Entertainment

As romantic comedy classic 50 First Dates celebrates its 20th anniversary, the film’s star Drew Barrymore is revealing new details about the film’s making — including a surprising “original ending” that did not come to fruition.

Perhaps the most radical divergence from the original plan was the setting. Rather than the shores of Hawaii for the love story between Barrymore’s character, Lucy Whitmore, who suffers from memory loss after an accident, and Adam Sandler‘s Henry Roth, Barrymore said it was originally supposed to be set in the continental United States.

“It was a drama set in Seattle,” said Barrymore on The Drew Barrymore Show, to the shock of co-host Ross Mathews. Barrymore also revealed that the movie’s title had been changed from its original name, 50 First Kisses.

The film’s narrative ends with Sandler and Barrymore’s characters married, having found a way to be together while navigating Lucy’s short-term memory loss that resets each day.

“The original ending was her saying, ‘You should go and live your life, because this is no life here,'” revealed Barrymore. “And he goes away as he does, and he comes back and he walks into the restaurant and just sits down and says, ‘Hi, I’m Henry,’ and the film ends.”

“Thank you for changing it,” Mathews said to Barrymore after the big reveal.

50 First Dates hit theaters in 2004 with Sandler and Barrymore starring alongside Rob Schneider, Lusia Strus, Dan Aykroyd and more.

The Peter Segal-directed movie brought in over $196 million, according to The Numbers, a film industry data website that tracks box office revenue.

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Christine Baranski says there will be a third Mamma Mia! movie.

In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, The Gilded Age star revealed she and producer Judy Kramer recently got together, and the filmmaker revealed Mamma Mia 3 is a go. “She gave me the narrative plotline of how it’s going to happen,” the actress said.

However, Baranski added, “That’s all I can say! But, it’s not like, ‘Oh, I wish it could happen!’ Judy Kramer makes things happen. She made number two happen, and it was a phenomenal hit. I wouldn’t put it past [her] to get everybody back together.”

Indeed, the sequel to the 2008 original Abba-drenched musical, 2018’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, grossed more than $480 million worldwide against a budget of $75 million.

Getting the gang back together is no small order: The multigenerational cast also included Meryl Streep, Cher, and Colin Firth, as well as Amanda Seyfried, Andy Garcia, Lily James and Pierce Brosnan.

That said, Baranski added, “People are drawn to happiness and to joy, not doom and gloom. Mamma Mia! made so many millions of people around the world happy. Is it a little dumb, a little campy? That’s part of its charm.”

Baranski mused of a third installment, “We’ll all be on some fabulous Greek or Croatian island having a blast, I hope.”

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Sony Pictures Classics just announced that Whiplash, the drama that netted J.K. Simmons a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing possibly the world’s most insane music teacher, is headed back to theaters.

The re-release is to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the film from director Damien Chazelle, who followed up the breakout movie starring Miles Teller with the Oscar-winning La La Land.

In the movie, Teller plays Andrew Neiman, a drummer who ends up under the abusive tutelage of Simmons’ Terrence Fletcher, an instructor at an elite musical conservatory.

The film also won Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

Whiplash will also have a 4K HD Digital release on Sept. 20, following a special anniversary screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9.

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“War has come to Middle-Earth” are the first words spoken in the trailer to the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and the sneak peek that follows bears out the warning.

The streaming service teases, “This season features the long-awaited Siege of Eregion, a definitive battle in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s history of the Second Age of Middle-earth, from which not everyone makes it out alive. The banners are raised, and the devastating war against Sauron is just beginning.”

The siege is teased as a massive battle, complete with catapults, cave trolls and masses of orc warriors doing battle with the forces of good. “Eregion must not fall,” Robert Aramayo‘s elf Elrond warns. “It would be a blow for all of Middle-Earth.”

Charlie Vickers plays the cunning dark lord to be in Amazon’s series, and while he was cast out by Morfydd Clark‘s Galadriel in the first season, he “must now rely on his own cunning to rebuild his strength and oversee the creation of the Rings of Power,” Prime Video continues.

Sauron created 19 rings and distributed them to the various races of Middle-Earth as a means to bring them under the power of his One Ring. The trailer shows them already working their dark magic on the bearers.

The streaming service continues, “Friendships are strained and kingdoms begin to fracture” and “the forces of good will struggle ever more valiantly to hold on to what matters to them most of all … each other.”

The first three second-season episodes of The Rings of Power will premiere Aug. 29; new episodes stream each week until the season finale on Oct. 3.

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Sony Pictures’ newest trailer to its upcoming Marvel adaptation Kraven the Hunter really leans into the upcoming movie’s R rating.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Sergei Kravinoff, the ruthless, titular Marvel Comics villain who is historically known to be one of Spider-Man’s nemeses. In the trailer, his father Nikolai, played by Russell Crowe, tells him, “My son, we are hunters. The greatest the world has ever known.” 

While behind bars, one inmate makes the mistake of doubting the hunter “myth,” and Taylor-Johnson pounces on him and stabs him in the neck as proof.

“Embrace who you are, son, and you will become a legend,” Crowe’s character says. 

Possessing animal-like agility and strength, the trailer shows Taylor-Johnson dispatching baddies in myriad bloody ways, including turning their animal traps and snares against them. 

The footage also shows the antihero tackling a comics-accurate version of the baddie The Rhino — a hulking half man, half rhinoceros. 

The movie is set in Sony Pictures’ universe of Marvel films, alongside the Venom movies, and the infamous entries Morbius and Madame Web.

Kraven the Hunter claws into theaters in December.

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The drama behind the drama It Ends with Us shows no signs of ending, three days after the movie scored an impressive $50 million box office debut.

The Hollywood Reporter says the movie’s star and director Justin Baldoni has hired a PR crisis team to help smooth over seemingly daily headlines and online posts of a reported rift between him and co-star and co-producer Blake Lively.

The trade notes Baldoni hired Melissa Nathan, whose PR firm specializes in “communications, crisis, reputation management, personal publicity and digital team services,” and that she was the person hired by Johnny Depp amid his court battle with Amber Heard.

Baldoni recently posted to TikTok an interaction with some fans, one of whom fawned over him, and although she knew he had appeared in Jane the Virgin and It Ends with Us, she thought his name was Ralph. “This is very humbling,” he says, smiling in the clip, which he captioned, “Dear mom…I’ve finally made it. With love, Ralph.”

He also posted an Instagram video from Sweden, thanking fans for embracing the movie. “Seeing this packed theater, connecting with some of you, and hearing your stories is a powerful reminder of why we brought this story to life,” he said in part.

Meanwhile, after taking flak online for her lighthearted promotion of the film, in which her character is abused by her partner played by Baldoni, Blake posted to Instagram statistics about domestic violence, and resources victims can access, including the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

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FX has revealed Sept. 25 as the premiere date for Ryan Murphy‘s new horror drama series Grotesquerie. The plot follows a detective and a nun— played respectively by Niecy Nash-Betts and Micaela Diamond — as they investigate “a series of heinous crimes” that “are eerily personal,” while dealing with their own personal problems. Together, they uncover “a sinister web that raises more questions than answers.” The cast also includes Courtney B. Vance, Lesley Manville, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, Raven Goodwin and Travis Kelce…

The Holdovers breakout star Dominic Sessa is in talks to portray celebrity chef and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain in the biopic Tony, according to Variety. Bourdain died by suicide in 2018. The No Reservations and Parts Unknown host was previously the subject of the documentary Roadrunner, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2021 …

Disney’s Frozen 3 will slide into theaters Nov. 24, 2027, the studio has confirmed. The original Frozen became a huge box office hit in 2013, grossing nearly $1.3 billion worldwide and earning two Academy Awards. The 2019 sequel did even better, earning $1.45 billion. Disney also announced that the Pixar movie Hoppers, a comedy about a young girl who uses technology to understand the inner thoughts of animals, will hit theaters March 6, 2026. Jon Hamm and Bobby Moynihan lead the voice cast. Disney is the parent company of ABC News …

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Vince Vaughn is a testy detective trying to solve a murder in his new series Bad Monkey, premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+, and he tells ABC Audio what intrigued him about the role.

“I just love that he was a guy that, you know, despite the obvious odds, he couldn’t let this thing go,” he says. “He just was like the Energizer Bunny. Never, never going to give up, never going to stop pursuing.”

The series is based on the book by Carl Hiaasen, and while his books have sold millions of copies, Hollywood hasn’t been successful at adapting them to screens, big or small — take the 1996 flop Striptease starring Demi Moore, for example. However, showrunner Bill Lawrence believed streaming could change that.

“Everybody that biffed it in movies thought they had this kind of cool airplane book caper that could be a movie in 90 minutes,” he says. “But the truth is, they’re these surreal satire character pieces, and if you can do them over 10 episodes, you got a chance.”

Like many of Hiaasen’s works, Bad Monkey is set in the Florida Keys — not a bad place to spend a few months filming, according to Vaughn.

“I loved it, it was like, the nature was incredible,” he says. “The Key deer that we have in the show actually came around a lot, on the set. They were beautiful. The water’s amazing. The views, I mean, the world is just esthetically gorgeous and the wildlife was very unique.”

“You do get sucked in when you’re there and there’s a nice breeze coming off the water, so the bugs aren’t as bad,” agrees Lawrence. “I think after three weeks I would start to lose my mind. It’s like being on a deserted island, man.”

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The estates of some stars who have already passed on — including Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds — have made deals that may soon have them reading you your next audiobook.

That’s what CNBC is reporting regarding a company called ElevenLabs, an audio technology startup that “has penned multiple deals with the estates of legendary actors for its IconicVoices tool.”

Using just 30 minutes’ worth of audio from a given celebrity — including the aforementioned stars, as well as James Dean and Laurence Olivier — the tool can create an AI-generated voice of that celeb to read to a user via an audiobook app.

Sam Sklar, a member of ElevenLabs’ team, says that a voice “can be called upon to read text (articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or other text content),” but that a celeb’s voice can’t be exported outside the app.

The latter caveat was meant to calm the nerves of stars who lobbied during 2023’s Hollywood strikes against AI replication of their work.

For example, Scarlett Johansson cried foul in May when OpenAI used a similar-sounding voice for its ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode. Users — even OpenAI’s Sam Altman — said the voice was sort of a real-life version of the Siri-like assistant ScarJo voiced in the movie Her.

Johansson had attorneys draft a letter to OpenAI to discover how this happened, especially after she expressly refused to provide her voice to the tool, and the company soon dropped the controversial voice it dubbed “Sky.”

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Only Murders in the Building season 4 is heading to Hollywood.

On Tuesday, the trailer for the upcoming season of the Emmy-winning Hulu series arrived, featuring Mabel (Selena Gomez), Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Martin Short) in the City of Angels, where a Hollywood studio is “readying a film about the ‘Only Murders’ podcast,” according to the synopsis for the upcoming season.

The trailer opens with the podcasters reading a script for the film and then finding themselves in a room full of studio executives — including one played by Molly Shannon — introducing the film’s cast, which features Eugene Levy, Eva Longoria and Zach Galifianakis.

Mabel, Charles and Oliver then find themselves being shadowed by the three stars, who want to do a “character study” on each of them as they prepare for the film.

But things take a turn in the trailer when Charles’ stunt double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), ends up dead in what appears to be the Arconia.

“There’s been another murder,” Gomez says in one clip.

“As our amateur sleuths race back to New York, they embark on an even more epic journey — traversing their building’s courtyard to delve into the twisted lives of the Arconia’s West Tower residents,” the synopsis states.

The season 4 star-studded cast also includes Michael Cyril Creighton, Meryl Streep, Richard Kind, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Only Murders in the Building season 4 arrives Aug. 27. New episodes will stream on Tuesdays.

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