Entertainment

Ice Cube says he lost out on a $9 million movie role for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. 

While appearing on the November 2nd episode of the Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast, the actor and rapper said candidly, “I turned down a movie because I didn’t want to get the m************ jab.”

“I turned down $9 million. I didn’t want to get the jab,” he continued. “F*** that jab. F**** y’all for trying to make me get it. I don’t know how Hollywood feels about me right now.”

Ice Cube later clarified that he “didn’t turn down the movie,” but that he wasn’t hired because of his refusal to get vaccinated.

“I didn’t turn it down. They just wouldn’t give [the role] to me,” he said. “The COVID shot, the jab. I didn’t need it. I didn’t catch that s*** at all. Nothing. F*** them. I didn’t need that s***.”

The admission comes a year after reports circulated that Cube exited the Sony film Oh Hell No, in which he would have starred opposite Jack Black.

(Video contains uncensored profanity.)

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ABC debuted the first trailer for 27th season of The Bachelor during Tuesday’s Bachelor in Paradise finale, and there’s no shortage of laughter, tears and heartbreak.

“Do I deserve this? I don’t know. But I’m pretty damn happy,” Zach Shallcross, a contestant from the most recent season of The Bachelorette, which starred Gabby Windey and Rachel Recchia, says at one point.

However, his mood quickly changes, saying in a confessional, “I feel like a failure. I feel like I let myself down, and I feel like I let the women down.”

Later, he’s seen crying, apparently over the departure of one of the contestants. “I don’t even know what happened. I saw something with her. I was not expecting that,” he says.

The 26-year-old tech executive from Anaheim Hills, California, whom Rachel had cast off after hometowns, was introduced as the next Bachelor during the season 17 finale of The Bachelorette.

The Bachelor returns for its 27th season January 23 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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Matthew McConaughey has much to be thankful for, but there are two things in his life he holds most dear.

“Family and health,” he told ABC Audio ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The actor continued that while “a lot of people say” the same thing, he absolutely means it and “will say it again.”

“[I] look around and go, ‘The family’s still together and we’re healthy. We’re moving forward,'” McConaughey expressed. “That’s really the baseline of everything else in my life.”

While so many people already share his point of view, the Oscar winner explained why family and health should be on the top of everyone’s list. He explained, “I think in most of our lives, out of everything else we have to be thankful for, all of it pales. If the family’s not healthy, everything takes a backseat to that.”  

McConaughey wed model and designer Camila Alves in 2012. They share three children — two sons and a daughter. Their eldest is 14, a son named Levi, and their youngest is 9-year-old Livingston. Their daughter Vida is 12.

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Now all those dots on Harrison Ford‘s face as seen on the set of the fifth Indiana Jones film make sense.

Fans connected the dots, speculating they were markers digital artists use to de-age actors — and now director James Mangold confirms his forthcoming movie will flash back to the past.

In a cover story for Empire, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker gives a nod to the original movies from the creator of the adventuring archeologist character, George Lucas, and the series’ former director, Steven Spielberg.

This comes in the form of a sequence centering on an Indy adventure that takes place between 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was set in 1938, and 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was set in the 1950s.

Mangold tells the magazine, “I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George-and-Steven old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast. And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969. So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ’40s and ’60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days … and then the beginning of now.”

The “now” will see Ford, who will turn 81 when the film is released, on his final, still secret adventure as the man in the hat.

But as Indy said in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”

The new movie hits theaters June 30, 2023, from Lucasfilm, which, like ABC News, is owned by parent company Disney.

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Like the smash show Yellowstone, Sylvester Stallone‘s new drama, Tulsa King, comes from prolific writer-producer Taylor Sheridan — who is also the producer of Jeremy Renner‘s well-reviewed series Mayor of Kingstown.

With Tulsa King taking place in, as its name suggests, Oklahoma, where Stallone’s mobster Dwight “The General” Manfredi has been exiled after getting out of prison, is it too much to wonder if the Dutton clan from Montana could ever cross paths with Sly’s big-city transplant?

At a recent press event, Stallone had a laugh at the prospect of a crossover in the Sheridan-verse. “You mean, I go over and I kill John Dutton? No problem. Got it. Take over the ranch?” he smiles, adding, “No.”

Stallone’s character starts gathering a crew in his new stomping grounds in the middle of America, so it’s not that out of the question, he admits. “I think we’re getting kind of close to it. You’ll see later on the episodes, I do get into the cowboy aspect of it and some of these real tough guys. It is going to continue that way.”

The Rocky icon continues, “When I start to get involved with the oil baron types and the real tough guys, they don’t mess around. So we’re kind of blending the two together. But will I actually be staying in John Dutton’s guesthouse? I doubt it,” he laughs.

Tulsa King is now streaming on Paramount+.

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The new Hulu series Welcome to Chippendales debuts today, chronicling the dramatic story of the Chippendales founders Steve Banerjee and his business partner Nick De Noia, and how their relationship went from success to scandal.

Kumail Nanjiani portrays Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who realized the American dream, and he tells ABC Audio he can relate to some of Banerjee’s journey, specifically “the idea of coming here and having to prove yourself and trying to make it.”

“And then coming here with an idea of what American success looks like and seeing how different it is from the reality of it… I sort of understood coming here, wanting to make your mark,” says Nanjiani, before adding, “However, I would like to think we chose different paths to get there.”

Surprisingly, neither Nanjiani nor his costar, Annaleigh Ashford, who plays Banerjee’s wife Irene, have actually been to a Chippendales show, but they feel they got the full experience through the recreations on set.

“There were times where we would have to, like, be silent because we needed sound, and there would be a part where they’d rip off their pants. And all of us would still go, Oh!” Ashford recalls.

“200 women and me going, Oh!,” adds Nanjiani.

Despite not making it a show, Ashford was familiar with this story before filming, thanks to her mother, who also has never been.

“I actually have a mother who really likes to watch crime shows. She’s a murder porn person… she likes murder porn,” she explains. “And so from my mother, I knew the ins and outs of the dark dramas of the Chippendales legacy.”

As for how she thinks her mother would react to a Chippendales show?

“… My mom would have a Diet Coke and a good scream in the corner,” she says.

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(NOTE LANGUAGE) Advance tickets for the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water are now on sale, and James Cameron — or, more accurately, Disney-owned 20th Century Studios — certainly hopes you buy some.

To GQ, Cameron explained the long-in-development sequel to the 2009 original — the highest-grossing movie of all time — has a, pardon pun, high water mark to hit to make its money back.

When asked how expensive the movie was to make, Cameron claimed, “Very f***ing.”

The Titanic Oscar winner then elaborated, “You have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.” He also referred to the movie, which is the first of four planned sequels, “the worst business case in movie history” in terms of risk over reward.

That said, Cameron is never anything if not confident, speaking on the movie’s bleeding-edge computer graphics and other cinema tech. “I’m attracted by difficult. Difficult is a f***ing magnet for me. I go straight to difficult,” he says. “And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t f***ing want to do it.”

To see what “difficult” looks like, check out exclusive interviews with the cast of The Way of Water on Fandango, which polled its moviegoers and found — happily for Cameron, no doubt — that Gen Z-aged moviegoers called the December 16 release their most anticipated film of the year.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

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Kevin Bacon worked with writer-director James Gunn in the 2010 low-budget, skewed superhero movie Super, but he tells ABC Audio he was just as surprised as other moviegoers to hear his name dropped in Gunn’s 2014 blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Bacon recalls to ABC Audio, “I went to the movies just like opening weekend, like I would, you know…I’d seen the trailer and I went to the movies having no idea that I was mentioned in it. But I mean, you can imagine you’re sitting there in the theater and I start looking around at people and going, you know, ‘Did I just hear what I think I heard?'”

For the uninitiated, Chris Pratt‘s Peter Quill/Star-Lord was abducted from Earth when he was still a kid back in the ’80s, so he cites Footloose and the legend of a “great hero named Kevin Bacon” to Zoe Saldaña‘s Gamora. In Avengers: Infinity War, Pom Klementieff‘s Mantis suggests the actor might be one of the Avengers.

“It was a pretty out of body experience, honestly,” Bacon admits. “I called my wife afterwards,” he says of Kyra Sedgwick. “It’s like, ‘You got to see this movie..I’m going to go back with you, but I’m not going to tell you anything about it…'”

On Friday, Bacon officially joins the MCU as himself in Disney+’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

Klementieff explains, “The story is just hilarious…Mantis and Drax (Dave Bautista) want to find a beautiful Christmas gift for…Peter Quill. And then they brainstorm, and they come up with the idea of Kevin Bacon, the real Kevin Bacon, the actual person.” 

In the spirit of Christmas, the aliens abduct him.

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The biggest movie of the year — and of Tom Cruise‘s career — Top Gun: Maverick, will finally land on streaming December 22.

Paramount+ made the announcement Tuesday.

As reported, Cruise — also a producer of the blockbuster — resisted pressure to stream the film while attendance in theaters was still low, or even nonexistent, during the pandemic, and insisted it be released only in theaters.

It was a gamble that paid off: To date, the movie has grossed more than $1.4 billion worldwide since its release on May 27.

Joseph Kosinsky‘s movie has Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell training a crop of young recruits for a dangerous mission: Miles Teller, Lewis Pullman, Glenn Powell, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and Greg Tarzan Davis play the cocky young guns. The film also stars Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, Oscar nominee Ed Harris, Emmy winner Jon Hamm and original Top Gun star Val Kilmer.

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What can we learn about the limits of the human mind and body, by pushing Chris Hemsworth‘s mind and body to the limits? That’s explored in the new Nat Geo/Disney+ series Limitless, out now.

The goal, Hemsworth tells ABC Audio, was simple: “To try to live longer. And that was the irony. I was put through a series of challenges that were potentially life-threatening.”

“It was an opportunity to understand how to live longer and better,” he continues. “…You know, I’ve trained a lot over the years. I’ve had pretty good attention to my nutrition, but I had no idea any of the science behind it. [Particularly] in the space of longevity, the science around…cold water exposure, heat exposure, stress management.”

The hardest thing physically says Hemsworth, was taking a plunge in Arctic water.

“I had Ross Edgley there with me training me, and he said, look, you’re going to have to override the message that your brain is telling you that you’re dying…and trust the science.”

“That was the most emotional, challenging thing I’d been a part of through the series,” he adds. “That gave me a wonderful sense of gratitude and…even greater appreciation for life. And I hope people have that same takeaway from it.”

Surprisingly, says the hunky Thor star, “Stress management was probably the biggest [takeaway] and realizing…how detrimental that is to our health, and you can do everything else right, but if you’re full of cortisol walking around in a state of fight or flight, then you’re really behind the eight-ball.”

After doing the show, Hemsworth insists, “I have a lot more sort of mindfulness practices and techniques, you know, putting myself, giving myself day to day. A lot of saunas, a lot of ice baths.”

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