Tom Cruise famously flies airplanes, climbs impossibly tall buildings and jumps off of mountains with a motorcycle, but James Corden put him up to a high-profile stunt of a different kind Thursday night.
According to The Late Late Show‘s Instagram, Corden and Cruise suited up in costume as the meerkat Timon and the warthog Pumbaa, respectively, at a performance of Disney’s The Lion King at the Pantages Theatre.
Appearing in theater productions is old hat for Corden, having won a Tony for One Man, Two Guvnors back in 2012, so perhaps the gag was payback for Tom scaring the heck out of him in the cockpit of a fighter jet in a segment of The Late Late Show.
The Lion King bit was part of outgoing host Corden’s upcoming The Last Last Late Late Show Primetime Special, which will air on April 27 on CBS and will also stream on Paramount+.
In September, fans will be able to get their hands on a meta piece of memorabilia from Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: the actual memoir from which Paul Rudd reads as his alter ego at an autograph signing in the beginning of the film.
At a recent press event, Rudd explains of his character, Scott Lang, “When we start this movie … the events of [Avengers] Endgame, everything has already transpired. So Scott has, I wouldn’t say he’s taking a victory lap — but others might say that. And he’s written … a bit of a memoir, Look Out for The Little Guy! And he’s explained everything that’s been going on in life and his experiences with The Avengers.”
The book is a real thing, with a cover that looks just as it does in the movie. “I think you just have to, you know, run out to your nearest Barnes & Noble or wherever you get your books and/or download,” Rudd teases. “It will be a very fun and informative read. I don’t want to give anything away.”
At that, Evangeline Lilly, who plays Hope van Dyne/The Wasp, piped in. “Who wrote it?” she asked.
“Scott Lang wrote it,” Rudd explains. “Really?!” she replied.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Rudd insisted.
Look Out for The Little Guy! comes out on hardcover on September 22 — and it’s already an Amazon #1 bestseller. The publisher calls it a “bracingly honest account of his struggles and triumphs, from serving time to being a divorced dad to becoming Ant-Man and joining The Avengers” and promises “stories of epic battles won and lost, as this everyman turned Super Hero finally tells all.”
Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
The Disney+ Marvel Studios show Hawkeye contained a recurring inside joke: Steve Rogers aka Captain America’s life and the Battle of New York as seen in The Avengers had been immortalized in a lavish Broadway musical. But now that Easter egg is becoming a reality.
In a video tweet from Disney’s California Adventures theme park, a woman who fans would immediately recognize as Rogers’ love Peggy Carter is shown strolling down a city street before she stops in front of a theater. She then glances to a Playbill, on which is written the name of that very play from the TV show: Rogers: The Musical.
The tweet teases the production will be a “short, one-act play” debuting this summer, calling it, as critics’ blurbs read in Hawkeye, “A timeless story of a timeless hero!”
Incidentally, Rogers: The Musical has some real-life Broadway bona fides: Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, veterans of hits like Hairspray and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,were tapped by Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige to craft the Rogers musical song “Save The City.”
The showstopper, which originally featured Broadway stars like Adam Pascal, Ty Taylor and Rory Donovan, was also performed live at the Disney expo D23 in 2022.
Paramount Network’s hit reality show Bar Rescuereturns Sunday night at 10 p.m. Eastern, and its star Jon Taffer tells ABC Audio, “this season may be the most intense of all.”
The no-nonsense Taffer, who uses his more than 30 years of experience in the bar and restaurant industries to turn around failing establishments, admits he’s shocked the show is still going strong after eight seasons. “I thought I’d do a pilot and go home. I never expected season two, three, four or five, so it feels like I’m hugged by America every week. It’s a pretty amazing feeling.”
Bar Rescue recently helped owners weather one of the most challenging periods in the hospitality industry, the pandemic. “It was very tough times, you know. It was the only time during Bar Rescue when their excuses were real, you know: Government shutdowns, people not coming out, The impacts of COVID, that’s real. It’s hard to scream and yell at them when COVID has taken them down.”
However, Taffer adds, “This is different now. People are out in bigger numbers than ever before. The opportunity is greater than ever before….So if ever an operator has no excuses and should up his game, it’s now.”
Taffer expresses, “This season, you’re going to see a wife look at her husband and say, I’m pretty much done over this. You’re going to see a family who’s a who blew their parents’ retirement money…college funds for kids gone, kids walking out on fathers, fathers letting their children down. It’s deep.”
He adds, “That’s why I fight so hard. People think I’m a raving maniac over a bar. It’s not over a bar. It’s over a family. It’s over their future. It’s over their security. There’s a lot at stake here!”
(NOTE LANGUAGE) HBO Max’s award-minting machine Succession will come to an end when the upcoming fourth season wraps up.
In an interview with The New Yorker, show creator Jesse Armstrong dropped the bombshell that the scheming Roy family’s adventures will be drawing to a close.
He explained, “I got together with a few of my fellow writers before we started the writing of Season 4 … and I sort of said, ‘Look, I think this maybe should be it. But what do you think?'”
He added they “played out various scenarios,” but ultimately decided against them. “We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference.”
Armstrong, an Emmy winner himself for the series, noted of his stars, including fellow Emmy winner Brian Cox and Matthew Macfadyen, “I said to the cast, ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I think this is it.’ Because I didn’t want to bulls*** them, either.”
He adds, “Although I wish, in a way, to carry on doing this thing with this group of actors and writers forever, I wouldn’t want to be going down the mine … for more and more vanishingly thin seams of gold.”
The first three seasons of the show earned 48 Emmy nominations and 13 wins, including Outstanding Drama Series. It also earned five Golden Globe Awards and trophies from the Writers, Directors, and Producers Guild Awards.
Succession returns for its fourth — and now officially final — season on March 26.
Ryan Reynolds is attached to star and produce the feature comedy Boy Band at Paramount, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The project would reunite him with his Free Guy and The Adam Project collaborator Shawn Levy, who is a co-producer. Details, including what role Reynolds would play, are being kept under wraps, but it’s being described as “a boy band reunion movie,” per THR. Reynolds is hoping to start shooting the film either this fall 2023 or early 2024…
Minari and Nope star Steven Yeun has been tapped to join the cast of Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts, according to Deadline. His exact role has not been revealed, but sources tell the outlet that it is “not only significant to this film but could also play a role going forward in future films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” Yeun joins a cast that currently includes Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko and Ayo Edebiri. Thunderbolts is set for a July 26, 2024 release. Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News…
Megan Mullally tells Entertainment Tonight that she and her husband Nick Offerman are close to inking a deal to join the cast of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy for the show’s fourth and final season. The Parks and Recreation alums would play “a mild-mannered married couple named Jean and Gene, who are college professors.” Meanwhile, the couple can both be seen on the new season of Party Down, premiering Friday on Starz. Mullally returns as Lydia Dunfree, a former member of the catering team who reunites with her co-workers. Offerman is set to appear as a guest star later in the season…
Deadline reports Emily in Paris‘ Ashley Park has joined the cast of Hulu’s Only Murders In The Building in the recurring role of Kimber, a Broadway ingénue, for the show’s third season. Park joins series stars Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, as well as recently announced season 3 cast Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd and Jesse Williams. Park will next be seen in Adele Lim’s Joy Ride, which follows four Asian American women traveling through Asia in search of one of their birth mothers, hitting theaters June 23…
The SAG Awards on Thursday announced additional presenters for the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. They include Jason Bateman, Jeff Bridges, Jenna Ortega, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Scott and Zendaya, along with SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, Matt Bomer, Ariana DeBose, Eugene Levy and Amy Poehler. The SAG Awards will be broadcast live on Netflix’s YouTube channel Sunday, February 26 at 8 p.m. ET from the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles…
Emmy-winning Hacks star Jean Smart is opening up about her heart health and sharing a plea to her fans.
“February is American Heart Month — a time when the nation spotlights heart health, so it feels important to share with all of you that I am recovering from a recent, successful heart procedure,” Smart, 71, shared in a statement posted to Instagram Thursday.
She continued, “I am fortunate to have excellent professional care and support from family and friends while I continue to recuperate.”
The Designing Women alum didn’t share any further details about her condition, but did urge those reading to take their health seriously.
“Please listen to your body and talk to your doctor — I’m very glad I did,” she concluded.
ABC News has learned that production on Hacks season 3 has paused for some departments.
“We are so happy that our beloved Jean Smart’s heart procedure was successful and she’s on the mend,” read a joint statement issued on behalf of HBO Max and Universal Television, who also sent Smart their “well wishes.”
Smart lost her husband of more than 30 years, Richard Gilliland, in March 2021. The New Yorker noted in a June 2021 profile of Smart that Gilliland had died unexpectedly of a heart condition.
Let the rampage begin! Cocaine Bear is in theaters this weekend — the darkly comedic, bloody tru-ish tale of a bear who finds a package of cocaine in the woods and goes nuts.
Keri Russell is among the film’s stars, telling ABC Audio when she got the offer, she quickly realized she had no choice but to do it, recalling friends who warned, “If you don’t do that movie, we are not going to be friends with you anymore.'”
Keri adds that after the last few years of the COVID-19 pandemic and everything going on the world, “the idea of really like letting loose and being in a movie theater and hearing people like scream, laughing their head off and, you know, something being so ridiculously not real and gory and just a total romp, sounded attractive.”
And another secret Russell shared: the bear in the film is, in fact, CGI.
“There is, a lot of times, this amazing, you know, actor who’s trained to be like an animal,” she shares. “But often it was us in the woods with [director Elizabeth Banks] screaming on a megaphone going, okay, now he’s eating his face off! There’s blood dripping all down his body! And now he’s climbing up and there’s blood squirting all over!”
Banks says Cocaine Bear is not a “rampaging bear movie” and that “a man’s hubris is the villain…this animal inspires awe and wonder until you realize that it’s an apex predator and you should actually run for your life.”
The scariest part of the movie for Banks was it suffering the same fate as Snakes on a Plane or Sharknado, sharing, “if it didn’t work…it just would have been an embarrassment for all involved, but me most.”
Warner Bros. Discovery is hoping to mine more box office gold from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Middle Earth. Variety reports that during an earnings call with CEO David Zaslav on Thursday, the executive announced that subsidiary New Line Cinema will be producing multiple Lord of the Rings movies, as it did for Peter Jackson‘s Oscar-winning trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), its 2002 follow-up The Two Towers, and 2003’s The Return of the King grossed more than $3 billion worldwide, with the last film winning a record-tying 11 trophies at the 96th Annual Academy Awards.
Jackson returned to Middle Earth for a prequel trilogy based on Tolkein’s The Hobbit. While those films weren’t as critically-acclaimed as the other trilogy, 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2013’s The Desolation of Smaug, and 2014’s The Battle of the Five Armies grossed nearly $3 billion globally.
Tolkien’s work was recently adapted into Amazon’s expensive, divisive series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
ABC is mum on the development, but Deadline reports its hit sitcom The Goldbergs will end after the current 10th season.
The ’80s-set sitcom, which stars Wendi McLendon-Covey, Sean Giambrone, Troy Gentile and Hayley Orrantia, soldiered on after the death of the series star George Segal in 2021, and then the loss of series patriarch Jeff Garlin the following year.
Garlin parted ways with the show following accusations of bullying and other conduct on set; his character Murray was killed off offscreen between seasons 9 and 10.
After his Goldbergs exit, Garlin revealed he’d been diagnosed as bipolar. He continued to work as Jeff Green on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and was cast in the fourth and final season of Mindy Kaling‘s Neflix series Never Have I Ever.
The Goldbergs is based on the life of creator Adam F. Goldberg. According to the trade, it’s currently the longest-running live-action network comedy series currently on the air.
