Entertainment

Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis scored a legal victory against their former nanny Ericka Genaro on Wednesday when a Los Angeles judge moved her wrongful termination lawsuit against the ex-couple to arbitration.

“The lawsuit has been fully dismissed. Both Olivia and Jason are hopeful they can finally close this chapter after what has not only been a selfish grab for financial gain, but a shameless exploitation of their trust played out in the media,” the actors’ rep said in a lawsuit obtained by Page Six.

“We don’t agree with the decision, but it is what it is, and now we’ll litigate it in arbitration, and the case goes on,” Genaro’s attorney, Ron Zambrano, said in a separate statement. “This does not terminate the lawsuit. It merely changes the venue.”

Zambrano noted the decision “does not terminate the lawsuit; it merely changes the venue.”

“As to the underlying facts, we’ve got text messages and testimony that [Genaro] was driven to quit, then was summarily fired anyway,” he continued. “We feel extremely confident in the case, so instead of taking this to trial, we’ll handle it in arbitration, and we’re ready to move forward.”

Genaro — who worked for the duo from 2018 to 2021 — alleged in her February filing that they fired her after she requested a three-day “stress leave” due to their crumbling relationship.

Wilde and Sudeikis announced their split in November 2020.

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In an Instagram post Wednesday evening, August 16, Jamie Foxx updated fans about his recovery from the still-undisclosed health scare that left him hospitalized in April.

Captioning a photo of himself wearing tinted aviator glasses and a crocheted bucket hat and holding a pair of red Crocs, the Oscar-winner began, “You’re lookin at a man who is thankful.”

Foxs noted that he’s “finally startin to feel like myself,” saying of the health complication that sidelined him, “It’s been an unexpected dark journey … but I can see the light…”

The They Cloned Tyrone star added, “I’m thankful to everyone that reached out and sent well wishes and prayers … I have a lot of people to thank.” He continued, “u just don’t know how much it meant … I will be thanking all of you personally … and if you didn’t know … GOD IS GOOD … all day every day.”

Jamie closed with the hashtags #swipeleft, #imbackandimbetter, and #nobaddays.

The first message of support in the comments came from none other than Jeremy Renner, who bounced back from a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. “Bless you my friend !!!,” Renner wrote, adding a pair of heart emojis.

Foxx’s update was liked more than 373,000 times, with supportive comments from fans and stars including Tamar Braxton, Garcelle Beauvais, and Eiza Gonzalez.

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The Girlfriends actress Jill Marie Jones has been added to the cast of Showtime’s The Chi in a guest-starring role. A new clip from the series shows Jones, who plays a business owner “with a shady clientele and a haunted past,” per the cabler, helping Curtiss Cook‘s Douda decide who would be the best person to take over his gang. Jones’ debut episode will take place on August 25 in the episode “ReUp”…

Film at Lincoln Center announced on Wednesday, August 16 that Maestro will be the New York Film Festival’s Spotlight Gala this year on October 2. Bradley Cooper directs Maestro and also plays Leonard Bernstein in the film, which co-stars Carey Mulligan as his wife Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. The Festival runs from September 29-Octover 15. Maestro is scheduled for a November 22 theatrical release, followed by a debut on Netflix December 20…

Deadline reports Lili Reinhart and Mark Ruffalo are set to headline Hal & Harper, an independent TV series from Cha Cha Real Smooth filmmaker Cooper Raiff, who will also star in the film. Blackout‘s Addison Timlin and No Exit‘s Havana Rose Liu have also been cast in the show, described as a comedic family drama. No other details have been released about the show, written and directed by Raiff, who landed a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement to produce the show amid the strike a couple of weeks ago…

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As one of the fastest growing sports, Pickleball is taking over the United States — and soon our televisions. 

The beloved sport is now the premise of the new reality show called Pickleball Paddle Battle, hosted by former Bachelor Clayton Echard and he tells ABC Audio viewers are in for a treat. 

“We’re going to get some of the top competitors in the country to come in for a little bit over a week and they’re gonna compete against one another,” he explains. “Very quickly you’re going to get to see people get very passionate, very competitive, and competition just brings out the best in people and sometimes the worst.”

The prizes are “quite a big deal,” with one female and one male competitor earning a one-year-sponsorship contract with Pickleball Kingdom Productions. Also, one female and one male will be awarded their own Pickleball Kingdom franchises. 

Hosting Pickleball Paddle Battle will be a new venture for Clayton, he’s no stranger to reality television after being the lead on The Bachelor in 2021 and a contestant on The Bachelorette. So what advice does he have for the new Golden Bachelor?

“Give Jesse [Palmer] a really hard time for me… Also don’t do anything that I did,” he jokes, before adding, “I would also just tell him to just be authentically himself.”

“The worst thing that you can walk away from an experience with is knowing that you weren’t yourself and then you’re going to beat yourself up even more,” he continues.

Clayton also shared advice given to him by a former lead, “Don’t try to have control over everything … Let it go and just live in the moment. You cannot control everything with reality TV.” 

Pickleball Paddle Battle show details can be found at www.picklballpaddlebattle.tv. 

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Just in time for Halloween, FX has announced its anthology spinoff American Horror Stories will debut on Hulu Thursday, October 26.

The spinoff of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s award-winning hit anthology series American Horror Story features a different story in each of its four new episodes, part of the “Huluweeen” event.

Details on the episodes are still secret, but Deadline reports Lisa Rinna will appear in one called “Tapeworm.”

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Shawn Levy, the Canadian-born director and executive producer of Stranger Things and the Ryan Reynolds hit Free Guy, will be honored at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Levy is known for his work behind the camera, including Reynolds’ time-traveling family drama The Adam Project and 2016’s The Arrival, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as a producer.

Levy will debut All the Light We Cannot See, a miniseries based on Anthony Doerr‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, at TIFF in September.

The Night at the Museum veteran will be given the inaugural Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award, named after the Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker and producer behind Moonstruck and others.

“With a multi-faceted career spanning over 3 decades, Shawn Levy has become one of the most versatile filmmakers and storytellers of his generation,” said “thrilled” TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey in the announcement.

Levy will be presented with the award at the TIFF Awards gala fundraiser at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel on September 10.

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Ahead of Ahsoka‘s two-episode premiere on Disney+ on August 23, Lucasfilm has dropped a more than 7-minute special look into the history of the character.

The snippet, called A New Star Wars Legacy, features interviews with Ahsoka star Rosario Dawson, Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, the guy who created Ahsoka Tano while working under George Lucas for the Emmy-winning animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The piece also shows how integral the master/apprentice relationship is throughout Star Wars, up to and including young Jedi learner Ahsoka and Anakin Skywalker, and between Star Wars creator Lucas and Filoni. It was the former who envisioned the character Filoni sketched as Anakin’s Padawan, it is explained, and as a result, Ahsoka was first seen by fans as a plucky teen.

Over the course of the series, and in the subsequent Star Wars: Rebels, she matures into adulthood, voiced throughout by Ashley Eckstein.

Dawson first picked up the baton — or literally Ahsoka’s twin lightsabers — in season 2 of The Mandalorian, in an episode directed by Filoni.

Dawson explains, “Ahsoka is one of the most developed characters in Star Wars, period,” and discusses “sinking into” the character through extensive makeup and training to expertly wield lightsabers ambidextrously, as Ahsoka does. “No matter how tired I was, I was like, ‘Sign me up for some more. Sign me up for some more,'” she declares.

The show has Ahsoka reuniting with live-action versions of her Rebels allies — including Mary Elizabeth Winstead as ace pilot and green-skinned Twi’lek Hera Syndulla and Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Mandalorian Sabine Wren — to stop an emerging threat in Lars Mikkelsen‘s Grand Admiral Thrawn.

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

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Bradley Cooper‘s upcoming romantic biopic Maestro, in which he plays famed composer Leonard Bernstein, dropped its first teaser on Tuesday. But it has already kicked off derision from people over Cooper’s look in the film.

It took some prosthetic work to get the actor and director to approximate Bernstein’s appearance, something detractors label “Jewface.”

The controversy attracted the attention of Bernstein’s children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who posted on X, formerly Twitter, a lengthy defense of Cooper’s choice.

“Bradley Cooper included the three of us along every step of his amazing journey as he made his film about our father,” their statement began. “We were touched to the core to witness the depth of his commitment, his loving embrace of our father’s music, and the sheer open-hearted joy he brought to his exploration.”

They continued, “It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts. It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

The trio also added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch — a practice we observed all too often perpetrated on our own father.”

They further expressed the “love” and “respect” Cooper showed for their father and mother, Felicia, played by Carey Mulligan in the film. “We feel so fortunate to have had this experience with Bradley, and we can’t wait for the world to see his creation,” they concluded.

Maestro opens in select theaters in November before debuting December 20 on Netflix.

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The Sound of Freedom, the child trafficking drama that’s the summer’s most unlikely blockbuster, beating the domestic hauls of $200-million-plus movies like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and the fifth Indiana Jones film, has made a profit for its crowdfunding investors, too.

To date, the Jim Caviezel-starring thriller that was produced by Angel Studios has made roughly $173 million on a production budget of around $14.5 million, and unlike the usual summer fare, relied on a word-of-mouth campaign to drive the movie’s business, instead of a hundred million dollar marketing budget.

Caviezel plays real-life former government agent Tim Ballard in the film, who quit his job busting child pornographers to take on his own mission of rescuing a little girl from sex traffickers in the Colombian jungle. He saved 123 people, including 55 kids, in the process.

Crowdfunding both paid for the movie and its marketing, with 6,678 people invested to support the P&A [Prints & Advertising] costs for the film. Angel reported Wednesday, August 16, that these investors are being paid back $1.20 for every dollar they tossed in to get the movie into theaters.

“[W]e are thrilled to be able to get funds back to them in three months,” said Neal Harmon, CEO of Angel Studios, in the announcement. “The Angel Guild is key to our theatrical strategy and paying out as quickly as possible is always our first priority.”

The announcement comes ahead of the movie’s first international roll-out: The Sound of Freedom will be launching in 21 countries before September 1, moving toward a global goal of 75.

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As Barbie‘s winning ways continue at the box office worldwide, the movie has just surpassed a personal high water mark for Warner Bros., taking down a superhero in the process.

Variety reports Barbie has passed $537.5 million at the domestic box office, beating Christopher Nolan‘s final Batman film, 2008’s Oscar-winning The Dark Knight ($536 million), for the title of biggest U.S. hit in Warner Bros. history.

Nolan, of course, need not fret: He has his own blockbuster with Oppenheimer — one half of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. However, Warner Bros. doesn’t get those bragging rights as Nolan made that movie with Universal, not his former cinematic home, WB.

Barbie is expected to soon unseat The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which grossed $1.36 billion and is the highest grossing movie of the year; Greta Gerwig‘s film has made $1.2 billion worldwide since its debut just four weeks ago.

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