Entertainment

Director-writer Adam McKay, who recently called the shots on Netflix’s environmental disaster movie Don’t Look Up, starring Oscar winners Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, has lined up some major stars for his next big comedy.

Deadline reports Oscar-nominated screenwriter McKay has netted Robert Downey Jr., The Batman‘s Robert Pattinson, Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler, and Oscar winners Amy Adams and Forest Whitaker for a dark comedy centering on a serial killer.

The trade reports Average Height, Average Build will have Pattinson playing a killer who turns to a Washington DC lobbyist, played by Adams, in an effort to help change the laws so that he could literally get away with murder.

Deadline says Downey will play a retired cop who still wants to bring the killer to justice. The film will reportedly start production later this year, bound for either theaters or streaming.

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Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth are divorcing after 12 years of marriage.

The Legally Blonde actress took to Instagram on Friday, March 24, to share a joint statement from herself and Toth announcing the split, which comes days before their 12th anniversary on March 26.

“We have some personal news to share,” the statement began. “It is with a great deal of care and consideration that we have made the difficult decision to divorce. We have enjoyed so many wonderful years together and are moving forward with deep love, kindness, and mutual respect for everything we have created together.

“Our biggest priority is our son and our entire family as we navigate this next chapter,” the statement continued. “These matters are never easy and are extremely personal. We truly appreciate everyone’s respect for our family’s privacy at this time.”

Witherspoon and Toth married in March 2011 and share son Tennessee, who turned 10 last year.

Prior to Toth, Witherspoon was married to her Cruel Intentions co-star Ryan Phillippe from 1999 to 2008. She and Phillippe share two children, daughter Ava, 23, and son Deacon, 19.

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Oscar-winning director James Cameron knows a thing or two about artificial intelligence — after all, he conceived of Skynet, the AI system that tried to end humanity in the Terminator films.

However, in real life, he tells Sean Hayes, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman‘s SmartLess podcast that we also have something to fear about the technology.

“I’m not afraid but I’m certainly pretty concerned about the potential of misuse of AI,” the Avatar director said. “I think AI can be pretty great. I think it could also literally be the end of the world.”

He agreed that experts in the field “start laughing” at him when he brings it up, given his Terminator bona fides, but he clarifies, “The point is that no technology has ever not been weaponized.”

Cameron asks, “And do we really want to be fighting something smarter than us that isn’t us? On our own world? I don’t think so.”

He also added, “Look, an AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it but we just don’t know because it would have total control over all the media and everything. And what better explanation is there for how absurd everything is right now?” he said. “Because nothing makes a damn bit of sense to me, I don’t know about you guys,” he said to his hosts.

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On Sunday, Kiefer Sutherland returns to TV with Paramount+’s new thriller series Rabbit Hole. The 24 veteran executive produces and stars as John Weir, an expert in corporate espionage, who takes on a routine job that lands him in the middle of a deadly conspiracy. 

The show touches on some ripped-from-the-headlines topics, from fragile digital banking systems to an omnipresent security state and deepfake tech. Sutherland tells ABC Audio, “It’s alarming. But the truth is we’re in the middle of a technological revolution … our capabilities of manipulating information, manipulating other people’s images and voice imaging is changing dynamically by the week.”

He adds, “And, you know, and some of it can be used for good and some of it can be used for bad. We do a bit of both in the context of our show.”

His character is a master of this bleeding edge tech and its uses, but Sutherland explains even he gets in over his head. “The duality of that is what really attracted me to the character. He’s incredibly smart, easy, he’s sophisticated, he’s witty … he’s got a sense of humor, but he’s also incredibly vulnerable.”

Kiefer continues, “With every gift comes, you know, your Achilles heel. And he has a … finite gift with numbers where he can use numbers very fast in his brain to predict probabilities and likely outcomes. But if he runs into a situation that’s so complicated that he can’t round out that number, he starts to go down what we call the proverbial rabbit hole and starts to emotionally come undone.” 

The series kicks off Sunday night on Paramount+. 

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The new series Up Here, out Friday on Hulu, follows a couple working through their anxieties in late ‘90s New York City. Mae Whitman stars as a writer who can’t get out of her own head, and she tells ABC Audio that even though she’s wanted to do a musical for a while, the thought of it also scared her.

“I’m at that point now where I’ve been lucky enough to do so many different things that it’s exciting to me to do something I haven’t done and that really terrifies me,” Whitman says. “This is genuinely the most terrifying thing I could ever possibly imagine. And I was like, well, if I’m scared of it, I should probably make myself try at least.”

Whitman says it was her Parenthood co-star Lauren Graham who convinced her to do the show.

“She slapped me around for three hours at a sushi restaurant, and basically forced me to go and was there for me every step along the way. I honestly don’t think I would have been able to do this without her,” Whitman said. “There were times where I was like, W.W.L.D. – what would Lauren do?”

Carlos Valdes stars as the other half of the show’s main romance, and says he found inspiration in the tone and execution of the FX series Fosse/Verdon.

Whitman, however, found her inspiration on the stage. She moved to New York to film Up Here and was able to catch the Tony Award-winning A Strange Loop before it left Broadway.

“I cried, I laughed, I screamed. It was incredible,” Whitman says. “The story is this person grappling with these insecurities in his head. And I was kind of like, ‘Wow, this is totally kismet. I can draw a lot of inspiration from this.’”

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This weekend, John Wick: Chapter 4 explodes into theaters, and to that end, the website Ranker polled its users about what they thought of Keanu Reeves‘ hitman movies.

Turns out, they love them. A lot.

The Keanu Reeves film series appears on countless fan surveys on the site, which lets its 30 million monthly visitors vote up or down on various topics.

For example, the John Wick movies ranked #1 on Ranker’s list of the Greatest Action Film Franchises, ahead of Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible movies (#2), the Jason Bourne collection (#3) and even James Bond’s decades of films (#4).

Chapter 4 is ranked #3 on the Most Anticipated Sequels And Reboots We Can’t Wait To See — behind only Deadpool at #2 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — and it’s #5 on its list of the website’s Most Anticipated Movies of 2023.

What’s more, 2014’s original John Wick ranked #11 on the list of the Greatest Action Movies of All Time, ahead of classics like Die Hard (#15) and Top Gun (#22).

Keanu’s black-suited assassin also ranked #2 on The Manliest Action Movie Heroes Of All Time list, behind only Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s “Dutch” in 1987’s Predator.

Perhaps its no surprise then that John Wick is ranked #33 on the Best Fictional Characters You’d Leave Your Man For poll, putting the dog lover with the bulletproof suit ahead of Harrison Ford‘s Indiana Jones and John Krasinski‘s Office romantic Jim Halpert.

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Jeremy Renner is proving once again that his sense of humor remained unscathed after the New Year’s Day snowplow accident that could have killed him.

The actor posted a video to his Instagram stories of him recording that he has been reunited with his snowcat snowplow that was at the center of his near-fatal mishap.

Reno, Nevada authorities had seized the 14,330 pound vehicle as part of their investigation into the accident, which occurred when the actor was pulled under its tracks, suffering more than 30 broken bones as well as blunt chest trauma.

According to the video, the snowcat was returned to him on Thursday, From another car, Renner recorded the plowing machine being driven back to his home, with the help of local cops.

“The cat get a police escort. Feels like the Green mile!” Renner captioned the video, referencing the 1999 film in which Tom Hanks played a prison guard who worked on death row.

The Mayor of Kingstown star required emergency surgery and spent weeks in intensive care after the accident. He continues to recover at home.

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Showtime has canceled The L Word: Generation Q after three seasons, according to Deadline, but the franchise may continue on the cabler with a reboot of the series, tentatively titled The L Word: New York. There are no further details at this time. The L Word: New York would be the latest Showtime series to get a reboot, joining Billions and Dexter…

The third season premiere of Netflix’s teen drama Outer Banks pulled in 3.15 billion minutes of viewing time for the week of February 20-26 — the biggest single-week total of 2023 to date for any title in the Nielsen rankings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Viewing of the first and second seasons accounted for almost a third of that total, per Nielsen. That’s an unusually high amount for back episodes of an original show, which typically make up less than 25 percent of viewing time in a week when new seasons of a binge-release show debut…

Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson, Jack Reynor and The White Lotus standout Meghann Fahy are in “various stages of negotiations” to star in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, sources tell Deadline. The six-episode murder mystery follows Celeste Otis, a Nantucket native who’s about to marry the perfect man, who happens to be from the area’s wealthiest family. However, when a body is discovered floating in the harbor on the morning of what was to be the wedding of the year, everyone at the party is suddenly a suspect, per the the streamer…

Variety reports Daveed Diggs, the actor and rapper best known for playing Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in the Broadway smash Hamilton, is set to join Rashida Jones and Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon in In the Blink of An Eye, the upcoming feature from Finding Nemo and WALL-E director Andrew Stanton. The film “follows three storylines, spanning thousands of years,“ that “intersect and reflect on hope, connection and the circle of life.” Diggs will next be seen in the live-action Disney film The Little Mermaid, voicing the role of Sebastian…

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Yellowjackets returns to Showtime for its second season Friday and star Sophie Nélisse promises the stakes are higher than ever.

Nélisse, who plays the younger version of Melanie Lynskey’s Shauna in the series, tells ABC Audio fans should prepare themselves for “more chaos” and “more conflict” as the teenage survivors of last season’s plane crash go deeper into survival mode and their adult counterparts deal with the repercussions 25 years later.  

“I think what I was really intrigued [about] with the show is to kind of see how we’ll transition into this sort of feral state where we’re ready to commit really bad things,” she says.

There are lots of fan theories about what those “bad things” will entail, but Nélisse says she can safely debunk at least one of them involving her character’s pregnancy.

“We’re not going to eat the baby,” she says. “[In] the first season, a lot of fans were like, ‘Are they going to eat the baby?’ I think our show does a good job at, you know, tapping into the horror, and we’re walking a very fine line and I think that’s the one line we are not ready to cross.”

As dark as it is, Nelisse admits she was actually a fan of the wild theory.

“I honestly, not gonna lie, I was kind of Team Eating the Baby,” she says. “I admit it’s a little dark. I think I would even have a hard time watching such a scene.”

Tune in to see just how dark things will get, as Yellowjackets’ season 2 premiere is streaming on Showtime now.

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(NOTE LANGUAGE) In a wide-ranging interview with the Wake Up with Angela Yee podcast, Abbott Elementary Emmy winner Sheryl Lee Ralph discussed an accusation she made in her new book, DIVA 2.0: 12 Life Lessons From Me For You, in which a “famous” person sexually assaulted her at a public event.

“There was one incident — it was like the third time something like this happened to me. I thought to myself, ‘What did I do to deserve that?'”

She expressed, “This was a famous TV judge. Not Judge Mathis, I love him. He’s a great man.”

Ralph recalled, “I’m at a very public place. I was suited. I had my suit on. I was handling my business for the television show I was on at that time. He and I were on the same network. This man walked in, grabbed me by the back of my neck, turned me around and rammed his nasty-a** tongue down my throat.”

She added, “And everybody at the network saw it.”

Sheryl explained that the former mayor of New Orleans, Marc Morial, offered to “send the police there right now” and “fix his you-know-what right now.” However, she was dissuaded from doing anything by someone from the network.

“They saw what happened,” Ralph said, before quoting the executives: “‘It wasn’t that bad. We don’t need the bad press.'” Sheryl exclaimed, “That’s the kind of stuff that … makes it hard for women to speak up about these things!”

She advised women, “Speak up. Do not carry the burden of that pain.” She said experiences like that “drive some people crazy,” noting, “They get changed forever.”

Ralph also said she was shocked Harvey Weinstein was “taken down” because many famous abusers aren’t.

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