The fallout from Will Smith‘s Oscars slap continues.
On Thursday, Varietyreports that the actor’s Q Scores, the industry standard for measuring celebrities’ mass appeal, have dropped significantly since he slapped host Chris Rock onstage at the Academy Awards in March.
Conducted twice a year in January and July, nearly 2,000 consumers starting from age 6 are surveyed about their opinion on famous figures.
Prior to the incident on live TV, Smith had a positive Q score of 39, meaning that 39% of the respondents cited TheFresh Prince of Bel-Air star as one of their favorite celebrities. But based on the July report, his score has dropped to 24, which Henry Schafer, executive VP of Q Scores, says is a “very significant and precipitous decline.”
His negative Q score has leapt from 10 to 26, meaning that 26% of those surveyed have a “fair” or “poor” opinion of the actor.
As for Rock, both his positive and negative Q scores remain unchanged in the aftermath of the incident, ranking at 20 and 14, respectively.
Smith received his first Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Richard Williams in King Richard during the 2022 ceremony.
Even after 30 years, the cast of A League of Their Own still keeps in touch.
The 1992 film, which starred Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Lori Petty and Anne Ramsay, is loosely based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that was active from 1943 to 1954. It was created to keep professional baseball in the public eye while many of the male players had been drafted for World War II.
Geena, who played the catcher and the team’s assistant manager, Dottie Hinson, says that she and many of the cast members are still close.
“The girls and I are all still in contact and we still remain a team,” Geena shares with People, adding that Anne is a “very close friend.” “So much time has passed, but A League of Their Own has been very important in my life.”
The Academy Award-winning actress also says that while she didn’t know how to play baseball before the film, she learned through filming that she had natural athleticism for the sport.
“I’d never played baseball. I didn’t know how to play at all,” she explains. “But I had to learn to play for this part. And it turned out that I actually had some kind of untapped athletic ability.”
A League of Their Own has been adapted into a TV series starring co-creator Abbi Jacobson as team catcher Carson Shaw and Chante Adams as pitcher Maxine Chapman. It premiered on Amazon Prime Video on August 12.
Jonah Hill may have directed and starred in the upcoming film Stutz, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see him promoting it.
Stutz is a documentary that explores mental health alongside Hill and his therapist. Coincidentally, Hill’s mental health is the reasoning behind his decision to forgo promotional media appearances for the show.
“Through this journey of self-discovery within the film, I have come to the understanding that I have spent nearly 20 years experiencing anxiety attacks, which are exacerbated by media appearances and public facing events,” he explained in an open letter obtained by Variety.
The actor, 38, went on to say that he’s “so grateful” the film is premiering this fall and he “can’t wait to share it with audiences around the world in the hope that it will help those struggling.”
Further explaining his choice to not do press, Hill added that he’s taking this step to “protect [himself.]”
“If I made myself sicker by going out there and promoting it, I wouldn’t be acting true to myself or to the film,” he said. “I usually cringe at letters or statements like this but I understand that I am of the privileged few who can afford to take time off. I won’t lose my job while working on my anxiety.”
“With this letter and with Stutz, I’m hoping to make it more normal for people to talk and act on this stuff,” the Superbad star continued. “So they can take steps towards feeling better and so that the people in their lives might understand their issues more clearly.”
“I hope the work will speak for itself and I’m grateful to my collaborators, my business partners and to all reading this for your understanding and support,” Hill concluded.
Jamie Foxx has an unreleased comedy that he’s hoping sees the light of day.
In 2016, Jamie co-wrote and directed a film called All-Star Weekend that stars him and Jeremy Pivenas friends and truck drivers Malik and Danny, respectively, who win tickets to the NBA All-Star Game. During their trip across the country to get to the event, they encounter a series of characters along the way, including Robert Downey Jr., who portrays a Mexican man.
It harkens back to Robert’s role in Tropic Thunder wherein his character in the film, who is also an actor, underwent pigmentation alteration surgery to darken his skin to play a Black character.
Jamie says the film’s release is still on hiatus due to the current state of the world.
“It’s been tough with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy. We’re trying to break open the sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again,” Jamie tells CinemaBlend. “We hope to keep them laughing and run them right into All-Star Weekend because we were definitely going for it.”
Rounding out the cast is Eva Longoria, Gerard Butler and Benicio del Toro.
Kenan Thompson may have a sequel to Good Burger in the works.
The 1997 film starring Kenan and Kel Mitchell as cashiers at a burger joint that was based off of a sketch featured in the Nickelodeon show All That has built a cult following over the years. In an Instagram post celebrating its 25th anniversary last month, Kenan wrote, “‘sup with that part 2?!'”
During his appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy FallonWednesday night, the Saturday Night Live star hinted that a sequel is not out of the question.
“Are you saying that Good Burger2 is happening?” the host asks.
“I would like it to,” Kenan replies. “We are working harder on it than ever, so it’s about meeting the numbers, letting the numbers match up because I need them numbers.”
If the sequel does get the green light, Kenan says he hopes that Kel’s character, Ed, has “a million kids” and predicts that his character, Dexter, will be “coming out of jail for something that he put me in jail for. He got me in trouble,” he quips.
Kenan also recalls the day he and Kel met on the set of All That as teenagers, realizing from “day one” that they had comedic chemistry. “I immediately recognized he was brilliant and we were very similar, so we hit it off from that point,” he says.
Kel stated in 2018 that talks about doing a Good Burger sequel were taking place.
If there’s one person Keke Palmer would love to play in a film, it’d be the late Whitney Houston. Her desire comes from wanting to do the singer some justice and tell her full story, unlike the projects that mainly discuss her highly publicized lows.
“I think that with Whitney’s story, a lot of times people exploit just the more sensational aspects in terms of her relationship with Bobby or the conversations around drug use,” Keke said in an interview with E! News. “I think there’s so much to Whitney that has not been explored in terms of just her family and her relation to the kind of music she did and how that was accepted culturally.”
“There’s just so many other nuanced aspects of who Whitney Houston is and the barriers that she broke, that I think have not been as explored,” she continued. “When I think about her story, I just would want to show her truly as the sweetheart that she was and everything that she did that changed culture forever.”
Keke’s wish to portray the “I Have Nothing” star is not far-fetched, at least not in the eyes of social media users. Last week, a fan sharing a compilation of funny Whitney clips tweeted, “Keke Palmer and Whitney Houston act exactly the same.”
Keke replied, “Let’s get the movie made y’all. I’m ready to ACK, we abt to weep in the theaters.”
Tom Hollander, Diane Lane and Calista Flockhart have been added to the season two cast of the FX series Feud, according to Variety. They join previously announced series stars Naomi Watts and Chloë Sevigny. The second season of Ryan Murphy‘s anthology series follows the true story of how Truman Capote‘s friendship with numerous members of New York high society was soured after he published excerpts of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, with the excerpts serving as a tell-all about the city’s elite…
Quinta Brunson‘s Emmy-nominated ABC series Abbott Elementary will return for its second season on September 21, ABC announced in a promo video released on Wednesday. Per ABC, “Philly’s favorite educators are gearing up for another school year, which means more workplace laughs are on the way”…
Ramy Youssef announced on Wednesday that his Hulu original series Ramy will return for its third season on September 30. The comedy drama, based on Youssef’s real-life experiences, follows “a first-generation American Muslim who is on a spiritual journey in his politically divided New Jersey neighborhood.” In the third season, Ramy’s family is forced to confront having lived a life dedicated to worldly concerns — and in some cases, lies — while Ramy all but abandons his spiritual journey, instead dedicating himself to him and his uncle’s diamond business, per ABC. Laith Nakli, Hiam Abbass, Amr Waked, May Calamawy, Dave Merheje, Mohammed Amer and Steve Way also star…
Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Hannah Waddingham and Cecily Strong have added to the voice cast of a new animated Garfield film, joining Chris Pratt and Samuel L. Jackson, according to Deadline. The film is based on Jim Davis’ titular lazy comic strip cat and his interactions with his owner, Jon Arbuckle, along with his fellow pet, Odie the dog. Jackson will reportedly play a brand-new character, Garfield’s father, Vic. Details as to the roles of the other actors have not yet been revealed…
Netflix has ordered a new version of the cult favorite reality show The Mole, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series, which originally aired for five seasons on ABC between 2001 and 2008, will feature “12 contestants working together on a series of challenges that, if completed successfully, add money to a prize pot that only one of them will win. The mole, meanwhile, tries to sabotage the other players’ efforts while maintaining their cover as a regular player,” according to THR. The reboot is set to launch on Netflix in the fall…
Anne Heche‘s death has been ruled an accident, more than a week after suffering serious injuries in a fiery Los Angeles car crash, city records show.
The 53-year-old actress died from inhalation and thermal injuries, according to records from the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. She also suffered a sternal fracture due to blunt trauma, the records state.
The day of Heche’s death is listed as August 11. The actress was declared brain dead that night but was kept on life support for organ donation and her heart was still beating, her representative said then. Heche was removed from life support on Sunday, her representative said.
Heche was alone in her car on August 5 when she crashed into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, engulfing her car and the house in flames, according to Los Angeles police and fire officials. No one else was injured in the single-car crash, and the home’s resident and her pets were able to escape the blaze unharmed.
Heche suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was in a coma in critical condition following the crash, her family and friends said in a statement. Heche was not expected to survive her injuries, her family said, noting that it “has long been her choice to donate her organs.”
Results from a blood draw completed several hours after the crash showed Heche had narcotics in her system, but additional tests were being run to determine more about the drugs and to rule out which may have been present because of drugs administered by medical personnel, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Investigators told ABC News no alcohol was detected in Heche’s blood sample, though again, the blood draw was several hours after the crash.
LAPD investigators told ABC News on August 12 that they had ended their criminal investigation due to the latest developments in Heche’s condition.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is open for business! The latest Marvel series for Disney+ is out today, starring Tatiana Maslany as the big green lawyer and she tells ABC Audio she wasn’t all that familiar with She-Hulk before taking the job.
“I kind of knew that that character existed just from having seen…images on T-shirts or like maybe passing the comic book, but I didn’t really know who she was,” she says.
The Orphan Black alum knows She-Hulk and Marvel have a voracious fan-base, and she hopes they like it, but she also likes that the series addresses the issue of toxic fandom.
“In so many ways just by putting She-Hulk at the center of it, we’re already pissing people off. Do you know what I mean? Like there’s already people who are upset about that.”
Unlike Maslany, executive producer Kat Coiro‘s She-Hulk fandom goes way back, noting she “fell in love” with the comic when she was nine years old, sharing, “I wanted to be her.”
“I didn’t know someone like this existed. She’s large. She’s in charge. She yells at the writers. She takes control of her own narrative.”
That humor is also what drew series creator Jessica Gao to the character.
“Traditional superhero comics, you know, are very dramatic and some of them tend to be very heavy and serious…And…then to have John Byrne‘s She-Hulk…it was so fun…she was so irreverent and like even when she was doing things like saving the world…she still dealt with it with humor.”
Marvel is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC.
The Showtime series has cast Obi-Wan Kenobi actress Simone Kessell in the role of a grown-up version of Lottie Matthews, played as a teen by Courtney Eaton. Eaton has also been upped to series regular on the show.
Last week, the show cast another pivotal role, tapping Six Feet Under actress Lauren Ambrose as the adult version of Liv Hewson’s Van.
The series centers on a high school soccer team forced to survive on their own in the wilderness after a plane crash. It also catches up with the survivors 25 years later.
The first season of Yellowjackets earned seven Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series, and also respective Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Supporting Actress noms for Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci.
