The Champagne Papi became the Christmas Papi for December 25.
Drake surprised random people on the streets of his Toronto hometown by handing out large stacks of 20-dollar bills on Christmas. The “Take Care” rapper was seen in a Twitter video giving out money as he rode in the back seat of a Mercedes Maybach.
“@Champagnepapi giving away racks for Christmas,” the video is captioned. “Legend of the city.”
As a woman held the money, she said, “Oh my God. This is crazy!” while a man with her responded, “Thank you, bro. I appreciate it, guys.”
The four-time Grammy winner enjoyed Christmas with his four-year-old son, Adonis. He posted an Instagram video of them having fun wrestling with another young boy, captioned “Merry Christmas From The Gang.” As the kids piled on top of Drake, he said with a laugh, “I’m gonna get up, I’m gonna out of this.”
2020 has been a special year for the Toronto MC, who won the Billboard Artist of the Decade award in May. He also dropped his long-awaited sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy, in September, his first new project since Scorpion in 2018. CLB debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart, selling 613,000 units. It was the biggest week for an album in 2020 until Adele’s 30 sold 692,000 units the fourth week in November.
Certified Lover Boy also received 714 million on-demand audio streams in its first week. Only one album has ever scored a larger on-demand audio streaming week: Scorpion, with 746 million in 2018.
Walker Hayes has had a whirlwind year, thanks to the success of “Fancy Like.”
After posting a video of him and his 16-year-olddaughter, Lela, performing an original dance to the track on TikTok, the video soon went viral, so much so the song and dance was featured in an Applebee’s commercial. “Fancy Like”also became Walker’s first #1 song and scored him his first Grammy nomination, for Best Country Song at the 2022 ceremony.
Looking back on where he was on January 1, 2021, Walker admits he never could have predicted that by the end of the year, he’d have a massive hit on his hands.
“It’s just crazy. [I] didn’t foresee that in my future when I woke up last year on the first of January, and so it’s just insane how this year my life has changed the most,” Walker reflects. “It’s pretty incredible.”
The singer shares that his favorite 2021 memories surround “Fancy Like” and the ripple effect that the song’s success is having across his life, noting that his wife, Laney, and their six children are at the center of it all.
“Biggest memory to me will probably be me and my daughter doing the dance to ‘Fancy Like’ and the adjustments that the catapult of my career has, the impact that it’s made on my family and how we’ve had to adjust,” Walker explains. “I’ve gotten so busy, but they’re able to come out with me, so we’re making memories left and right.”
Walker will perform “Fancy Like” and his new single, “AA,” on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2022, airing December 31 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Kane Brown finds solace in “Whiskey Sour,” a new song he’s releasing on January 14.
Kane shared a sample of the track on Instagram, featuring traditional country elements of fiddle and tear-in-your-beer lyrics. It tells the story a couple preparing to get married, only to break up a month before the wedding. The chorus follows the heartbroken groom to a bar where he drinks his whiskey sour alone.
“So now I take my whiskey sour/Sittin’ bar side after hours/Thinkin’ how can I get over/If the love was never ours/And I know you got my message/All my x’s and my o’s/And it kills me by the hour/Now I take my whiskey sours alone,” Kane sings over the mournful, fiddle-led melody.
“I love getting to sing other people’s stories!” Kane writes alongside the video, which shows him singing along to the tune at his kitchen counter.
“Whiskey Sour” is set to arrive as Kane’s current single, “One Mississippi,” continues climbing inside the top 10 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart.
KISS‘ Paul Stanley has contracted COVID-19 for a second time.
In an Instagram post, the Starchild shared a photo of his “Omicron face,” referring to the latest COVID variant driving a new surge of cases.
“My entire family has it,” Stanley wrote in the caption. “I’m tired and have sniffles. Most of my family have absolutely no symptoms.”
“Do as you choose,” he added. “I’m so glad I’m vaccinated.”
Stanley previously tested positive for COVID-19 this past August, as did his band mate, Gene Simmons. As a result, KISS postponed a number of dates on their ongoing End of the World farewell tour.
Bridgerton fans got the ultimate Christmas gift over the weekend: a season-two premiere date.
In a video featuring both returning and new cast members, Netflix announced that the period piece will debut its sophomore season on March 25. The announcement was made on the one-year anniversary of season one’s premiere.
Season two will focus on Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton and his new romance with Simone Ashley’s Kate Sharma.
Bridgerton also stars Phoebe Dynevor, Nicola Coughlan, Adjoa Andoh, Claudia Jessie, Luke Newton and Luke Thompson, and Julie Andrews as the voice of Lady Whistledown.
The Strokes have postponed their upcoming New Year’s Eve concert at the Barclays Center in New York City due to surging COVID-19 case numbers driven by the Omicron variant.
“We were so excited to be performing for everyone in Brooklyn this New Year’s Eve, but the Omicron variant has thwarted our plans,” Julian Casablancas and company write in a statement. “We’ve made the decision to postpone our show at Barclays Center.”
The band adds, “We want everyone to stay safe and healthy and we look forward to celebrating the new year with all of you…just a bit later than originally planned.”
All previously purchased tickets will be valid at the rescheduled show, the exact date for which has yet to be announced. Refund information will also be available when the rescheduled date is announced.
How can we put this….
We’re postponing the show.
We were so excited to be performing for everyone in Brooklyn this New Year’s Eve, but the Omicron variant has thwarted our plans. We’ve made the decision to postpone our show at Barclays Center.
The Marvelettes: Wanda Young, center; James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Wanda Young, co-lead singer of Motown’s The Marvelettes, died December 15 at age 78, according to the New York Times.Her daughter, Meta Ventress, told the paper that she died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Young replaced original member Georgia Dobbins ahead of the group signing with Motown in 1961. Their debut single, “Please Mr. Postman,” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in December of that year. It was Motown’s first number-one record on the Hot 100.
Years later, “Please Mr. Postman” was famously covered by both The Beatles and The Carpenters.
While Young sang backing vocals on that song, she sang lead on many other Marvelettes hits, including “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” “Too Many Fish in the Sea” and “Don’t Mess with Bill.“
Young left Motown in 1972 and later recorded for Motorcity Records. She and fellow Marvelettes member Gladys Horton also reunited for an album called The Marvelettes: Now! for that label in 1990.
Claudette Robinson, the first female artist signed to Motown, paid tribute to Young on Twitter, writing, “Wanda was a star on Earth and now she is a star in Heaven. Put on some #Marvelettes and turn it up.“
Young was married to The Miracles‘ Bobby Rogers for 12 years, until 1975. In addition to Ventress, Young’s two children with Rogers survive her; she’s also survived by seven grandchildren, a great-grandson, four sisters and four brothers. Her daughter, Miracle Rogers, was murdered in 2015.
Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has died at age 58, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
His longtime producing partner Nathan Ross confirmed his passing to THR. Vallée reportedly passed away suddenly at his cabin outside Quebec City. A cause of death is not yet known.
The filmmaker was known for directing the Matthew McConaughey film Dallas Buyers Club, for which McConaughey won the Best Actor Oscar, as well as HBO’s critically acclaimed series Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects.
Vallée, who also executive produced Big Little Lies, won two Emmys for the series in 2017: Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series.
“Jean-Marc Vallée was a brilliant, fiercely dedicated filmmaker, a truly phenomenal talent who infused every scene with a deeply visceral, emotional truth,” HBO said in a statement to THR. “He was also a hugely caring man who invested his whole self alongside every actor he directed.”
(WASHINGTON) — As the “extraordinarily contagious” omicron variant surges across the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that COVID-19 cases will likely continue to climb.
“Every day it goes up and up. The last weekly average was about 150,000 and it likely will go much higher,” Fauci told ABC This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
While Fauci said studies show omicron is less severe in terms of hospitalizations, he stressed, “we don’t want to get complacent” because “when you have such a high volume of new infections, it might override a real diminution in severity.”
“If you have many, many, many more people with a less level of severity, that might kind of neutralize the positive effect of having less severity when you have so many more people,” he explained. “And we’re particularly worried about those who are in that unvaccinated class … those are the most vulnerable ones when you have a virus that is extraordinarily effective in getting to people.”
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced a plan to distribute 500 million free at-home rapid tests to Americans beginning in January. The tests will be delivered by mail to Americans who request them. A website to request the tests will launch in January, according to the administration.
But the omicron surge created a massive rush for tests as Americans prepared to see relatives for the holidays, and they instead faced empty pharmacy shelves and massive test lines.
On Wednesday, ABC News’ World News Tonight anchor David Muir, asked Biden if that was a failure.
“I don’t think it’s a failure,” Biden replied in the exclusive interview. “I think it’s — you could argue that we should have known a year ago, six months ago, two months ago, a month ago.”
“I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago,” he told Muir.
Biden added “nothing’s been good enough” when it comes to the availability of at-home tests.
When Karl asked about the comments, Fauci admitted to This Week he is frustrated with at-home test availability and said “we’ve obviously got to do better.”
“The beginning of the year, there were essentially no rapid point of care home tests available. Now, there are over nine of them and more coming,” Fauci said. “The production of them has been rapidly upscaled, and yet because of the demand that we have, which in some respects, Jon, is good, that we have a high demand because we should be using testing much more extensively than we have.”
“But the situation where you have such a high demand, a conflation of events, omicron stirring people to get appropriately concerned and wanting to get tested as well as the fact of the run on tests during the holiday season — we’ve obviously got to do better,” he continued. “I think things will improve greatly as we get into January. But that doesn’t help us today and tomorrow.”
Karl also asked about the FDA last week granting emergency authorization to both Pfizer and Merck’s antiviral pills to treat COVID-19.
“Is this really the breakthrough that you’ve been waiting for?” Karl questioned.
“That’s part of the comprehensive approach to this outbreak. Vaccines and boosters, masks and now very importantly, a highly effective therapy is really going to make a major, major difference,” Fauci replied. “We’ve just got to make sure that there’s the production of enough of that product that we can get it widely used for those who need it as quickly as possible.”
“I assume that will be a top priority going forward, right? I mean, possibly including Defense [Production] Act … and the like?” Karl pressed.
“Absolutely, Jon, absolutely,” Fauci said. “We’ve got to get that product into the mouths of those who need it.”
Only 61.7% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to CDC data. Many Americans remain against COVID-19 vaccines over one year into their use.
The omicron surge doesn’t appear to sway unvaccinated Americans. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll this week, just 12% percent of unvaccinated Americans polled said the variant makes them more likely to get a vaccine.
Former President Donald Trump showed his support for vaccinations, who has spread conspiracy theories about vaccines and didn’t get vaccinated publicly, showed his support for COVID-19 vaccines in a Wednesday interview with The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, saying, “The results of the vaccine are very good. … People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”
Karl asked Fauci whether Trump’s supporters might listen to that message.
“I think that his continuing to say that people should get vaccinated and articulating that to them, in my mind is a good thing. I hope he keeps it up,” Fauci responded.
Fauci also said he was surprised when Trump was booed by some of his supporters in Texas last weekend after the former president revealed he’d gotten his booster shot.
“I was stunned by that,” Fauci said. “I mean, given the fact of how popular he is with that group, that they would boo him, which tells me how recalcitrant they are about being told what they should do.”
The COVID-19 pandemic eased its grip on theaters all over the world for much of the year, allowing box office returns to be much more generous than in 2020 — though still light-years from the Avengers: Endgame heights of 2019.
However, with the Omicron variant in the air, literally, it appears Spider-Man may be the first superhero truly immune from COVID-19. Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s debut spun a staggering web at the box office, scoring the biggest opening weekend ever for Sony and earning an estimated 587.2 million dollars worldwide — the third-biggest global opening of all time. An estimated $253 million of that global tally came from domestic ticket sales, making Spider-Man: No Way Home also the third-biggest domestic opening in history and the biggest-ever December debut. It was also the first pandemic-era film to bow with more than $100 million.
As of December 26, Spider-Man: No Way Home also topped the worldwide box office list, earning 1.05 billion dollars worldwide after a little more than a week in theaters, making it the biggest box office smash of the year and the first film to earn more than a billion dollars globally since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Elsewhere on the yearly chart, some other films that were theater-only releases in the U.S. performed better than expected, like Sony’s Spider-verse adjacent Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Ryan Reynolds‘ pandemic-delayed Free Guy. The flicks earned the #3 and #9 slots on 2021’s top ten highest-grossing films list domestically
Movies like Black Widow, Disney’s Jungle Cruise and A Quiet Place Part II performed decently, but likely saw their movie ticket take trimmed by the films’ being available simultaneously on streaming services. Black Widow star Scarlett Johansson sued Disney, claiming her movie’s box office — and her bottom line as a producer — was affected by Disney+’s streaming strategy. The suit was eventually settled, apparently amicably, and ScarJo mentioned she’d stay in the Marvel Studios family by producing future content, even though her Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow perished in Avengers: Endgame. Disney is the parent company of Marvel and ABC News.
Overseas, some weaker domestic performers like the pandemic-delayed James Bond adventure No Time to Die performed well; foreign theater-goers were more comfortable getting back to the theaters throughout the summer and fall, prior to the emergence of Omicron. Daniel Craig‘s last outing as 007 made more than $612 million from overseas audiences. Likewise, Marvel Studios’ Eternals added more than $236 million to its total take from overseas audiences; F9 made more than $553 million overseas; and Black Widow earned an additional $183 million from the foreign box office.
China, meanwhile, minted its own blockbuster with The Battle at Lake Changjin, a nationalistic war film about China’s defeat of U.S. soldiers in a battle of the Korean War. The film earned more than $902 million on China and Asia, second only to Spider-Man: No Way Home for the year.
2021’s top ten movies in the U.S. (as of 12/26/2021)
1. Spider-Man: No Way Home — $467,331,855 U.S. gross earnings
2. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — $224,543,292
3. Venom: Let There Be Carnage — $212,527,511
4. Black Widow — $183,651,655
5. F9: The Fast Saga — $173,005,945
6. Eternals — $164,508,664
7. No Time to Die — $160,772,007
8. A Quiet Place Part II — $160,072,261
9. Free Guy — $121,626,598
10. Ghostbusters: Afterlife — $120,460,060
2021’s top ten movies internationally (as of 12/26/2021)
1. Spider-Man: No Way Home — $587,100,000 overseas gross earnings
2. The Battle at Lake Changjin — $902,196,534
3. Hi, Mom — $822,009,764
4. No Time to Die — $613,262,000
5. F9: The Fast Saga — $553,223,556
6. Detective Chinatown 3 — $686,257,563
7. Venom: Let There Be Carnage — $288,500,000
8. Godzilla vs. Kong — $367,300,000
9. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — $207,686,762
10. Eternals — $236,181,075
