The combined star power of Taylor Swift and Shawn Mendes wasn’t enough to lift either of their new films to number one at the box office over the weekend.
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, starring Shawn as the voice of the titular reptile, made an estimated $11.5 million, good enough for second place behind the horror film Smile but still below expectations.
Billboard reports that Sony, the studio releasing the film, expects the Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day holiday on Monday to help boost its three-day take to $13.4 million.
David O. Russell’s star-packed movie Amsterdam, which stars Taylor as well as Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek and more, earned $6.5 million or about eight percent of the $80 million it cost to make.
The studio had expected Amsterdam to hit $10 million after garnering less-than-stellar reviews. The words “flops” and “bombs” are being used most frequently to describe its box office performance.
Meanwhile, that other movie featuring a pop star, Harry Styles‘ Don’t Worry Darling, is still in the top five after three weeks and has so far earned $38 million.
Last month, Julian Lennon released his first new studio album in 11 years, an 11-track collection titled Jude.
Julian, the older of late Beatle John Lennon‘s two sons, tells ABC Audio that Jude is actually made up mostly of previously unreleased older songs.
“This journey started with me receiving a few boxes of different formatted tapes from the basement of my business manager in London, who retired,” he explains, noting that the tapes dated back to the beginning of his music career.
“The first thing I saw was reel-to-reel tape,” Julian says. “[I]t had the original demos for ‘Too Late for Goodbyes,’ for ‘Valotte,’ a number of other songs on the [1984 Valotte] album, and a couple of songs that I was saving for a later date.”
Lennon says he began working his way through the tapes, picking songs to update for what he initially felt would make a good EP. Julian looked for tunes with themes that fit together well, and that reflected what was currently going on in his life and in the world, eventually realizing he had enough tracks for a full album.
The album’s title is a reference to the classic Beatles song “Hey Jude,” which Paul McCartney famously wrote in 1968 to cheer up a young Julian after his father left his mother. Lennon says titling the record Jude partly ties in with his recent decision to legally change his given first name, John, to Julian, which he’s been called since childhood.
“Jules, Jude, me, retrospective, collection of songs from life, taking ownership of the name Jude and/or being me finally … that all made sense to me,” he maintains. “And it was just pieces of this weird puzzle that just came together and all made sense in the end.”
The “All the Small Things” rockers have deleted every post on their Instagram and have also cleared their website of all content except for a landing page featuring graphics of yellow construction tape and the band’s rabbit mascot.
If you scroll to the bottom of the site, you’ll find the words, “Hard at work! Check back soon.”
The digital wipe has fans hoping that new Blink-182 music is in the works. The group’s most recent song is the 2020 pandemic-themed single “Quarantine,” which followed their 2019 album, Nine.
Since then, the Blink members have been dealing with a lot in their personal lives: Bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus has been continuing to recover from his 2021 cancer battle, while drummer Travis Barker was hospitalized earlier this year with pancreatitis.
There’s also the question of who will be playing guitar in Blink going forward. Since 2015, that role belonged to Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba, who joined the band in place of founding member Tom DeLonge. However, rumors have persisted that DeLonge would be reuniting with Blink, and even Skiba commented that “Your guess is as good as mine” when it comes to his current status in the group.
In response to the rumors, Hoppus proclaimed that Blink had “nothing to announce.” In an interview People published in August, he shared that he’s “open to whatever the next phase of Blink is.”
Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd brought down the house at New York Comic Con on Saturday, where they reminisced about their partnership in the Back to the Future trilogy.
The pair chatted about how Fox came to replace Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in the 1985 blockbuster — after weeks of filming with Stoltz as the lead.
“I felt that I barely made it through the [first] six weeks, and now I was gonna have to do it again?!” Lloyd recalled thinking.
Fox — who at the time was doing double-duty as the star of Family Ties — immediately made an impact, continued Lloyd. “The chemistry was there from the first scene we had…It hasn’t gone away, by the way,” he noted.
Fox said all he had to do was “react” to the “brilliant” Lloyd playing the eccentric Dr. Emmett Brown. He added, “It was a thrill. Anytime I got to work with him, I knew it was gonna be a good day.”
Fox retired from acting in 2020 because of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. He remained inspiring, even as he at times struggled with the spasms from the disease, for which he’s raised $800 million through his eponymous foundation.
Fox’s sense of humor was very much intact: At one point, a source tells ABC Audio that a tic caused Fox to drop his gum out of his mouth onto the couch. Immediately, he scooped it up and popped it back in. “You saw it here first, folks: The moment I just got COVID,” he joked.
Fox later said, “I’ve said to people [Parkinson’s] is a gift, and they say, ‘You’re nuts.’ …But it’s a gift, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”
The pair also signed autographs for hundreds of fans, who Fox explained “gave me my whole life.”
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Justin Timberlake brought sexy back to a crowd of 1300 people in Santa Monica over the weekend, performing a sweaty 40-minute set at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles gala — the first time the event has been held since 2019.
Billboard reports that the gala landed JT as the entertainment because his pal Nikki DeLoach, a fellow former cast member of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, is the chairman of the CHLA Foundation Board of Trustees.
According to Billboard, Justin and his band, billed as Justin Timberlake & the Undercovers, performed for 40 minutes, singing cover versions like Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’,” Stevie Wonder‘s “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” Al Green‘s “Love and Happiness,” and standards like “Smile” and “The Way You Look Tonight.”
Justin also performed some of his own hits, including “Suit & Tie,” “Señorita,” and his number-one hit “Can’t Fight the Feeling!,” to which he added a bit of Bill Withers‘ classic “Lovely Day.”
The event raised a record $5.5 million, and was attended by many celebrities with personal connections to the hospital, like Jimmy Kimmel, whose son Billy had several open-heart surgeries there when he was a baby. Billboard reports that another reason Justin may have been compelled to perform is because his wife Jessica Biel‘s niece had life-saving heart surgery at the hospital.
“My kids have not had the need to be at CHLA,” Justin told the crowd, according to Billboard. “I think about all the lives that all of you saved, and I just want you to know that y’all are not unnoticed — especially to a father like me to a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old.”
The Apple TV+ documentary follows Selena over six years, detailing her mental and physical health struggles as she deals with lupus, anxiety and depression. In the two-and-a-half-minute trailer, we see both the glamorous side of Selena’s life — onstage and at big events — and her more vulnerable side, where she’s crying in a hospital, visiting childhood friends, or becoming emotional when she talks about how she never feels “good enough.”
In a voiceover, the singer and actress says, “Just be who you are, Selena. No one cares about what you’re doing. It’s about who I am, being okay with where I am. I am grateful to be alive.”
We also hear a snippet of a song in which Selena sings, “My mind and me/we don’t get along sometimes/It gets hard to breathe/but I wouldn’t change my life.”
The doc is directed by Alek Keshishian, who was behind the iconic 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare, and who also helmed Selena’s clip for “Hands to Myself.” It has its world premiere at Hollywood’s AFI Fest on November 2, and will then premiere globally on Apple TV+ on November 4.
ABC’s Pierre Thomas traveled to Chicago for an exclusive conversation with police Superintendent David Brown as part of ABC’s continuing coverage of guns in America. – John Parkinson/ABC News
(CHICAGO) — Over one recent weekend in Chicago, two children under the age of 10 became victims of the city’s rampant gun violence.
Mateo Zastro, 3, was shot and killed while in the car with his mother and siblings in an apparent road rage incident on Sept. 30. Then 7-year-old Legend Barr was shot and wounded as his family arrived at church on Oct. 2.
ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas spent a day with Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown for an inside look at the department’s efforts to curb gun violence — incidents affecting many Chicagoans — throughout the city.
“It’s the most complex policing landscape ever in this country’s history. We are making progress, but the complexities make it such that it is so fragile,” Brown told Thomas. “The ebbs and flows of violence are persistent.”
While shootings like those that killed Zastro and wounded Barr continue, the violence does seem to be ebbing: An ABC News/Gun Violence Archives analysis of the nation’s 50 largest cities shows homicides are down nearly 5% from last year after two years of pandemic-era increases.
In Chicago, shootings are down 20% through the end of summer and homicides have fallen 16%. That means 101 fewer people were shot this year than last.
What’s behind the small but encouraging decline? The Chicago police credit both community engagement as well as a new, more surgical deployment of officers to crime scenes after an analysis by the department showed half of all shootings and homicides occurred on 55 “beats,” or areas that are roughly the size of a block.
According to Brown, police have also been taking an average of 12,000 guns off Chicago’s streets every year — including “ghost guns,” which are unregistered firearms that can be assembled from at-home kits.
But Brown told Thomas that’s likely only 10% of the illegal firearms out there. “I don’t think we’re even chipping away,” Brown said.
Police say they have another powerful tool in their investigations, however: The department uses a system called “ShotSpotter,” where sound sensors are placed throughout Chicago to detect and locate gunfire.
“It’s like the intelligence network for how we respond to crime, how we solve crime,” Brown said. “I think more importantly, this is one of our major linchpins for how we prevent crime.”
Thomas had rare access inside the department’s technology center, where officers comb through surveillance camera footage from businesses and homes near crime scenes to identify and track down suspects. Brown said using such footage also protects witnesses who are “fearful to come forward,” while still helping solve cases.
In 2021, the department said it had cleared about half of its homicide cases, a nearly 20-year high, though a quarter of those did not result in prosecutors bringing charges, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.
Brown stressed to Thomas that gun violence was a multi-pronged issue.
“We’re talking about policing, but this is about economic development,” he said. “This is about poverty. This is about, in many instances, race.”
Community investment and engagement
Brown touted Chicago’s $1.4 billion investment to revitalize South and West side communities, which are disproportionately affected by crime.
“Our impoverished communities in Chicago here, we just did not have the commitment,” he said.
Brown explained his belief in economic development as a crime-fighting tactic by comparing his city to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood.
“You look at Harlem in New York today versus Harlem in New York 30 years ago, where you see actually some gentrification, but you see, really, a commitment to economic development. And you see Harlem much safer than it was 30 years ago,” Brown said.
“You did not have that here in Chicago,” he continued. “We’re starting to see that commitment now. So that we can have that sustained decline, because we are investing in affordable housing. We’re investing in jobs, we’re investing in mental health services and other drug treatments, social services.”
Brown showed Thomas what he says is an example of how that support has made an impact, visiting an area once known for being a crime hotspot that’s now been turned into a basketball court and green space for the community.
“Instead of it being an attraction to hand-to-hand drug transactions, it’s an attraction to community engagement with each other and with police,” Brown said.
With decreased crime and increased investment, the area can foster something more important, the superintendent said.
“Hope, hope, people have hope. People who have hope can have dreams of a better life. People who have dreams of a better life are not attracted to violence,” Brown said. “That’s what economic development does — different than what policing does.”
Working to build trust
Community engagement is another strategy Chicago police have been employing, one Brown told Thomas is key to gaining trust in communities of color, especially in light of high-profile police killings like George Floyd’s murder by an officer in Minneapolis.
“How difficult has it been?” Thomas asked of forging bonds between police and those they are assigned to protect.
“[It] made it more difficult to even be heard,” Brown said.
He also acknowledged the role race plays in perspectives on crime and policing.
“The demographics are what they are, in terms of people who look like you and me, who are shooters and are victims,” Thomas said. “How, as a Black man and as a law enforcement executive, do you balance how you feel about that?”
Brown said: “I think the first step for me personally is to never forget where I’ve come from.”
ABC News’ Jack Date, Quinn Owen and John Parkinson contributed to this report.
Walker Hayes’ new duet with Flo Rida, “High Heels,” might seem like an uptempo party tune, but in his verse, the country star dives into some real-life subject matters.
“You know my life is like / Giddy up, giddy up, family daddy / Almost got that Grammy / But I guess they don’t do ‘Fancy Like’ me,” he sings, in a tip of the hat to his Grammy nomination for his breakout mega-hit, “Fancy Like.”
Despite the disappointments, Walker’s life has lots of bright spots, such as his faith, the “low miles on my Prius” and the “free food” at Applebee’s ever since he shouted out the restaurant chain in “Fancy Like”’s lyrics.
Another line in the song reads, “I’ll take my whiskey neat to hide my mixed emotions,” which is a personal sentiment for Walker, too. He has seven years of sobriety under his belt.
The singer spoke about his experiences with addiction during a recent conversation with Country Faith Radio with Hillary Scott on Apple Music Country. Walker explained that deep-rooted family issues and a tumultuous relationship with the country music industry led him toward what he describes as a “Godless phase,” and that took its toll on his relationship with his wife Laney.
“I’m an alcoholic. I’m seven years sober now, but I wasn’t thinking about becoming sober for a very long time,” the singer recounts. “That was a problem in our marriage.”
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson won’t be adding president of the United States as one of his roles any time soon.
The wrestler-turned-actor has toyed for a while with the idea of running for POTUS, but during a new interview he declared that the idea is “off the table” so he can focus on being a dad.
“I love our country and everyone in it I also love being a daddy. And that the most important thing to me,” he explained during CBS Sunday Morning on October 9.
“Especially during this time, this critical time in my daughters’ lives,” continued Johnson. “Because I know what it was like to be on the road and be so busy that I was absent for a lot of years for my first daughter’s growing up, [at] this critical age at this critical time in her life. And that’s what the presidency will do.”
Johnson, 50, has three daughters: Simone Johnson, 21, with ex Dany Garcia, and Jasmine Johnson, 6, and Tiana Johnson, 4, with wife Lauren Hashian.
“Sure, CEO sounds great, but the #1 thing I want to be is daddy. That’s it,” The Black Adam star added.
Netflix on Saturday debuted the official trailer for its upcoming Addams Family series, Wednesday, which revealed Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armisen playing the role of Uncle Fester. The dark comedy is focused on a grown-up Wednesday Addams — played by Jenna Ortega — navigating her way as a student at Nevermore Academy, and a budding psychic with strange powers, as her hometown is terrorized by a spree of monstrous killings. Luiz Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones, respectively, play Wednesday’s parents Morticia and Gomez. Wednesday premieres November 23 on Netflix…
Disney+’s upcoming Goosebumps series has added Justin Long as a regular cast member, according to Variety. The 10-episode series, based on the R.L. Stine books, follows “a group of five high-schoolers who unleash supernatural forces upon their town and must all work together — thanks to and in spite of their friendships, rivalries, and pasts with each other — in order to save it, learning much about their own parents’ teenage secrets in the process.” Long will play Nathan Bratt, “the new schoolteacher who develops a terrifying connection to a decades-old supernatural murder.” Disney is the parent company of ABC News…
NBC has ordered America’s Got Talent: All-Stars, a spinoff to its long-running competition series America’s Got Talent, according to The Hollywood Reporter. AGT host Terry Crews will also serve as host of the new series, while executive producer Simon Cowell will judge along with Heidi Klum and Howie Mandel. Contestants will include “winners, finalists, fan favorites and viral sensations” from the show’s past 17 seasons. America’s Got Talent: All-Stars is set to premiere sometime in 2023…
Keanu Reeves has pulled out of Hulu’s adaptation of The Devil in the White City, according to Variety. The show, based on Erik Larson‘s book, “tells the true story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H. H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious ‘Murder Castle’ built in the Fair’s shadow,” per the streaming service. Reeves was cast as Burnham in what would have been his first major American television role…
