Entertainment

The release of Coyote vs. Acme is starting to look more likely as Warner Bros. has been negotiating with a distributor to sell them the shelved project. The Coyote vs. Acme movie was originally cancelled by Warner Bros. in November 2023 for a tax write-off despite being complete. However, the movie started getting shopped to potential distributors after public backlash. By April 2024, it seemed the studio was unable to come to agreeable terms with potential buyers, leaving the movie shelved for the foreseeable future. However, it had not been outright cancelled despite a lack of news about its fate.

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In recent weeks, several Hollywood studios and entertainment companies pulled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives following pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration. Despite this, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists reaffirmed its support for diversity reform.

In a resolution passed by the SAG-AFTRA National Board Saturday, the actors union reported that the accurate portrayal of the “American Scene” is “essential to the integrity and credibility of the entertainment and media industry,” according to a letter by Fran Drescher, SAG president, and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator. In addition, the letter states that SAG diversity measures have existed since the Sixties, when the formerly known Screen Actors Guild and producers agreed to the “American Scene” clause, which affirmed a non-discrimination policy for “any actor because of race, creed, color or national origin.”

If you are cool like me, you have probably cancelled all mega-corp owned streaming services. While it is really nice managing my own media library like an adult instead of letting corpos decide arbitrarily what I can watch on a given day, that does mean I no longer have their input on new content. So I can obviously pick up on what shows and movies are hugely popular, but that's a very small fraction of what gets released and simply non-representative of what is out there waiting.

Since most search engines are rendered useless by AI spam and SEO chasers, you can't exactly just google "best goofball comedies" or you'll just end up with the same 10-15 lousy suggestions on repeat.

Where do you go to discover shows and movies?

This just in — Looney Tunes is no longer streaming on Max! The Warner Bros. show is one of many cartoon series that the platform has removed in recent times. In October 2024, fans learned that Max had taken down several big shows from the studio, including Ben 10, Chowder, Steven Universe, and Regular Show, without warning. Not just that, but Warner Bros. has also removed several of the Scooby-Doo movies from Max, along with two Tom & Jerry titles.

The exact details may never be known, but Mr. Hackman, 95 with advanced Alzheimer’s, was alone for about a week after his wife and sole caregiver died.

(Books count as Entertainment, right? If Zuckerberg has no haters, I am dead. Currently waiting in line for this book on Libby as I type this)

Meta Platforms META.O on Wednesday won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop promotion of the tell-all book "Careless People" by a former employee, according to a copy of the ruling published by the social media company.

The book by Meta's former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams, was called by the New York Times book review "an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world," and its leading executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan.

After what seems like eons, season three of Euphoria is finally in production, and has added some exciting new cast members to boot — including Spanish pop star Rosalía, who famously dated the show’s star Hunter Schafer in 2019.

(I'm sorry Beehaw but I am in LOVE with Rosalia and I am taking you down this sad bisexual girl's obsession trench with me.)

Netflix expects to spend in the neighborhood of $18 billion in cash on content in 2025 — and it sees plenty of runway to expand in the years ahead, according to Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann.

"We're not anywhere near a ceiling" with respect to content spending, said Neumann, speaking Wednesday at the 2025 Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom Conference. As a global entertainment company, he said, "I think we are still just getting started." The $18 billion cash content spending pegged for this year would be up around 11% from $16.2 billion in 2024.

Asked about how Netflix forecasts content spending, Neumann said "it's a little art and a little science." It starts with anticipated revenue, which the company has "pretty good predictability about," he said, and then Netflix looks at content spending in the context of achieving margin targets.

[...]Mazin and Druckmann knew that making Season 2 would be a far more daunting endeavor. Along with the usual pressures of following an overnight smash, "Part II" upends fundamental things fans loved about the first game. It alienates Joel and Ellie from each other, pushes the story to jaw-dropping extremes and forces players to empathize with — by playing as — the game's central antagonist, Abby (who will be played by "Dopesick" Emmy nominee Kaitlyn Dever). While "Part II" was lauded as one of the best games ever made when it debuted in June 2020, its provocations also caused a cascade of online fan fury that still percolates. On top of all that, "Part II" is such a colossal experience, taking almost twice as long to complete as "Part I," that adapting it would necessitate telling the story over multiple seasons.

None of that fazed Mazin; if anything, it made him more eager to get to work.

"One of the notes that I resent the most is 'We loved this thing — more of it, please!'" he says. "No. You love it because that's the right amount of it. When you do more, what makes it special starts to dissipate. It becomes comfort food. And if there's one thing about 'The Last of Us,' it is not comfortable."

Druckmann leans forward, turning a thought around in his head. "I hope this doesn't sound arrogant," he says. "But I think you have to have a certain level of success to have the confidence to do what we're doing, both in the game and in the show. Because on paper, it looks so risky. But this is where I love working with Craig, because he thinks like me. Sometimes, you have a feeling the story has to be this and only this, and you just have to commit."

Mazin turns to Druckmann. "If there's one thing that you and I share, we have no problem going all in. Sometimes you just move all your narrative chips into the middle and say, 'Fuck it, we're doing it.'"

It's only when I bring up the character of Abby that Mazin and Druckmann evince any apprehension about changes they've made between the game and the show. The character is much more muscular in "Part II" than Dever is on Season 2. With the violence markedly cut down from the game, the showrunners say the need for Abby to be so imposing wasn't as critical.

More importantly, Druckmann says, "Kaitlyn Dever wanted to work with us; we wanted to work with her. It's not worth passing it up to continue a search that might never bear fruit to find someone that matches the physicality."

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When Daryl Hannah let fly with a “Slava Ukraini” before presenting the Academy Award for Best Editing, it felt like an attempt to burst the comfortable bubble the Oscars had been erecting around the Dolby Theatre all evening up to that point. What Hannah said wasn’t more than an off-the-cuff reference to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but it was the first moment, 100 minutes into the ceremony’s runtime, when the tumult of the reality outside was acknowledged in more than vague terms. Host Conan O’Brien mentioned “divisive politics” in his opening monologue, the director of Flow closed out his acceptance speech by saying that, like the animals in his films, “we’re all on the same boat,” and Emilia Pérez songwriter Camille expressed the hope that her winning song “speaks to the role music and art can play and continue to play as a force of the good and progress in the world.” (In neither of the speeches for Emilia Pérez’s two wins were trans rights mentioned.) But as though by previous agreement, or maybe just because the sheer enormity of current stressors made it daunting to do justice to any particular one, this year’s Oscars were an inward-looking affair that found the industry foremost concerned with itself.

The result was the most solid Oscar broadcast in years, though that had less to do with the relative lack of recognition of what’s going on in the world than with providing reassurance that Hollywood is still good at putting on a show. The Academy Awards have had a storied, complicated relationship with politics that hinges on the myth, repeated by O’Brien tonight, that a billion people watch the telecast. With that kind of audience, participants really have no choice but to use their platform for higher purposes, even if the result sometimes feels like a forced marriage with questionable effectiveness. But that number has never been real, and if it was ever a little bit close, it certainly isn’t now that cinema, awards shows, and live TV have all slipped from cultural dominance. We’re long past the era when the Oscars could position themselves as the irresistible sugar that helps more serious messaging go down. And this year, still limping from the pandemic and the strikes, and destabilized by contractions due to streaming, the film industry was hit by the Los Angeles wildfires that laid waste to the homes of so many of its workers, and called into question the very assumption that it would continue to have a geographical center. Hollywood needed to put on a show, to put itself in the spotlight, to self-mythologize, and to use the wattage of its stars to draw attention to its less famous craftsmen.

Journalism dictates getting the name of the dog, which is not provided.

This shit's hard enough at the scale of Beehaw. Trying to do it for billions would drive me to ... oh, wait.

If at first you don't succeed ...

After a decade in the music industry as a relatively unknown indie artist, the Midwest princess catapulted to fame following her instantly iconic set at Coachella in April 2024. This was a huge adjustment for the singer-songwriter, who had never been in the spotlight before the festival, as well as having a hit single “Good Luck, Babe!” and viral TikToks and Instagram reels of her energetic live performances. But the combination of her hit song, her festival set, and her social-media presence, Roan has solidified a massive new fanbase.

In theory, this is the ideal for any pop singer, because having so many fans enables a pop star to leverage the profit that comes with visibility into gaining creative autonomy. But that also comes at a price, working in an industry that has a reputation for exploiting powerless artists by molding them into the most palatable and mainstream version of themselves for maximum earnings.

Roan’s 2024 trajectory is a great case study in how celebrity functions in America, particularly because she has had to take a crash course in balancing fame with privacy and personal space. In the beginning of 2024, Roan was able to go out in public in peace. But now, she encounters fans who demand her attention, her kindness, and her gratitude. Even more bafflingly, in September, Roan was widely criticized for not endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate, and was forced to clarify that she is critical of all people in power. When she expressed her discomfort and set boundaries around her political and social lives, she received quite a bit of backlash online from critics who felt she should be grateful for her success.

It’s the ultimate trade-off: You’re allowed to make the art you want if you sacrifice your whole self to your audience. Back in 2016, an Amy Schumer fan who was insisting the comic take a photo with him, even as she asked him to stop, articulated this dynamic perfectly. The man told her: “No, it’s America and we paid for you.” If you’re famous, the public believes they get to do whatever they want with you, as some kind of a treat in exchange for the horrors.

It's difficult to know how to react to people making ethical calls that were designed by the junta to happen.

The entire franchise’s inability to balance substance with pleasure crashes into its inept conclusion. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve hated an ending to a movie more in recent memory than this one. For the purposes of this review, I will not spoil it. But let’s just say this film imagines it’s living in a different country, nay a different world, than the reality many have experienced. It argues for unearned forgiveness while making rushed, last-second nods to the weight of Black excellence, the fight to gain a seat at the table, and the importance of representation. It not only turns its hero into a Magical Negro. In an effort to soothe white America’s anger and hurt, it also asks its hero to grin and figuratively tap dance off screen. Even as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly anthem “I,” a choice meant to elicit joy, adds a declarative note, you can’t help but feel icky. This is our Black Captain America? This is our piece of the pie?

This movie is anything but brave. It is the most feckless, spineless blockbuster of the last decade, a film in need of burning down the old world before daring to look for the new.