The Weekend · The culture and wellbeing desk
Interested in the business behind the screen, not the gossip in front of it.
- 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.
- Arm cycling helped hearts in spinal cord injury. Nobody measured if life got easier — Cochrane reviewed 17 trials of exercise after spinal cord injury; fitness rose, but daily function stayed unmeasured well.
- 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.
- A pill for dermatomyositis arrives with no augmentation-therapy caveat attached — The FDA approved brepocitinib for dermatomyositis, a disease affecting up to 70,000 Americans with no dedicated drug until now.
- 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.
- The IV drip that treats a deficiency and adds exacerbations — Cochrane found intravenous AAT therapy raised yearly exacerbations to 1,960 per 1,000 people, versus 1,420 on placebo.
- 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.
- No cancer screening guideline covers a nursing home resident — No major guideline addresses long-term care residents; 8.1% of women 75+ reach stage 4 breast cancer.
- 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.
- Two patch materials, one operation, no clear winner after 4,971 patients — Synthetic and biological neck-artery patches show no meaningful difference in stroke or death risk after 80 months.
- 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.
- The advanced-cancer drop that got smaller under a magnifying glass — Adjunctive ultrasound cut advanced breast cancer by 1.08% vs 1.14% at 180 months in Japan’s J-START trial.
- 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.
- Three minutes of sprinting beat 45 minutes of jogging, on paper — A trial found short sprints alter more blood proteins tied to metabolic health than long moderate exercise sessions do.
- 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.
- “Wellness Month” has no owner and no metric — August's "National Wellness Month" has no federal registry, no funder disclosure, and no way to measure if it works.
- 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.
- Your fitness tracker may be stressing you out — A new survey links constant health tracking to anxiety. The data on why is more specific than the headline.
- 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.
- Ferrero bought Purely Elizabeth. Here’s what that means — Ferrero paid $850 million for a granola brand. The math on "healthy" acquisitions rarely tracks with what's inside the box.
- 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.
- Your doctor’s office now wants your Apple Watch data — Health systems are pulling wearable data into patient records. The evidence for what that improves is thinner than the pitch.
- Hollywood failed its own child stars, actuarially — Hayden Panettiere's death revives a decade of documented findings on the industry's youngest earners.
- The $60 billion aisle with a one-page evidence file — Most supplements sold have no demonstrated benefit for the people buying them. The exceptions are knowable.
- The living-room screen belongs to creators now — The biggest screen in the house increasingly plays creator video. Television’s successor arrived from below.
- Ten thousand steps was marketing. Seven thousand holds up. — The famous target came from a pedometer ad. The dose-response research found the real curve.
- 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.
- The ice bath, measured in effect sizes — Cold plunges promise everything. The trial literature supports a shorter, more interesting list.
- 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.
- Protein is having a decade. The evidence is narrower. — Protein sells everything from water to cereal. What the requirement research actually supports.
- 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.
- Your sleep score is a guess in a nice font — Wearables measure movement and pulse well, sleep stages poorly, and the anxiety they generate has a name.
- The $40 million movie is back, on a spreadsheet — Mid-budget films are returning because the arithmetic of blockbusters stopped working reliably.
- The weight-loss drugs are rewriting grocery maths — GLP-1 medicines changed appetites at population scale, and the food industry is re-running its forecasts.
- Four streamers is where the market is settling — Households cap their subscriptions, services bundle, and the streaming wars end the way cable did.