Entertainment

Audible has just dropped Blues Brothers: The Arc of Gratitude, a star-studded Audible Original oral history in which Dan Aykroyd tells the full story of how he and John Belushi joined musical forces in the mid-1970s. 

They turned their love of the genre into the double-Platinum 1978 album Briefcase Full of Blues, which spawned the blockbuster The Blues Brothers, starring their alter egos “Joliet” Jake and Elwood Blues.

Aykroyd tells ABC Audio Belushi initially was more of a fan of heavy metal and punk, but eventually “really committed to it.” 

Though Belushi and Aykroyd first performed Slim Harpo‘s “I’m a King Bee” on SNL in 1976, the Blues Brothers — complete with their signature look — made their SNL debut on April 22, 1978, backed by a band that included legendary musicians Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Thomas “Bones” Malone and Matt “Guitar” Murphy. 

Aykroyd recalls some early resistance from producer Lorne Michaels. “Lorne loved the bees. I think that that was what really started us was singing ‘King Bee’ with the hats and glasses and the bee costume.”

Michaels was skeptical “when we proposed the idea of expanding it out,” Aykroyd says. “And I think Lorne was convinced by some of the members of the band that this is a real thing. … And I think Lorne saw the heat of it eventually and of course fully got behind it.”

The Blues Brothers film in 1980 starred the band, and featured performances from icons like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker and James Brown. 

“The Blues Brothers aren’t really the star of The Blues Brothers,” Aykroyd admits. “It’s Aretha, it’s Ray, it’s John Lee Hooker. It’s those venerable artists, and it’s in our band today. And yesterday.” 

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Entertainment Weekly has a sneak peek of The Penguin, Max’s spin-off from Matt Reeves‘ blockbuster The Batman. 

Reeves is producing the small-screen project centering on the ascent of Colin Farrell‘s Oz aka Penguin. Farrell tells the magazine, “I loved doing the part in the Batman film and the idea that we would get spoiled by having eight hours to really delve into this character’s psychology and backstory. Backstory plays a big part in the television show.”

Lead writer and showrunner Lauren LeFranc calls the show “a Scarface story,” adding, “It’s a rise-to-power story of Oz before he really makes it to the top.”

Set a week after the events of The Batman, which ended with Paul Dano‘s The Riddler flooding Gotham, LeFranc says, “We’re living in the underbelly of the city. … We’re in Oz’s world.”

LeFranc explains the show is a “bridge” between the Robert Pattinson blockbuster and Reeves’ anticipated sequel. “We’re going almost directly into the second film Matt has planned.”

The Penguin debuts on Max this September.

The Batman – Part II hits theaters on Oct. 3, 2025.

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If you’ve never heard of Skibidi Toilet, there’s a good chance you don’t have anyone under the age of 15 living in your house, but the viral sensation has just attracted one of the biggest blockbuster producers in Hollywood.

Variety says Michael Bay is developing a film and a TV franchise around the property, which began in 2023, when a 23-year-old from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia named Alexey Gerasimov uploaded to YouTube an 11-second video of an animated head singing from a toilet. 

Those humble beginnings have turned into nearly 80 mini films, with hundreds of millions of views the world over, and games, detailing a war between the toilet head folks and cyborgs known as Cameraheads. 

The trade says Bay and Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman are collaborating on the project. 

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The “Joy” buttons are being mashed in the minds of Disney executives, with the news that Inside Out 2 has just become the highest-grossing animated film in history. 

The Disney/Pixar hit’s global take has passed the $1.46 billion mark, nudging out the previous record holder, 2019’s Frozen II, which made more than $1.45 billion during its run. 

Deadline points out that Disney has seven of the top 10 animated films of all time on its resume, with five of those being collabs with Pixar.

Inside Out 2 was the first 2024 film to cross $100 million in its opening weekend back in June. The sequel features the voices of Amy Poehler, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, Maya Hawke, Tony Hale and Paul Walter Hauser.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

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In 2017, Hugh Jackman hung up his Wolverine claws for good with the Oscar-nominated Logan. 

However, as the story goes, he saw his buddy Ryan Reynolds‘ original Deadpool in theaters and started to feel he’d made a mistake, potentially shorting fans on their fan-favorite comics tag team. 

Fast forward to today, and Deadpool & Wolverine is headed to theaters Friday.

For Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, that proves anything is possible — including taking up Robert Downey Jr. on a potential return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after his Tony Stark’s world-saving sacrifice in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. 

Although Downey was initially cool on the idea — and Feige told Vanity Fair he’d never “magically undo” Iron Man’s Endgame‘s sacrifice — as reported, Downey had a change of heart. 

So has Feige, he tells Discussing Film, but there’s a but. “How do you do it in a way that maintains what has come before, and in a great way? And we’ve been spending, you know, the last two-plus years figuring that out for Wolverine.” 

He adds, “We’re just proud that we … have figured it out for Wolverine. I think Hugh’s appearance and starring role … is a great sign that it can be done — if great care is taken.”

Indeed, without giving away spoilers, Deadpool & Wolverine brings a veritable toy box full of superheroes back to the big screen, so as Feige says, ” … what’s to come? We’ll see.”

Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.

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Throughout its award-winning run, HBO’s Game of Thrones introduced viewers to hundreds of characters, which might be a tall order for someone who is trying to binge.

However, for the approximately 1 in 50 who live with prosopagnosia — or face blindness — it’s even tougher.

The show’s deep bench of characters is one of the reasons scientists out of England’s University of York used the series to study the condition that, as its name suggests, causes people to be unable to recognize faces.

Kira Noad, the lead author of the study and a PhD student at the university’s Department of Psychology, said: “We chose to show participants footage from Game of Thrones because the series captivated people around the world with its strong characters and their deeply nuanced personalities.”

The scientists scanned the brains of people as they watched the show; the test subjects included people who have seen the show and those who haven’t, and also people who have the condition and those who don’t.

The “exciting” results showed recognizing someone isn’t just skin deep, researchers say.

Senior author of the study, professor Tim Andrews, said the results “suggest that our ability to recognize faces relies on what we know about people, not just what they look like.”

He adds: “While it was believed that we recognize faces by learning their visual properties — such as features, configuration, and texture — our study indicates that it involves connecting a face with knowledge about the person, including their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them, and our feelings towards them.”

For the record, Brad Pitt says he’s one of the 1 in 50, so don’t be put off if you ever run into him and he seems aloof.

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Oscar winner Halle Berry took to social media — and took off her top — to give flowers to her 2004 movie Catwoman. 

The DC Comics-based film was slammed when it debuted, but Berry leaned into it, famously accepting her Razzie Award for Worst Actress while holding her Oscar for Best Actress in the other hand. 

In the years since, the movie that also starred Sharon Stone and Benjamin Bratt has become something of a cult classic, something she referenced in her sexy posts, for which she used a pair of kitties she adopted after finding them in her yard to protect her modesty. 

“It’s been 20 years since I had the honor of bringing this iconic character to life,” Halle began a post on social platform X.

“THANK YOU to the fans who have embraced Catwoman (even if it was a little delayed ). Patience Phillips [her character] is finally getting her due. Meow.”

To a similar Insta post, Berry wrote, “She will always be close to my heart and I will forever be Patience Phillips aka CATWOMAN!”

Entertainment Weekly recently published an oral history of the film, in which Berry talked about the backlash at the time. 

“Being a Black woman, I’m used to carrying negativity on my back, fighting, being a fish swimming upstream by myself,” she told the magazine.

“I’m used to defying stereotypes and making a way out of no way … I went and collected that Razzie, laughed at myself, and kept it moving,” she continued. 

“A little bad publicity about a movie? I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t going to stop my world or derail me from doing what I love to do.”

She insisted the Catwoman “experience changed me,” adding she went from being a dog person to a cat lover “because of that experience and those relationships.”

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We are finally getting our first real look at Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan.

The first trailer for the upcoming Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, has just been released, and not only do we get to see Chalamet as Dylan, we get to hear him sing as Dylan as well.

The clip opens with Ed Norton as Pete Seeger talking about Dylan to an audience.

“Let me tell you a little story, a few months back my friend Woody Guthrie and I, we met a young man, he dropped in on us out of nowhere and he played us a song,” Norton shares. “In that moment we got a feeling we were getting a glimpse of the future.” 

As he’s talking, we see Dylan’s back as he walks through the streets of New York, before it cuts to Dylan singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to an audience. There are then more images of Dylan in New York, as well as clips of Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez.

It ends with Dylan looking up at Seeger, and saying, “that’s all I got so far,” with a kid telling him, “good start,” before the opening chords of “Like a Rolling Stone” kick in.

“Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s,” reads the film’s description, “A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.”

So far there’s no release date for A Complete Unknown, although the description says it will be in theaters this December.

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Tori Spelling is “grateful” that she was able to have one last conversation with Shannen Doherty before her death from cancer at 53 on July 13.

On the latest episode of her 90210MG podcast with their former Beverly Hills, 90210 co-star Jennie Garth, titled “Remembering Shannen Doherty,” Spelling described her conversation with Doherty as a “second chance.”

“I’ve had a lot of death in my life,” Tori said. “And I don’t believe in regrets, but I have a lot of regrets that I didn’t have that time to have a second chance to get past stuff from the past and look at all the good things and really talk it out and have that last conversation.”

“And I feel like she and I had that and I’m super grateful for that,” she added.

Spelling, who didn’t share much about what she and Doherty talked about in their final conversation together, said that she “didn’t feel ready” emotionally to talk about the death of her friend but wanted to do the episode for the fans.

“She was not just their childhood friend that they had grown up watching, but she was someone so strong, such a fighter and going through so much that on some level they could relate to her,” Spelling said about Doherty’s fans. “She was that person for them, that mentor to look up to, to keep going.”

“I feel like I got so much strength from just knowing her as a young girl, growing up beside her for the years that I did,” Garth said about Doherty. “And I learned a lot, about how to stand up for myself, how to fight for things that I believed in.”

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The Veil star Josh Charles has been tapped for a role in the sixth and final season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, according to Deadline. It marks a reunion with his Veil co-star Elisabeth Moss, who also stars in the series. Details on the upcoming season, as well as Charles’ role, are being kept under wraps. The Handmaid’s Tale season 6, which begins filming later the year, is set to premiere in 2025 …

Focus Pictures has set March 14 as the premiere date for Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Black Bag, according to Variety. The film stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, along with Regé-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Pierce Brosnan. Plot details are being kept under wraps …

Jon Hamm is set to executive produce and star in the scripted podcast series Dungeon Masters, according to Deadline. Wil Wheaton, Supernatural‘s Felicia Day, Game of Thrones‘ Kristian Nairn, Adam Ruins Everything‘s Emily Axford, Ms. Marvel‘s Anjali Bhimani and Captain Marvel‘s Mark Daugherty also star in the series, launching Aug. 12 …

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