I find comfort in the thought that cinema is not just moving pictures; it sets hope in motion! . . . It is a sensory journey . . . in which . . . even pain can find new meaning.

—Pope Leo XIV, ten days ago

Tom Cruise given a special Oscar in obscure ceremony

A Bridget Jones statue has been unveiled in Leicester Square, reaffirming the British compulsion to immortalize people who don’t exist

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are stopping interviews on their Wicked: For Good press tour because Erivo is losing her voice

No, it’s because Grande has Covid. Frankie Grande, the singer’s brother, however, said his sister will be fine, commenting “We’ve all had Covid at this point”

Grande was grabbed by an Australian man while promoting Wicked: For Good in Singapore. The man was arrested, tried, and thrown in jail for nine days, and has now been sent back to Oz and banned from returning to Singapore for life

Wicked: For Good has been called in newspaper and magazine reviews an “aimless slog,” a film that “sinks under its own greed,” and “very, very bad.” “This all could’ve just been one movie,” said another reviewer

Vue Cinemas boss Tim Richards has slammed IMAX for making a sweetheart deal to show the Netflix Greta Gerwig Narnia movie in theaters. The deal “risks undermining the very ecosystem that makes theatrical success possible,” he wrote in an open letter

Jaws director Steven Spielberg, executive producer of Hamnet, is patting himself on the back for “fighting the tides” to get movies like Chloe Zhao’s period piece into theaters

It’s easy for him to fight the tides because he owns a superyacht that’s longer than two Olympic swimming pools and burns 700 liters of fuel per hour as soon as you start it up. He can also fight the tides from the air in his G650 Gulfstream jet, if that would be more effective

Filmmaker magazine will be “rebooted” by a former Vanity Fair digital editor, Mike Hogan, whom the Gotham Film and Media Institute has hired to force-pivot the magazine to live events (awards shows). Because we are all so interested in the Gotham Awards, and hate reading about the cinema

Bids to buy Warner Brothers Discovery are due in this week

Eyebrowless Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison sat down with President Trump at a White House State Dinner for Saudi Crown Prince and journalism critic Mohammed bin Salman to discuss his proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, in which the Saudis will deposit money, along with the Qataris and the Emiratis, if all goes smoothly for this bunch

Netflix’s bid for WBD will include theatrical releases, they claim

Trump’s interest in a possible merger seems to be twofold: establishing unofficial state control over news media properties owned by the two megacorps and getting Paramount to make another Rush Hour movie

The night before the bids were to come in, WBD boss David Zaslav had a dinner party with Oprah Winfrey, Margot Robbie, Lorne Michaels, and Al Pacino, which is like a main table at Musso and Frank’s if Musso and Frank’s was in hell

The confluence of the sale of an original Superman No. 1 comic book for $9.2 million the same week as the possible sale of WBD prompted a headline that exemplifies Hollywood thinking: “Record Prices for Superman Comic Could Bode Well for Warner Bros. Discovery Sale.” That really takes the goat-and-adding-machine ritual to a new level

Anthropic AI honcho Dario Amodei warns that CEOs such as himself should not be in charge of the future

Amazon MGM head owner Jeff Bezos is launching an AI startup with himself as COO

The CEO of Microsoft’s AI division, Mustafa Suleyman, is upset that people are unimpressed by AI and don’t like it much. He explained in a whiny tweet that “there are so many cynics” and noted how their disregard “cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.” He can’t get over “the fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video,” he continued blah-blah-blibbity-blah

Knives Out auteur Rian Johnson says that “AI makes everything worse in every conceivable way.” Monkeybone actor Brendan Fraser calls AI “a form of plagiarism.” Family Plan 2 director Simon Cellan Jones: “I fucking hate AI”

The creator of the AI-generated actor Tilly Norwood has stated, somewhat gleefully, that “you’re gonna see a lot of Tilly Norwood next year”

“AI video is threatening our ability to trust documentaries,” writes New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson, who has just received this newsflash from a copy boy rushing it across the press room

A teddy bear named Kumma, powered by AI, gave safety-testers tips on pills, knives, and sex. But everything Kumma said was bullshit

OpenAI is seeking the “optimal setting” for its ChatGPT product that won’t cause users to become suicidal lunatics, even as its former employees says the weird nonprofit doesn’t care about “those kinds of risks.” Also, users will soon be able to have “erotic conversations” with the company’s new, updated chat product. I will be asking it about sex, yes, but also knives and pills

Frozen 3 and 4 will be made, and the voice actors from the original movie—Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, and Josh Gad—will be paid $60 million each

The voices of Bell, Clockwork Orange actor Malcolm McDowell, and Adaptation actor Brian Cox were all used without permission by Fox News for a podcast about Jesus

The Stahl House, aka Case Study House 22, an iconic midcentury steel-and-glass house designed by Pierre Koenig that overlooks a cliff in Los Angeles, is for sale for the first time since it was built in 1959. I’m hoping Josh Gad buys it

After a class-action lawsuit, Amazon Prime is sending out $2.5 billion in small increments to people who tried to quit Prime, couldn’t figure out how

NPR asks, in a recent article, “Do people still quote movies?”

Yahoo News UK counters that with: “People Are Sharing the Most Iconic Movie Quotes That Live in Their Heads Rent-Free.” (Could studios perhaps charge for that?)

Funnyman Ross Douthat has penned an op-ed for The New York Times telling the movies what they need from Madame Web actor Sydney Sweeney

Disney spent more on the TV series Andor, a Star Wars spin-off, than on any Star Wars movie

Star Wars fan filmmaker Lorenz Hideyoshi says an episode of Star Wars: Visions plagiarized scenes from his 2019 amateur film Dark Jedi: A Star Wars Story. Side-by-side comparisons bear him out

Unfortunate Headlines of the Week:

“5 Reasons Why Glen Powell’s The Running Man Flopped at the Box Office”

“Director Edgar Wright Knows What Makes a Movie Great—or Absolutely Terrible”

“Epic New Sundance Documentary Traces the Event’s Rise and Fall”

“Empathetic Parrot Documentary Will Bring You to Tears”

“Watch These 22 TV Specials, Movies and Cultural Events This Holiday Season”

“As an Entertainment Editor, I’m Only Watching These Christmas Movies This Year”

“The Most Nostalgic Movie of Every Year of the ’90s, Ranked”

“10 Harsh Realities of Rewatching the MCU’s 2025 Movies on Disney+”

“8 Reasons Why It’s Tough to Watch the X-Men Movies Today”

“10 Pivotal Roles Sabrina Carpenter Could Play in the MCU”

“James Gunn Shares a Giant Pile of Storyboards”

China has banished new releases of Japanese films from its movie screens in a “spat” that has also been called “a vicious game of chicken.” At issue is Japanese Navy placement too close to Taiwan. Banned films include Crayon Shin-chan the Movie: Super Hot! The Spicy Kasubuke Dancers and Cells at Work! (Those are two movies, not three)

Fugee Pras Michel has been sentenced to fourteen years in prison in a trial that included testimony from Titanic actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Michel was found guilty of a money laundering scheme that included financing from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street and channeling cash into the 2012 Obama presidential campaign

American Beauty actor Kevin Spacey says he’s homeless and lives in international hotels and Airbnbs, and is working as a lounge singer in the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus

After this news came out, Spacey clarified on Instagram that “it would be disingenuous of me to allow you to believe that I am indeed homeless in the colloquial sense”

The trailer for Charli XCX movie The Moment has been described as “cryptic”

In the ultimate non-cryptic move, the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 uses the Madonna song “Vogue”

There is a Family Stone sequel in the works that director Thomas Bezucha says will be a tribute to Diane Keaton, who died in October and therefore won’t be in the film

“Nobody’s been robbed of their trilogy,” says Toy Story 5 director Andrew Stanton. Making the fifth one, he goes on, “allows us to embrace time”

Emerald Fennell says her new movie version of Wuthering Heights isn’t what it seems. The reason? “It is an adaptation of a feeling: my first disemboweling by the baby god”

A fan hashtag campaign called #Avatar3Billion seeks to persuade moviegoers to see the forthcoming Avatar sequel five times each, so that the James Cameron film will make at least three billion dollars at the box office

Halloween actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a black-and-white photo of Zombieland actor Woody Harrelson on Instagram, causing many users to assume that Harrelson had died

In a record for the theme park, five people have died at Disney World in the past month, two by suicide

The Kessler Twins, Alice and Ellen, committed assisted suicide in Grünwald, age 89. You remember them from Mario Bava’s Erik the Conqueror (1961) and the West German thriller Dead Woman in Beverly Hills (1964)

Beloved German movie star Udo Kier has died at 81. He had a Twitter account on which he only ever posted one tweet: “film should not be streamed on netflix. envelop yourself in the darkness of the movie hall and submit to the artist’s vision”

Parmigiano Reggiano, the cheese, has signed with UTA and now has an agent

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