Entertainment

Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves are set to star in the comedy Good Fortune, along with Aziz Ansari, who will make his feature directorial debut, according to Variety. Good Fortune marks the second directorial debut for Ansari, whose first attempt, the comedic drama Being Mortal, was suspended over complaints of actor Bill Murray’s inappropriate behavior on set…

Fox has ordered the game show Snake Oil, hosted by former Saturday Night Live star David Spade and executive produced by Will Arnett, host of the network’s LEGO Masters, according to Deadline. The show “sees contestants pitched unique products by convincing entrepreneurs – some of whom are showcasing real business ventures, while the others are ‘Snake Oil Salesmen’ whose products are fake. Contestants, with the help of guest celebrity advisors, must determine which products are real and which are a sham, for a chance to win life-changing money,” per the outlet. Snake Oil is set to launch during the 2023/24 season…

Peacock has ordered the first Love Island spinoff, Love Island Games, the streamer announced on Tuesday. The spinoff will bring together popular islanders from the U.S. and international versions of the show for a second shot at love, featuring both team and couples’ challenges, all while navigating dating, eliminations, recoupling and dramatic new arrivals. A premiere date has not yet been set. Details around cast, schedule and location will be announced at a later date…

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The season finale of the beloved sitcom Abbott Elementary airs Wednesday night and Sheryl Lee Ralph, who stars as Barbara Howard in the series, is dishing to ABC Audio what viewers can expect to see.

“It’s a bit unexpected,” she teases.

“And once again, you’re going to learn something new about Barbara,” the actress adds. “You’re going to see some things that you’ve been looking for and maybe, well, I don’t know how they’re going to turn out, but I know one thing. It’s going to keep you watching and looking forward to season 3.”

With two seasons under her belt as the old-school kindergarten teacher who has also taken on the role of a maternal figure to some, Ralph shares what she loves about the role.

“I love the fact that this is a wonderful character. She is fully living and invested in her life. She loves what she does. She loves her career as a teacher. She loves the students that she teaches year after year,” she explains.  “And you can see through the episodes that she will go to the limit to try to make sure that things are set up properly for her students because she wants them to succeed. And I love that about her.” 

Abbott Elementary, which also stars Quinta Brunson, Tyler James Williams, Janelle James, Lisa Ann Walter, Chris Perfetti, and William Stanford Davis, has also had quite a few celebrity guest stars including Leslie Odom Jr. and Taraji P. Henson. So who’s on Ralph’s list of dream guest stars?

“Why not Robert De Niro? I mean, that would be great,” she says excitedly, before offering another suggestion. “Oh, we could have Whoopi [Goldberg] back.” (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)

Catch the season two finale of Abbott Elementary at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.

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Motormouthed leading men Ryan Reynolds and Vince Vaughn are joining Jason Momoa and Aubrey Plaza for Animal Friends, a film Deadline is describing as an “R-rated road trip adventure.”

The trade says the project will combine animated characters with live-action ones, which sounds similar to Reynolds’ hit Detective Pokémon — except this time, it’s not for the kiddie set.

The plot is otherwise still a secret, Deadline says.

Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider, who previously worked with Reynolds on the 2020 game show Don’t, are writing, with Peter Atencio, who called the shots on Bert Kreischer‘s upcoming semi-autobiographical The Machine, directing, and Reynolds co-producing through his Maximum Effort company, with Legendary Pictures and Prime Focus Studios.

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Will Trent will be back on the case for another season on ABC. 

The network has renewed the drama based on the bestselling book series from Karin Slaughter, which stars Ramón Rodríguez in the title role.

Trent, an unorthodox investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, quickly became a fan favorite for the author, who Rodríguez called an “amazing” resource as they told her stories on screen. 

“Karen was amazing,” he enthused to ABC Audio. “You know, she came down the set, and we got to hang out, and she got to see sort of the stages. And you know, I can’t imagine that feeling: these are characters that have lived in her head and worlds that have lived in her head. And now here they are sort of in the physical realm.”

He added he’s “just grateful that she created some really complicated, compelling humans, and I’m just trying to do my best to, you know, fill those shoes.”  

The show, which launched in January, emerged as ABC’s #1 new drama this season in total viewers, with nearly 10 million, and goosed the total viewers for the Tuesday 10 p.m. hour compared to last season by 143%.

In the renewal announcement, Rodríguez expressed, “We’re so thankful to our ABC and Hulu fans for joining us on this wild ride and watching Will Trent. When we set out to bring the series to television screens, we wanted to do justice to the gritty, thrilling world that Karin Slaughter created with her bestselling book series.”

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Those little red DVD envelopes from Netflix are going the way of the Betamax and free AOL CDs.

In what will come as a surprise to millions of Netflix’s subscribers, the company has still been sending people DVDs through the mail as they did in the days before streaming.

However, that will come to an end in September, the company announced Tuesday. Cue Green Day‘s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life):

“After an incredible 25-year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com [service] later this year,” Netflix announced. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members, but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult. So we want to go out on a high, and will be shipping our final discs on September 29, 2023.”

The company continued, “Those iconic red envelopes changed the way people watched shows and movies at home — and they paved the way for the shift to streaming….DVDs also led to our first foray into original programming — with Red Envelope Entertainment titles including Sherrybaby and Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion.”

Netflix’s retrospective continued, noting its first DVD was shipped on March 10, 1998, and it was the 1988 Michael Keaton classic Beetlejuice.

Since then, it has shipped more than 5.2 billion discs to more than 40 million subscribers.

And for the record, its most popular DVD to be shipped out was Sandra Bullock‘s Oscar-winning 2009 football family drama The Blind Side.

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While she’s since become a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with her role as Dr. Christine Palmer in the Doctor Strange films, there was a time Rachel McAdams could have been Iron Man‘s Pepper Potts.

But saying no to the role that eventually went to Gwyneth Paltrow was important to preserve “normalcy” after hits like Mean Girls and The Notebook, she tells Bustle.

Ditto declining roles in Mission: Impossible III, The Devil Wears Prada, the James Bond film Casino Royale and Get Smart, also starring Prada‘s Anne Hathaway.

McAdams, who is about to star in the adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., explains she took a two-year break from acting after walking out on what turned out to be a nude 2006 Vanity Fair cover shoot opposite stars Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley.

She explained of her hiatus from the spotlight, “I felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot. But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane.”

As for those parts she turned down, the actress admits, “There’s certainly things like ‘I wish I’d done that,'” but adds, “I step back and go, ‘That was the right person for that.'”

McAdams added, “There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that? It’s taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing.”

Her role in Margaret, about the titular late bloomer’s mother, Barb, allowed McAdams to hire her sister, Kayleen, to do her makeup, so that the siblings and their children — Rachel has a son and daughter with longtime partner Jamie Linden — could spend time together.

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Nearly 12 years after his infamous tiger blood-spilling, Violent Torpedo of Truth-launching flameout, Charlie Sheen has apparently made up with his former Two and a Half Men producer Chuck Lorre.

While HBO refused to comment to ABC Audio, there are reports that Lorre, the target of many of Sheen’s tirades at the time, has tapped Sheen to join How to Be a Bookie in a recurring role.

The comedy series stars comedian/actor Sebastian Maniscalco and will run on HBO’s newly rebranded screening service Max.

Sheen, once the highest paid actor on TV thanks to Two and a Half Men, was fired in 2011 over his behavior at the time, and the show continued with Ashton Kutcher joining the cast until the show ended in 2015.

Back in 2021, a now-sober Sheen looked back with “regret” at his behavior, and the media circus it became. He called it “desperately juvenile” and the result of “drugs or the residual effects of drugs,” adding, “it was also an ocean of stress and a volcano of disdain.”

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Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once star Michelle Yeoh is boldly going back to Gene Roddenberry‘s universe with a Paramount+ movie called Star Trek: Section 31.

Section 31 refers to Starfleet’s black ops agents, who were to be at the center of a long-gestating TV project.

On the TV series Star Trek: Discovery, Yeoh played both Philippa Georgiou, the captain of the Federation’s USS Shenzhou, and also Emperor Philippa Georgiou, the ruler of the militaristic Terran Empire, which controlled Earth and the surrounding space.

The dual role came courtesy of a Trek conceit known as the mirror universe, a parallel dimension to our own. While the former died in battle, Star Trek: Section 31 will center on the latter.

Paramount+ teases of the film, “Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets and faces the sins of her past.”

“I’m beyond thrilled to return to my Star Trek family and to the role I’ve loved for so long,” Yeoh said in the announcement. “Section 31 has been near and dear to my heart since I began the journey of playing Philippa all the way back when this new golden age of Star Trek launched.”

She enthused, “To see her finally get her moment is a dream come true in a year that’s shown me the incredible power of never giving up on your dreams. We can’t wait to share what’s in store for you, and until then: live long and prosper (unless Emperor Georgiou decrees otherwise)!”

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The third Ant-Man movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, comes out on HD digital Tuesday.

The latest movie has Paul Rudd‘s size-shifting hero Scott Lang enjoying a bit of notoriety following the defeat of Thanos as seen in Avengers: Endgame, only to face a tiny-yet-massive new threat: Jonathan Majors‘ Kang the Conqueror, who rules over the microscopic Quantum Realm with his sights set on the world above.

When his daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), builds a machine to explore the Quantum Realm from afar, things go awry. Cassie, Scott, Evangeline Lilly‘s Hope Van Dyne and her parents, Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, respectively), get sucked into the mysterious subatomic universe. Once there, Janet must face the past she left when she was stranded there for decades.

The digital release comes with supplemental material, including a gag reel, deleted scenes and commentary from director Peyton Reed.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania comes out on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD May 16. While a Disney+ release date hasn’t been announced, it will likely be available for streaming for subscribers around that time.

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

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First responders are seen racing to rescue Jeremy Renner after the Avengers star’s snowplow accident in dramatic body camera footage obtained by ABC News.

In the video, medics are seen working on Renner after he was crushed by a 7-ton snowplow on his Nevada property on New Year’s Day, an accident that resulted in him breaking more than 30 bones.

“Right where his blood is at, that’s right where it all happened,” Renner’s nephew Alex Fries is overheard telling the first responders.

Fries tells the first responders how his uncle intervened to save him from the snowplow as they were trying to get a pickup truck out of the snow, saying the snowplow was “coming at me full force.”

“He tried to jump on it?!” one first responder asked, with Fries affirming the series of events.

“He tried to jump on it and it took him under,” Fries explained.

Elsewhere in the body camera footage, one of the first responders finds Renner’s hat underneath the snowplow, saying, “Oh, wow. Get a picture of that. That’s a hat.”

Renner underwent surgery and rehabilitation as a result of the accident, and is still recovering.

However, he was able to attend the red carpet premiere of his Disney+ series Rennervations last week with his 10-year-old daughter, Ava, by his side.

In a recent exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer, Renner said he considers himself a “lucky man” for having survived and largely recovered from the horrific accident.

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