear, but so many that they can feel blinding, while production designer Gitte Malling’s lush sets are a succession of red rooms for cinephiles.
With all that effort put into making something so lavish, it’s too bad the movie fails to sustain our attention — and actively seems to combat it at times. When Refn came onto the scene in the early aughts, his work was anything but boring. It felt bold and fresh, making the director an early ringleader of the “elevated genre” trend that brought B-movies into the arthouse. Drive’s sensational premiere at Cannes in 2011 was a consecration of his cinema, but perhaps also the tipping point. Since then, NWR has headed further and further down the rabbit hole of his own obsessions, with his latest bringing him all the way to some level of hell. If his film’s fetishized heroine manages to claw her way back out by the end, conquering her daddy issues and taking on the boogeyman, most of us are still stuck down there.
Lionsgate is developing a live stage adaptation of “The Housemaid,” its December 2025 release that has grossed nearly $400 million at the worldwide box office, the company announced Tuesday.
The seductive psychological thriller, based on Freida McFadden’s multi-million dollar selling novel, is being developed for the stage via the production company Melting Pot, led by Simon Friend and Hanna Osmolska, a three-time Tony Award winner known for “Life of Pi” and “Paranormal Activity” on Broadway, and playwright Bekah Brunstetter, a Tony Award nominee for Best Book of a Musical for “The Notebook.”
“’The Housemaid’ has all the elements for a successful stage adaptation – a blockbuster title, compelling characters, and a story full of twists and turns that builds tension and momentum in a way that naturally lends itself to the stage,” Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate’s president, global products & experiences, said in a statement. “This project reflects how our hit films and IP can be transformed into novel experiences. We’re excited to collaborate with Simon, Hanna, and Bekah to bring ‘The Housemaid’ to theatre‑goers in a new and intimate way.”
“When I first read ‘The Housemaid’ it was exhilarating, and what occurred to me is how truly theatrical the story is, not only happening largely in a single, claustrophobic location, but the twisty elements which contemporize what has long worked in potboiler stage thrillers,” Friend added. “Bringing this story to live theatre, after the immensely successful film, offers the chance to heighten its intensity in a shared way, and we’re thrilled to join forces with Lionsgate and Bekah.”
Brunstetter added: “I’m so thrilled to be bringing this gripping, emotional, strange and even funny story to the stage. Not only have I fallen in love with the adaptation process and bringing books to life on both stage and screen, I’m extremely excited to dig into ‘The Housemaid’s’ incredibly universal themes of jealousy, the pain of desire, and the traumas that connect us.”
Recently, Lionsgate successfully launched “The Hunger Games: On Stage” in London, in a purpose-built theatre in Canary Wharf. Lionsgate will also kick off a North American tour of a new stage production of “Dirty Dancing” this August, and the studio is developing a musical production of the $500-million grossing, four-time Oscar winner “La La Land” from producer Marc Platt, headed for Broadway.
For the stage, Melting Pot’s work includes the West End, Broadway and international hit “Life of Pi,” which won five Olivier Awards and three Tony Awards (including Best Scenic Design of a Play), “Paranormal Activity” – soon to open on Broadway as well as its Olivier-nominated West End run, Academy Award-winner Florian Zeller’s play “The Truth” opening in the West End next month, the world premiere musical of David Nicholls’ novel “One Day,” as well as “Ghost Stories,” “The Girl on the Train,” and “Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts.”
For film, Friend produced “The Father,” which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and went on to win two statuettes, including Anthony Hopkins’ second Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
As we mentioned, Brunstetter will write the play. She earned her Tony Award nomination for her work on the book for the Broadway musical “The Notebook,” which she penned with Ingrid Michaelson. Later this month, her play “Mother’s Day” will debut as part of the DNA New Works Program at La Jolla Playhouse. Brunstetter is also creator of the upcoming Peacock television series, “The Five-Star Weekend,” starring Jennifer Garner. As a writer and producer, her TV work includes “This is Us,” “Sirens,” “Maid” and “American Gods.”
France-based Irish British filmmaker Róisín Burns has scooped the Cannes Critics’ Week Next Step prize for her project Happy Hardcore.
Set against the backdrop of Burns’ native city of Liverpool, the drama revolves around a 17-year-old soldier who deserts his post during the Iraq war.
Happy Hardcore is among ten projects selected for the 12th edition of the Next Step program of Cannes Critics’ Week, which supports the first feature films of directors who previously showed their shorts in the section focused on emerging filmmaking talents.
Burns participated in the 2025 edition of the parallel selection with her short film Wonderwall.
This year’s Next Step Prize jury featured Carole Scotta, founding co-head of Paris-based production, distribution and exhibition company Haut et Court; Rebecca De Pas, programmer for the Rotterdam International Film Festival and curator for the Fondazione Prada Film Fund; Fiorella Moretti, founder and president of sales company Luxbox, and Alexandre Hautecoeur, marketing director at France-based streaming platform Sooner, which is a partner of the program this year.
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, beach clubs have become battlegrounds. Every after-party I attend has been the site of a heated debate, as journalists and industry insiders fight about the polarizing films vying for the Palme d’Or.
During the soiree for “Paper Tiger,” a New York thriller starring Miles Teller and Adam Driver, I predicted that their co-star Scarlett Johansson would become a major Oscar contender. Glowering over a glass of wine, another awards pundit declared that Johansson’s performance — with its big accent, big emotions, and big hair — was Razzie-worthy.
At another party, the talky drama “All of a Sudden” generated its own talky drama, as one passionate dissenter faced off against several fans. Was this three-hour film from the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) a tear-jerking humanist triumph or a self-satisfied lecture? The argument got so animated that you might have mistaken it for the deliberations of the Cannes jury itself.
Mixed reactions are a given at any film festival, but I’ve rarely seen as many that are this mixed. On the Screen Daily jury grid, which compiles scores from a dozen critics on a scale from one to four, consensus has been hard to come by: Nearly every competition film, including Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” and the Javier Bardem vehicle “The Beloved,” runs the gamut from three stars to a measly one.
That ought to make this year’s Palme race a tough one to call. While watching “Fjord,” a strong Norwegian drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, I wondered whether it could earn a second Palme for the director Cristian Mungiu, who in 2007 won for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” Then, as the closing credits began, the journalist in front of me broke into derisive laughter.
But I don’t expect any competition film still to come will prove more polarizing than “Hope,” a South Korean action movie that premiered Sunday night to love-it-or-hate-it reactions. Directed by Na Hong-jin (“The Wailing”), it’s nearly three hours of nonstop action as a besieged town tries to fend off rampaging aliens. Those beasts are played by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, who have been transformed via motion-capture technology into some of the most egregious-looking creatures you have ever seen, as though James Cameron tried to render his Na’vis with nothing but a dented Nintendo GameCube.
“Hope” is thin on character but long on action scenes in which people shoot at CGI monsters that never, ever die, and I found it to be stultifying slop made by people who should know better. The critic Peter Howell agreed, positing that the “biggest mystery at Cannes this year is how this steamy load of dodgy CGI and inane plotting managed to make it into the Palme competition.”
And yet! People I respect — or at least respected until now — are still going to bat for “Hope.” The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney praised the film for its “sharply drawn characters” even though, when last I checked, France does not formally celebrate Opposite Day. On social media, the writer Iana Murray is so “Hope”-pilled that she has begun campaigning for it to win the Palme.
Still, if “Hope” manages to buck common sense and win the top prize, that would be emblematic of just how split this year’s slate has been. And, at the very least, I know the feuds about it at the closing-night party would be legendary.
Back when it was known simply as “Star Wars,” the movie that changed the world — and launched George Lucas’s ever-expanding universe of mythical sci-fi — seemed as born for the big screen as any movie of its era. “Star Wars” said to its fans: Here’s a swashbuckling Zen space opera of irresistible vastness — a world large enough to colonize your imagination. To do that, “Star Wars” needed to be epic, and was.
But by the time “The Mandalorian” came along, in 2019 (42 years after the original movie), the world of “Star Wars” had expanded to the point that in its very omnipresence, as well as its hyperactive digital-age busy-ness (a quality launched with “The Phantom Menace” in 1999), it felt larger than ever…and also smaller. More had become less. That’s why “The Mandalorian,” created by Jon Favreau as the “Star Wars” universe’s first live-action television series, was the perfect solution to what had become The “Star Wars” Problem.
The prequels, then the sequels, were all trying — oh, were they trying — to be true “Star Wars” movies. Yet the bar had been set impossibly high. A couple of the later films were all right, a number were not, to the point that the sound of fans fighting about them (“‘The Phantom Menace’ sucked!” “I felt the thrill again with ‘Revenge of the Sith’!” “‘The Force Awakens’ was chintzy fan service!” “‘The Last Jedi’ was great!” “No, it was a mess!” “‘The Rise of Skywalker’ was too woke!”) may have produced more dramatic sparks than anything in the films themselves. My own attitude always came down this: The “Star Wars” brand had become an industry — but none of these movies could ever truly recreate what “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back” had.
Yet part of the low-key, shaggy-dog success of “The Mandalorian” is that it didn’t try to. The small screen was arguably the perfect home for repackaged “Star Wars” nostalgia that didn’t pretend to be anything else. Whereas the movies showcased dynastic battles and striving, conflicted characters who were increasingly grandiose, the hero of “The Mandalorian,” a bounty hunter who almost never takes off his helmet of gleaming beskar, is a character who would have been listed 15th in the credits of a “Star Wars” movie — and, in fact, he was essentially spun off from the armored figure of Boba Fett, who started out as a supporting gunslinger in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” But that made the Mandalorian the perfect figure of lightweight gravitas to anchor a TV series; it was like watching a sci-fi version of “The Virginian” or “Kung Fu” or “Baretta.” And in “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the deluxe movie version of the series, he’s every bit as cozy and compact a figure.
The Mandalorian, whose real name is Din Djarian (but he’s usually called Mando), is a slightly forbidding dude in dark armor and a geometric breastplate, with a voice of ominous neutrality that’s been slightly electronically altered, which gives him a mild Darth Vader echo, though this is no villain — he’s more like Darth Nicer. In his gun-wielding invincibility, he may remind you a bit of RoboCop, though with a flourish of “Star Wars” valor; call him Han Robo. On the rare occasions when he takes off his helmet, we see the mustached face of Pedro Pascal, who is such an agreeable actor that you may have trouble re-imagining him as a badass.
And though Din Djarian has a touch of revenge-thriller mercilessness about him, that’s more than offset by the fact that his apprentice and symbolic son is Grogu, an infant member of the same humanoid-alien species as Yoda. Grogu never speaks; he just coos like the Snuggle Bear from the fabric-softener commercials. But what I’ve always found slightly absurd about him is that in “The Empire Strikes Back,” the whole idea of how Yoda looked — shriveled skin, wisps of white hair, deeply furrowed high forehead — emerged from the fact that he was a wizened, ancient, 900-year-old master of the Force. He was a very old man. So it makes absolutely no sense that an infant version of him — a character originally known as Baby Yoda — would look like that. (Yoda’s furrows reflected 900 years of thinking.) I bring this up only to make the point that that’s how possessed the Lucas universe had become with creating toys and dolls to market.
All that said, Grogu, like Din Djarian, is what he is: an unabashed TV-friendly mascot-product. These two were made for the small screen, where they can intersect with the narrative tentacles of other “Star Wars” series, like “Ahsoka” and “The Book of Boba Fett.” The ironic reason I would say they translate just fine to the big screen is that they bring with them our collective sense of lowered expectations. I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.
In the opening set piece, Mando, who has been hired to hunt down the remnants of the Empire forces that are still scattered across the galaxy (the film is set roughly a year after the end of the original “Star Wars” trilogy), invades one such enclave. He shoots the place up and lays waste to a couple of All Terrain Walkers — the dinosaur-like giant armored combat vehicles that were so cool in “The Empire Strikes Back,” and that now adorn the series like an iconic hood ornament. This battle has spectacle, but the rest of the movie is really a crime thriller in “Star Wars” drag.
Back at the New Republic base camp, Mando is given a mission by Col. Ward, played by newcomer Sigourney Weaver with a snappish “Yes, I belong in a ‘Star Wars’ movie…but not totally” hauteur. He’s to journey to Nal Hutta, swampy home planet of the Hutts, and arrange to rescue Rotta the Hutt (son of the deceased crime lord Jabba the Hutt), who has been taken prisoner. Rotta is voiced by Jeremy Allen White with a cocksure geniality that makes him the first bro Hutt. Mando will return Rotta in exchange for a crucial piece of information. At least, that’s the plan. But you can’t trust the Hutts. And who would, given that every one of them looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon crossed with a giant slug melted into a pile of excrement?
Rotta has been made into a gladiatorial fighter, bound to a contract by Janu (Jonny Coyne), the warlord gangster. Mando frees him soon enough (after a funny encounter with a four-armed simian food-truck chef voiced with high anxiety by Martin Scorsese). He also succeeds in capturing Janu, though that just sets up the film’s real battle: between the Mandalorian and Grogu and Rotta’s relatives, known as the Twins. They have plenty of power to unleash on Mando, who will be placed in a water pit, where he faces off against a dragon-snake (a very fleshy set of jaws), who bites and poisons him, which means it’s now up to Grogu to rescue his master, which he does with the aplomb of an even more cuddly Ewok.
Will audiences go into “The Mandalorian and Grogu” expecting a full-blown “‘Star Wars’ movie?” I’d say yes…and no. Will they turn out for it in the requisite numbers? By nudging “The Mandalorian” onto the big screen, Disney, the purveyor of the “Star Wars” multiverse, is offering nothing more (or less) than a couple of likable, diverting, semi-forgettable episodes jammed together, albeit with the lavishly scaled action of a big-budget movie adventure. Yet there’s no escaping that “The Mandalorian and Grogu” comes at us with a tidy small-screen consciousness. The upshot is that maybe that’s what “Star Wars” now is.
Fans may now have a sense of when Avengers: Doomsdaycould eventually get a release window for its streaming debut on Disney+. While Doomsday is still over half a year away from its worldwide premiere, it is expected to be Disney’s biggest 2026 release by a wide margin. Following what should be a massive run at the box office, some are looking ahead to when it will be available to watch at home.
Disney confirmed that Avatar: Fire and Ash will begin streaming on Disney+ on June 24. This date will be just over six months after the threequel debuted in theaters on December 19, 2025 (188 days). Director James Cameron’s third Pandora-based epic became the third-highest-grossing movie of the year at just under $1.5 billion worldwide.
Disney
Based on this date, Avengers: Doomsday is expected to follow a similar Disney+ release schedule, likely arriving on the streaming service in late June 2027, after its December 18 release. Both films were or will be released under the Disney umbrella in December of their respective years. Also, like Fire and Ash, experts predict Doomsday to be the most successful movie of the year at the box office. While Avatar 3 ranked behind Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2 at the worldwide box office, it was in heavy contention for that title.
This would be the longest gap between theatrical and streaming releases for any movie released in the MCU’s Multiverse Saga. Previously, the longest gap between any movie from Phase 4 through Phase 6 was 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which arrived on Disney+ on November 12, 2024, 109 days after its July 26, 2024, theatrical premiere.
Behind Robert Downey Jr.’s return as Doctor Doom, dozens of MCU stars and Marvel legacy actors will join forces in Avengers: Doomsday as the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and more will unite to protect the multiverse.
How Disney Plus Will Navigate Avengers: Doomsday’s Streaming Release
Marvel Studios
Since the start of the Multiverse Saga, Disney has faced complaints from fans about how quickly some of the MCU’s biggest movies have moved from theaters to Disney+. After Black Widow was released in theaters and on Disney+ on the same day in 2021, MCU films have usually come to Disney+ two to three months after they are initially brought to theaters.
The seven MCU movies released since the end of 2022 have all had theatrical-to-streaming release timeframes of at least 80 days, and the last three have all had at least 100-day gaps. That group includes a few of the MCU’s best-reviewed movies from recent years, including Thunderbolts* (88% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (86% Tomatometer score).
Doomsday is arguably the MCU’s most anticipated movie since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, as the first four trailers accumulated over 1 billion combined views. Considering this, Disney is sure to want to make the most out of Doomsday‘s exclusive theatrical run, especially without the benefit of IMAX screenings in its opening weeks. In fact, the studio even created a competitor to IMAX called InfinityVision for Doomsday‘s release, which should be heavily used in marketing.
The Avengers sequel could easily shatter Deadpool & Wolverine‘s current record for the longest theatrical-to-streaming release gap, with many expecting it to come close to Avatar: Fire and Ash‘s 188-day gap. While the specifics of Doomsday‘s Disney+ release are not expected to be confirmed until 2027, it should be one of the studio’s most prominent theatrical exclusives months after its debut.
Samuel L. Jackson as Russell Lee Washington Jr. in Tulsa King Season 3Paramount+
Samuel L. Jackson‘s performances have earned him widespread acclaim as one of cinema’s most compelling (and profitable) actors. He has demonstrated his incredible acting range through a vast array of roles – from playing spymaster Nick Fury in the MCU to starring as Jedi Master Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and voicing superhero Frozone in The Incredibles. His next movie role positions him as a wealthy criminal mastermind, leading the high-profile action thriller Just Play Dead, and it shouldn’t be too long before audiences get to meet him, as the project has just scored a major release update.
Samuel L. Jackson as Jack Wolfe and Eva Green as Nora Wolfe in Just Play DeadHighland Film Group
Nintendo has a new mobile game on the way, which will turn your selfies into quirky WarioWare-esque minigames. The game is called Pictonico!, and will release on May 28 for Android and iPhone.
Pictonico! was co-developed by Intelligent Systems, the studio behind the WarioWare series of games, and that influence is clear from the minigames Nintendo has teased so far. The main difference is that Pictonico’s minigames pull faces from your photos, warping real people into its absurd minigames.
When setting up the game, you can either snap a photo in the moment or pull an existing picture from your gallery–meaning friends, family, or even your favorite celebrities could be subjected to the indignity of starring in a WarioWare-style game.
I’m not sure there’s an actor synonymous with one genre the way John Wayne is with Westerns. He spent decades defining the genre, playing stoic heroes in cinematic landmarks like The Searchers and Stagecoach.
There is no American myth without him, and despite a complicated legacy, he is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars ever.
And despite carrying the Western genre on his back for nearly half a century, “The Duke” won exactly one competitive Academy Award in his entire career. And it wasn’t for a sweeping, poetic John Ford masterpiece.
It was for Henry Hathaway’s 1969 Western, True Grit.
In True Grit, Wayne stepped into the dusty boots of Rooster Cogburn, and maybe the best of Wayne came out.
He was used to playing heroes, but this was a distinct antihero.
Cogburn was a fat, one-eyed, hard-drinking, trigger-happy U.S. Marshal who was hired by a fierce 14-year-old girl named Mattie Ross to track down her father’s killer.
Wayne lumbered in not as the moral compass of the movie, but the person willing to embody the lawless nature of the Wild West via lawman.
Yet, it worked beautifully.
The performance balanced broad comedy with genuine menace. You got several different classic character archetypes while completely subverting expectations of who we knew Wayne as, and these characters are well.
The reason this movie works so well is that Wayne’s chemistry with Kim Darby (Mattie) and a young Glen Campbell (La Boeuf) really brought out the subtle aspects of the story that gave each person more to play with in their performance.
Old Hollywood vs. The New Wave
To understand why Wayne won the Oscar at the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970, you have to look at what was happening to the film industry at the time.
Hollywood was undergoing a massive seismic shift. The “New Hollywood” era was exploding, bringing gritty, counter-culture, avant-garde films to the mainstream.
Just look at who Wayne was up against in the Best Actor category that year:
Dustin Hoffman – Midnight Cowboy
Jon Voight – Midnight Cowboy
Peter O’Toole – Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Richard Burton – Anne of the Thousand Days
Midnight Cowboy actually went on to win Best Picture, cementing a massive shift in how Hollywood viewed independent filmmaking styles.
And even the mythos of the genre that Wayne had created.
But the town wasn’t quite ready to let the past go.
Wayne had recently survived a brutal bout with lung cancer and had lost a lung and several ribs in the process. He was the titan of a dying era of studio filmmaking that many voters viewed as a literal last gasp from that older era.
Wayne won his Best Actor Oscar and did so, showcasing a vulnerable side that I’;m not sure the town had seen or knew was in him.
Here’s a fun piece of trivia that might surprise you: John Wayne didn’t even think True Grit was his best work.
In a brutally honest 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne admitted that he didn’t consider the film to be in his personal top five.
Instead, he favored his collaborations with legendary directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks, mostly because those films required much tighter blocking and directing techniques to build tension.
And for me, I think his best performance was in The Shootist, which was his final film and is worth checking out.
1969 vs. 2010: A Tale of Two Roosters
Of course, True Grit was remade by the Coen brothers in 2010, and they absolutely nailed it, too.
They cast Jeff Bridges as Cogburn in their 2010 adaptation. For anyone studying the art of the remake, comparing these two versions is a goldmine.
I think they’re both great for distinct reasons, and they show how each filmmaker took Charles Portis’s novel and made it their own.
And I think it says something that each actor was given a chance to win an Oscar for the Rooster role.
Feature
1969 Version (Henry Hathaway)
2010 Version (The Coen Brothers)
Tone
Colorful, bombastic, traditional Hollywood Western
John Wayne’s Oscar win proves a fundamental truth about the entertainment industry: star power, a good industry narrative, and subverting your own brand matter just as much as any sort of marketing.
If you can get people to buy in, you will not only have a hit on your hands, but you’ll have an awards movie that can enter the annals of history.
YouTube reclaimed the top spot in Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge in March with a 13.5% share of TV viewing. The move comes as total time spent streaming during the month fell 7% to a share of 47.6%.
The Alphabet-owned video platform added a half-point to its share despite viewing volume declining about 3%. Trailing behind in second was Disney with a 10.5% share, which was driven by ABC’s coverage of the Oscars and a record 5.3% share for its streaming properties.
NBCUniversal and Versant finished in third with a combined share of 8.4%. The former made up 6.1% of the total, while the latter made up 2.3%. Peacock also climbed 19% year-over-year for a total share of 1.8%. Netflix finished fourth with an 8.2% share, driven primarily by the latest season of “Bridgerton.”
Paramount rounded out the top five with an 8.1% share and had the second largest monthly gain of any media distributor, driven by March Madness coverage as well as CBS’ “60 Minutes” and dramas “Tracker” and “The Marshals.” CBS represented seven of the top 10 broadcast telecasts for the month. Paramount’s streaming properties finished the month with a 2.2% share.
Courtesy of Nielsen
Fox finished the month at a 7.2% share, driven by a heavy news cycle, including Fox News Channel’s State of the Union coverage. Tubi ended the month with a 2.2% share.
Warner Bros. Discovery ranked in seventh at 6.1%, but saw the largest monthly gain among media distributors for the month, driven by increases at CNN and HBO Max, as well as NCAA basketball tournament coverage on TBS, TNT and TruTV. “The Pitt” and March Madness simulcasts drove WBD’s streaming properties to a 1.4% share for the month.
Rounding out the remainder of the list was Amazon at 3.8%; The Roku Channel at 3%, the highest annual viewing increase of any distributor; Scripps at 1.7%, Weigel Broadcasting at 1.4%, A+E Networks at 1%, Hallmark at 0.8% and AMC Networks at 0.7%.
“Bridgerton” topped March’s streaming titles with 7.8 billion viewing minutes, while “The Pitt” clocked 5.7 billion viewing minutes, becoming the second-most streamed title for the month.
“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Bluey,” “Zootopia 2” and “Family Guy” represented four of the top 10 streaming titles in March and amassed over 16 billion viewing minutes across the month. The Hulu original series “Paradise” ranked just outside of the top 10 titles with 3.6 billion minutes.
Courtesy of Nielsen
Meanwhile, broadcast finished the month with a 20.3% share, while cable ended the month at 21.4%.
Cable was the only category to record a monthly viewing increase in March, resulting in its largest share since October 2025. The increase was driven by cable news, which represented 29% of the category’s viewership for the month, and the return of the NCAA basketball tournaments.
The largest monthly uptick across age demographics came from 18-24 year-old viewers, whose viewing jumped 8%, likely driven by March Madness.
The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green was far and away the highest paid CEO among the top publicly traded adtech companies last year, according to a dataset of regulatory filings compiled by executive intelligence firm Equilar and reviewed by ADWEEK. The dataset included 22 companies out of which 15 were major adtech companies like AppLovin and Criteo. Seven were agency holding companies including Omnicom and Publicis.
Green’s total compensation stretched to $27.4 million, SEC records show. That’s 53.8% higher than the median compensation of an S&P 500 CEO.
Compensation among publicly traded adtech CEOs was relatively stable from 2024 to 2025, though a handful of major outliers reshaped the rankings, the data indicates.
For Yukiko Sode, the challenge wasn’t pressure – it was pleasure. Adapting Mieko Kawakami’s introspective novel “All the Lovers in the Night” for the screen meant externalizing a protagonist’s inner world, a task the director describes not as burden but as sustained creative exploration.
“It was certainly a challenge to find a way to externalize the protagonist’s first-person introspection from the novel. But if anything, what stayed with me was the enjoyment of the process – continually exploring how to shape and articulate it cinematically,” Sode says.
The film premieres in Un Certain Regard at Cannes this month, arriving at a moment when Japan serves as the Marché du Film’s Country of Honor. For Sode, the timing carries dual significance.
“I am deeply honored that the film has been selected for Un Certain Regard in a year when Japanese cinema is in the spotlight. More than that, however, I value the opportunity for the film’s strength to be tested – how far it can reach across borders and cultures,” she says.
Kawakami’s novel centers on Fuyuko, a freelance proofreader whose solitary routine shifts after meeting Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher. The screen version stars Yukino Kishii opposite Tadanobu Asano, a pairing Sode pursued with specific intent.
“It was important that they feel like two people on the margins of the world – almost invisible, overlooked by everyone. As actors of immense talent whose profession is to be seen, I imagine this was no easy task, yet they responded beautifully. They carried a presence that felt as if they had been born into these roles,” the director says.
The film’s pacing reflects its protagonist’s experience – slow stretches punctuated by subtle transformation.
“As for the rhythm that runs through the film, it may divide opinion – whether one feels that nothing is happening, or that something is always unfolding. I see this not as a story about the two of them, Fuyuko and Mitsutsuka, but as a portrait of a woman’s everyday life after she falls in love. She isn’t thinking about romance twenty-four hours a day, so by giving more time to moments that don’t involve Mitsutsuka, I felt we could more clearly convey the subtle shifts in her daily life,” Sode says.
Building Fuyuko’s interior landscape on screen required tools beyond performance. Sode and her team leaned into cinematography, lighting, production design, and costume to express what dialogue couldn’t carry.
On adapting a novel with an established readership, Sode rejects the notion of special responsibility attached to Kawakami’s name specifically. The tension, she suggests, is inherent to any adaptation.
“I didn’t feel any particular pressure simply because it was a novel by Mieko Kawakami. Adapting an existing work always comes with a certain sense of tension, regardless of how well-known the original is. But as I continue writing, a screenwriter’s ego inevitably emerges. So I approach the process by holding both respect for the original and my own ego in balance, aiming to let them merge to the point where the boundary between what is drawn from the source and what is my own begins to dissolve,” she says.
The film occupies territory between romance and psychological study, a tonal balance Sode navigated by viewing romantic feeling as inseparable from broader human need.
“I see romantic feelings as something intertwined with other human desires – intimacy toward family and friends, attachment, the desire for recognition, self-expansion, and the urge to fill a sense of lack. For that reason, I found myself working hard to shape the film within the framework of a romance. It ultimately came together as a romance because of the actors’ remarkable performances. Thanks to them, I came to believe in those emotions myself,” the director says.
Asked to describe her thematic preoccupations as a filmmaker, Sode offers a succinct formulation.
“I’m interested in what is shaped by social norms, and in the distance between that and the individual,” she says.
That interest informs how Sode positions “All the Lovers in the Night” within Japan’s current international visibility. While narrative-driven films addressing social issues dominate contemporary Japanese cinema, her film pursues a different kind of relevance.
“In recent years, even in Japan, films that deal with social issues or contemporary topics, or that are driven by strong, plot-led narratives, have become mainstream. Such works certainly offer a way for audiences to understand present-day Japan, but I see this film as contemporary in a different sense. Living in a society saturated with information, how can we come to feel ‘there is something about you that only I can see,’ ‘a version of myself that only you can know,’ and ‘this very love – this one, here and now – is truly singular’? Even though our clothes, our dates, and the words we use to express love are all, in a way, quotations from social norms…Through a single relationship, the film explores this seesaw between the particular and the universal, and I hope that is something audiences outside Japan can also connect with,” Sode says.
Long before I had the language to decipher the music I liked and the music I couldn’t stand, kompa ballads were already swirling in my head and commanding the rooms I walked into–banquet halls full of oscillating hips and outstretched arms and collared shirts drenched in sweat. Being of Haitian descent means understanding kompa music by osmosis, often starting in early childhood when your mom or tatie drags you to dance during some ten-minute Sweet Micky song. The shuffling, click-clacking rhythms, twangy basslines, and pearly synths of my parents’ home country have only sounded better with time.
On “Little Haiti,” B0YG1RL, the Miami-based singer-producer duo, take the genre’s gooey percussive sway and kitschy electronica and push the gain into the stratosphere. Kompa has never sounded this distorted or ethereal. Vocalist June Vinette’s trancelike call and response summons all the life-or-death romanticism of a classic Haitian love song. “Ou c’est sèl bagay m bezwen,” he sings. “Cherie lanmou mwen, mwen bezwen viv bò kote m.” (“You are the only thing I need/My darling, I need you to live by my side.”) In one fell swoop, I’m transported back to late-night soirees watching my parents rock back and forth together, only this time I won’t need any convincing to join them on the dancefloor.
A collection of AI-generated short films drawn from erotic magazine photo spreads published 50 years ago has made its debut on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival, streaming on Cultpix with a physical release on BluRay and VHS from Klubb Super 8 to follow.
The project was developed by Thomas Meier of Norwegian company Multiformat, who used generative AI tools to transform 1976 magazine photo spreads into full motion video with colour, synchronised sound, dialogue and voice-over. A physical release on BluRay and VHS will follow from Klubb Super 8, including a limited VHS edition.
“We want to use the latest technology to stimulate a discussion about attitudes to images that are now half a century old,” Cultpix CEO and Co-Founder Rickard Gramfors said. “What was once considered shocking ‘adult’ material now seems remarkably innocent by today’s standards. By bringing these static images to life through AI, we’re creating a conversation between past risqué aesthetics and new technology, exploring how our attitudes to the human body and sexuality have evolved over fifty years.”
The Cannes announcement arrives as the festival screened a restored print of Ken Russell’s “The Devils” (1971), a film that faced heavy censorship on its original release and remains a touchstone for debates around artistic freedom and sexuality on screen.
The films land amid growing academic and curatorial interest in vintage erotica. Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles earlier this year presented an “Eros” season paying tribute to the theater’s history as an adult cinema in the 1970s. The Swedish Film Institute’s Cinemateket, meanwhile, hosted Svenska Synden – a retrospective examining how Swedish cinema’s permissive approach to nudity and sexuality became an international phenomenon that alarmed censors around the world.
Cultpix launched in April 2021 and positions itself as the world’s largest cult and genre streaming platform – one that has championed the movies that populated drive-in and grindhouse circuits, from horror and science fiction to martial arts and spaghetti westerns. The platform has maintained a curated strand of vintage erotica in collaboration with specialist rights holders including Something Weird Video and Vinegar Syndrome.
Sebastian Stan was here this morning to talk about his latest movie Fjord at Cannes, however, that’s hard when the last time he was here at the fest, he was playing Donald Trump.
The Avengers actor was asked how Trump has evolve since the premiere of The Apprentice two years ago. That pic world premiered at Cannes at a time before Trump was elected for a second-time. The question drew laughs.
“It’s not a laughing matter, said Stan with a grave tone.
“I think we’re in a really, really bad place,” the actor continued.
Fjord follows an immigrant Romanian family living in Norway who are subject to an investigation after their daughter comes home with bruises from school. The couple, played by Sebastian Stan and Renates Reinsve, face the scrutiny of the local judicial system.
The pic is Christian Mungiu’s seventh to play the festival. He’s won several awards here at Cannes, but he took home the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s head of strategy, celebrated with a team of lawyers in a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, after Elon’s Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company was rejected by a nine-member jury in less than two hours.
But Mr. Kwon and OpenAI cannot afford to celebrate for very long.
Although the decision left OpenAI free to continue with its plans for an initial public offering as soon as this year, the company still faces a long list of other challenges as it approaches what could be one of the largest Wall Street debuts in history.
Rival A.I. companies like Anthropic and Google are rapidly improving their technologies, giving OpenAI far more competition than it faced during the first three years of the A.I. boom. Dozens of other lawsuits accuse OpenAI of everything from copyright infringement to wrongful death. And Mr. Musk has already vowed to appeal Monday’s decision.
In a lawsuit filed in 2024, Mr. Musk accused OpenAI, its chief executive, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, of breaching the A.I. lab’s founding agreement by putting commercial gain over the public good. Mr. Musk founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, before leaving in a struggle for power.
After Mr. Musk left, Mr. Altman attached a commercial company to the original nonprofit and began raising billions of dollars from Microsoft. OpenAI is now valued at $730 billion.
Mr. Musk asked for a court order unraveling another move OpenAI made last year to give the for-profit company more control. On Monday, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury said that he had not filed his suit before the expiration of a statute of limitations. It did not actually consider his claims, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed them after the jury’s decision.
If Mr. Musk had succeeded, OpenAI’s plans to go public would have been caught in limbo. But now that its plans can move ahead, OpenAI faces significant business challenges.
Though it has raised tens of billions of dollars in funding over the past several years, OpenAI remains a long way from being profitable. Investors may expect it to close the enormous gap between how much money is heading out the door and how much it is taking in.
The company’s revenues are on the rise amid the rising popularity of Codex, an OpenAI technology that is particularly good at writing computer code. And the company has a new revenue stream now that it has started to serve ads inside ChatGPT. But the competition is doing the same.
In November, Google ratcheted up the pressure when it released a new A.I. model called Gemini 3, saying the technology had surpassed OpenAI’s leading technology and was now the best in the world. Anthropic also started grabbing big chunks of the market with its A.I. technology, called Claude.
In just a few months, Anthropic added thousands of big business customers and more than doubled the revenue it expects to see this year to $19 billion, up from $9 billion last year. A high-profile disagreement with the Defense Department raised Anthropic’s public profile, and its smartphone app climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.
Anthropic grabbed more headlines when it unveiled a new A.I. system called Claude Mythos and said the technology was too powerful to share with the general public, because hackers could use it to exploit security holes in computer networks with unusual speed. Anthropic shared the technology with only about 40 organizations, so they could use it shore up holes in common internet infrastructure.
OpenAI released its own technology designed specifically for cybersecurity. And its technologies continue to outperform most systems on the market, according to standard benchmarks. But Google is a formidable rival in the ad market. And after Anthropic’s sudden rise, OpenAI faces a battle as it tries to sell its technology to businesses.
In an effort to meet its soaring demand, Anthropic recently made a deal with Mr. Musk’s firm SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.
Google and Anthropic declined to comment on the verdict in the trial.
As OpenAI fights its rivals, it also faces myriad battles in the courts.
Book authors, publishers and news organizations have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming their copyrighted works were illegally used to train its A.I. systems. Many parents and other groups have sued the company for negligence and wrongful death, claiming that ChatGPT contributed to various suicides and school shootings.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
And despite Monday’s decision, the company still faces a legal challenge from Mr. Musk because he and his lawyers said they would appeal.
“The judge and jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” Mr. Musk said in a social media post. “There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!”
Peter Molk, a law professor at the University of Florida who specializes in corporate structures, said that while Mr. Musk lost in court on Monday, there was still a chance this case could stir anger in the court of public opinion. And that, he said, could get the attention of the state attorneys general who approved the company’s new for-profit structure.
“This could raise some concerning flags that the state attorneys general could have a reason to revisit OpenAI’s structure,” he said.
Catherine Bracy, who helps lead a coalition of organizations called EyesOnOpenAI, said people should continue to question OpenAI’s restructuring as for-profit. Ms. Bracy, who was in the courtroom for much of the trial, has long complained that California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, allowed OpenAI’s restructuring to move forward.
“In light of the mounting evidence of OpenAI’s unlawful abdication of its nonprofit mission,” she said, Mr. Bonta “must revisit his agreement with OpenAI, order an independent valuation of the nonprofit’s assets and compel their transfer to a truly independent charitable entity.”
