Entertainment
Entertainment, explained daily: the document behind the headline, the figure with its unit, and who pays. From on the article.
- Days of Thunder 2 has a date, a director, and Maverick’s shadow — Cruise and Hathaway’s Days of Thunder sequel arrives June 2028, chasing a $1.5 billion benchmark it may not clear.
- An 88-year-old director wants one more Alien movie than the fans do — Scott is developing a third Covenant film while two rival Alien projects already outperform his recent entries.
- Lively asked for $8m in fees. The judge gave her 5 percent. — A judge cut Blake Lively’s $8m attorney-fee claim to $407,451, ruling media relations don’t count as legal defense.
- Four critics, four verdicts: what $110 million actually bought — Ridley Scott’s postapocalyptic drama split critics from “misfire” to “his best since The Martian” — the budget explains why.
- A documentary about a talk show, not its host — Peacock’s new Wendy Williams series covers 2008 to 2022 — the show’s run, not her guardianship or diagnoses.
- Ruffalo’s target isn’t Israel. It’s a $40.4 billion backstop. — Ruffalo says he’s scrutinizing Oracle’s Israeli military contracts, not Jewish people; Paramount calls it antisemitic.
- An R-rating cost The Odyssey the opening. Legs won it back. — The Odyssey’s $1.352 billion win over Deadpool & Wolverine came from a slower, longer, more international run.
- The Walk of Fame star costs $75,000. Who pays? — Lea Salonga's Walk of Fame star, the first for a Filipina performer, comes with a specific price tag and sponsor.
- A production house closed. The reason is a balance sheet — A Los Angeles production company shut down this month, citing an industry contraction the trade data has been showing for two years.
- Hollywood’s new writers room is sixty seconds long — Vertical microdramas are pulling TikTok money into scripted content, and studios are chasing a format built for phones, not screens.
- The Golden Globes lawsuit is about who owns “Hollywood” — The Hollywood Foreign Press Association's dissolution left a $150 million question: who gets to keep selling the Globes' name.
- Hollywood failed its own child stars, actuarially — Hayden Panettiere's death revives a decade of documented findings on the industry's youngest earners.
- The living-room screen belongs to creators now — The biggest screen in the house increasingly plays creator video. Television’s successor arrived from below.
- Dynamic pricing turned the gig into a market — Concert tickets now float like airfares. Where the money goes, and what the queue is actually for.
- Live service is eating its young — A handful of forever-games absorb most playtime, and the shutdown list grows. The gaming middle is the casualty.
- Most of what gets streamed is old music now — Catalog listening outweighs new releases by a wide margin, and the economics of pop are reorganising around it.
- The $40 million movie is back, on a spreadsheet — Mid-budget films are returning because the arithmetic of blockbusters stopped working reliably.
- Four streamers is where the market is settling — Households cap their subscriptions, services bundle, and the streaming wars end the way cable did.