Author: Randy Meeks

Tom Cruise has had so many girlfriends, so many weird things and so many ups and downs in his life that the fact that he was seen with Taylor Swift at a football game has set alarm bells ringing across the world’s tabloids. However, obviously, nothing was going on between them. Nothing beyond a pure love of the sport, of course.

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Sport Cruise

The truth is they’re buddies: he went to the Eras Tour concert in London and went to her wedding with Travis Kelce, so it’s not strange that they were, in fact, at her first game of the season with the Kansas City Chiefs. “She was teaching me about football. Really”, Cruise said. Don’t worry: his name isn’t going to show up on Swift’s next album.

“First of all, she’s a genius. I’ve followed her since she was a little girl. Everyone was there, all her friends… They’re a beautiful, magical couple in their own right”, said America’s most eligible bachelor (whose last known girlfriend was Ana de Armas). What’s more, the actor said that before meeting her husband Swift didn’t have a clue about sports, but now she knows absolutely everything. Self-taught, then.

Cruise said they also talked about music and film. “She’s funny, she has a great sense of humor. A brilliant writer, by the way. A brilliant musician and director, very talented”. With the singer wanting to get into film directing, will she ever end up directing Cruise?

If I had taken part in Star Wars, frankly, I’d try to milk it for all it was worth. Conventions, sequel series, whatever it took so I could retire early. However, that isn’t the case with Alden Ehrenreich, who after bringing in the lowest box-office haul in the history of a film in the franchise (The Mandalorian and Grogu notwithstanding) with Han Solo has decided to walk away from the role for good. Or at least, that’s what it seems like.

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In a universe very, very far away, that’s not happening either

Recently, fans of the saga started posting on Twitter (or X, if you prefer) asking for Han Solo 2, but at Disney they’re ignoring their outcry… and the actor seems not to care either. When he’s been asked when he’ll play Solo again, he simply answered “No idea”. What’s more, when they asked whether he could come back in the style of Andrew Garfield in Spider-man: No way home, he simply said “Oh, interesting. We’ll see”. Doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing it.

Although we don’t know what Disney has in mind for the new direction of Lucasarts, the truth is that the actor seems over it all. After all, we’ve seen him lately in Weapons, Oppenheimer or Ironheart, and he doesn’t need Star Wars to get by. It’s understandable that after how badly the audience treated him he doesn’t buy into online pleas and simply wants to turn the page.

Obviously, an actor whose career faded into obscurity for years because of Star Wars isn’t going to want to go back to that saga even at gunpoint, but… We have to remember that right now the saga only has Star Wars: Starfighter on the theatrical slate. Who knows what’s still to come? If this film proves that there can be galactic action without tying it to a trilogy, it’s possible we could be in for some surprises in a few years. If the Force is with us, at least.

In May 1992, right in the middle of the superhero crisis, Todd McFarlane published the first issue of the character destined to end the reign of Marvel and DC: Spawn. It was a massive hit that sold 1.7 million copies, and the saga continues to this day, now closing in on 400 issues (not counting its many spin-offs). At the height of Spawn-mania, Hollywood decided to make a movie about the hero in 1997, and it was a moderate success. However, since then we haven’t heard anything about another adaptation… until now.

A demonic hero

The new version of Spawn was announced in 2015, with a script finished by McFarlane himself, but more than a decade later we still know nothing. In 2024, the creator confirmed that, this time for real, the script had been finished under the title King Spawn… but he’s just confirmed that he’s still not entirely convinced. So, we may never see Spawn on the big screen again.

“We’re trying to get the right script. I know it’s frustrating for everyone, especially for me. I haven’t signed off on it because I’m not seeing what I have in mind. The thing is, people either take too many liberties or they’re too faithful”. According to McFarlane, it makes no sense to do another origin story: there are 380 issues of the comic to draw from, and he doesn’t understand the obsession with basing it on the first four or five.

He certainly has a very clear idea of what it should be like: “Dark, raw and uncomfortable. When I see examples like Obsession or Backrooms, I think ‘Audiences will eat this up’. We don’t need to do it like a superhero movie. In fact… We should try to do something different because we won’t have the 200 million budget of other superhero movies”.

He’s right, to be clear. With time, we’ll see more movies like Clayface, whether it’s a box-office hit or not, for one simple reason: they’re original, risky, different films and, above all, much cheaper than the latest Spider-Man. And if it succeeds, we’ll see what happens with the inevitable sequel.

I’m a very, very, very big fan of Scream. It’s the saga that hooked me on horror movies, and its constant meta-referencing has fascinated me for decades. The commentary built around the psychopaths and the filmmaking in its first installment, and later the jokes around sequels, trilogies, remakes, reboots, and “elevated horror” has been a fascinating evolution to watch unfold. Until Scream 7 came out, which straight-up became the kind of movie the saga has always parodied. However, Matthew Lillard, who returned to the saga after many, many years, doesn’t regret how bad it is, but something much more serious.

Do you like people getting fired from horror movies?

It all started when, in 2023, Melissa Barrera was abruptly fired from Scream 7 for posting comments on social media in support of Palestine, at the start of the Israeli genocide. The script had to be rewritten from scratch, and, somehow, Kevin Williamson, the new director (and the franchise’s original screenwriter) called Lillard to have him play Stu Macher again, one of the killers from the first Scream. Of course, he accepted without hesitation… and now he regrets it.

“Melissa Barrera, who is a really great actress, was fired for what she said about Palestine, what was happening in Israel. It’s fucking awful and really hard, and she’s on the right side of history. When they start firing you from your jobs, sometimes things deserve it… When it happened to Melissa, nobody took her side. But she knew what was happening. The whole world should’ve jumped up and said ‘She’s right’. And it didn’t. and it’s brutal”. He didn’t either, of course.

Lillard, however, accepted the offer: “I came back to do Scream and people called me out. And I said ‘Oh, fuck, that’s brutal’. I feel awful. I feel ashamed. Because at that moment I was excited to come back and I didn’t think about Melissa and her journey. I didn’t say no. I’m ashamed, that’s the truth… I fucked up. I’m on the wrong side of history because of that. I still like being in the movie, but it may not have been the best idea”. Better late than never, Matthew.

When Spider-Man: Brand New Day premiered and the box-office numbers started coming out, we all went a little bit crazy: Would it become the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide? Would it be the first to break 3 billion dollars? Were we looking at the movie that would save the film industry forever? The answer is close, but not quite. When it became clear that beating Avengers: Endgame and Avatar would be impossible, settling into the top 3 (which many would love to have), there was only one record left to beat. And it has just done it.

A lightsaber that goes “Thwip!”

Although it took 7 and a half weeks, Disney has finally beaten itself at the US box office, and officially Spidey has beaten The Force Awakens, Star Wars Episode VII, which had gone unbeaten since 2015. Specifically, that one finished at $936.6 million and Marvel’s has just surpassed it by another $100,000 (and counting, of course).

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It’s so official now that Lucasfilm’s own account has celebrated the triumph on its Instagram account: “Impressive. Most impressive. From a galaxy far, far away, everyone at Lucasfilm sends huge congratulations to Destin, Tom, everyone at Sony and Marvel, and the whole team behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day for setting a new domestic box-office record and taking the crown from Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. No hard feelings. At the end of the day, it all stays in the family.

It took a tiny bit longer than I expected, but now it’s official… although with Avengers: Doomsday around the corner, Spidey’s reign may not last long. We’ll have to see, but, for now, all that’s left is to celebrate. There can’t be any champagne left to uncork at Marvel by now, that’s for sure.

Last week, everyone in the industry was worried about Netflix‘s mistreatment of its second seasons, which is leading to one absurdity after another in the ratings. But, suddenly, something unexpected has happened: after a dreadful first week, The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s series, has had an unexpected surge. And in the world of streaming, where only opening weekends seem to matter it’s, at the very least, worth commenting on.

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Better the second time around

The first week for the new season of The Gentlemen was a horror show, losing almost half the viewers it had in season 1. However, to everyone’s surprise… in its second weekend it has become the number 1 English-language series, with 9.9 million viewers. For comparison, in its first few days it debuted in the top 3 with just 6.7 million, proving that, sometimes, you simply have to give viewers time.

Fantastic word of mouth has helped, with some comparing it to The Godfather, although, truth be told, it still hasn’t reached the numbers it posted in 2024, when it went past 12.2 million views in its first 3 days. Even so, it doesn’t seem like Netflix are too worried, because season 1 has also returned to the global charts, placing in the top 3. In short, even if it hasn’t been quite as powerful, a third season is guaranteed.

If everything keeps going like this, The Gentlemen should stay in Netflix’s top 10 much longer than its series normally do (let’s admit it, they’re considered disposable). And it’s proof that even in a predictable world like streaming services there can still be surprises… and make its critics eat our words.

In just three years, everything has changed a hell of a lot. The world has become sourer, nastier, less kind to anyone who wants to keep moving forward without looking back. And I think nothing exemplifies it better than the last two major Harry Potter projects: Hogwarts Legacy and the HBO Max series. While the former announced with great fanfare that JK Rowling had nothing to say about its development, the latter has done the exact opposite. Why? Well, because that’s which way the wind is blowing: toward reaction.

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What a rowll

Although many celebrities, faced with online backlash, have decided to do a 180 and learn from their mistakes, the Harry Potter author has dug in on her transphobic views and her hate speech. And what used to be reason enough not to buy anything related to her is now reason to do exactly that. That’s how it is: the internet is rougher than sandpaper.

When Casey Bloys, head of HBO, was asked whether Rowling’s controversial views have created any difficulties for the show, he answered clearly: “Not even a little bit”. What’s more: when he was later asked whether she was still developing the series alongside them, he replied “Yes, absolutely”. I just want to remind you that its merger with Paramount, a bastion of the far right in the media, still hasn’t happened. And we’re already at this point.

By the way, he also confirmed that we can forget about seeing a new season every year, because they don’t have time to make them… but they won’t take two years to make them either. So yes, the kids will indeed have Stranger Things syndrome by the time this thing ends in, if we’re lucky, 2034 or 2035. Who knows what we’ll think of Rowling by then, of course. That’s what they’re counting on.

With the success (however much it pains Warner) of Coyote vs ACME, quite a few of us have started going back over the classic Looney Tunes episodes, beginning with the first short released in theaters on September 17, 1949, Fast and Furry-ous (no, nothing to do with Vin Diesel). From then on, Chuck Jones, who had an absolutely crystal-clear sense of what the characters were like, created 15 years of stories (24 short films) that forever shaped the personalities of the Road Runner and the Coyote. One always gets away, the other always fails to catch him… Or maybe it wasn’t always like that? Surprisingly, throughout the history of these characters there have been many more times than we think when Wile E. Coyote has succeeded… even if only to fail monumentally right afterward.

The last beep-beep

All the Coyote and Road Runner shorts are basically the same: the Coyote has a perfect plan to catch his prey, but something goes wrong, and he ends up falling from a height, exploding, or flattened into an accordion. The audience laughs out loud, his rival says “Beep-beep,” and we move on. However, if you search the Internet, you’ll find that there is a moment when the Coyote caught the Road Runner. It is, without a doubt, the most famous one: it aired on television on May 21, 1980, during a Bugs Bunny special with new animated segments, and Chuck Jones returned to one of his favorite duos once more to give them a kind of ending. In his own way, of course.

After a classic 9-minute chase (the longest Coyote and Road Runner episode), the two end up chasing each other through a series of pipes that keep getting smaller and smaller. When they come out, they’re miniature cartoons, so they retrace their steps… Except the bird comes out normal-sized and the predator miniature. When he’s finally about to dig in, he pulls out two signs where he explains his tragic fate: “All right, wise guys, you always wanted me to catch him… Now what do I do?”. However, this isn’t the only time the eternal loser achieved his goal.

In 1966, a strange batch of shorts (awful, by the way) gave us, as a strange gift, The Solid Tin Coyote, where our hero built a gigantic robotic coyote and… managed to catch his prey! The only problem is that, like all AI, it didn’t understand the rules properly, and instead of eating the Road Runner, it ate the Coyote, throwing the whole plan out the window. In the Looney Tunes Cartoons shorts, which ran from 2020 to 2024, a group of Coyotes could finally get their hands on the feathered one after a combination of traps. The problem? They couldn’t agree on who got to eat him, and he managed to escape during the debate. There are several more shorts from this period where he manages to get his hands on him, but it’s part of the gag and he always escapes, so we won’t count it as such for practical purposes.

Even in some sketches made exclusively for television, he manages to catch him… Only for a drawing, for no reason whatsoever, to shoot him, leaving the hunt unfinished. Pretty unfair, if you ask me, even by Looney Tunes standards. In the franchise’s worst years, at the start of the 2000s, they even made some shoddy Flash shorts where Granny, now a judge, ruled that the Coyote could eat the Road Runner… And even though he escaped, hey, that’s the closest he’s really ever come to gobbling him up. That said: I don’t recommend watching these shorts, because they can drop a bomb straight on your nostalgia.

It depends on what you consider “catching the Road Runner,” but personally I’d say he’s done it 5 times, far more than the classic “He did it once, but it was too big for him, and that’s that”. Apart from apocryphal versions (like the ones in Family Guy or similar), and after Coyote vs ACME makes it clear that one can’t live without the other, I think we can clearly say that we will never see the Coyote seriously eating the Road Runner, like he’s at an all-you-can-eat wing buffet. Not while a “beep-beep” can still be heard on the road.

This year Netflix has made it very clear that its “Oscar” movie isn’t going to come from the United States, but from a foreign country. After the Academy opened itself up to films from all corners of the world with the success of Parasite and the nominations for The Secret Agent, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Anatomy of a Fall or All Quiet on the Western Front, it was only a matter of time before someone go all in on a foreign film. In this case it’s La bola negra, a Spanish film by Los Javis that quite a few people are putting on their best-of-the-year lists… and that looks poised for awards-season success.

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Love, death and desire in Spain

La bola negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, not only won them the award for best direction at the Cannes Film Festival, but dozens of insiders expect it to be nominated, at the very least, for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best director at the Academy Awards. For now, Spain has done the obvious and submitted it for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film.

La bola negra was up against two excellent films, El ser querido and Los Domingos, which in another year would’ve had a better chance of getting into the category. However, in this case it was more than a foregone conclusion: La bola negra was the only real choice, which will go up against some of the year’s strongest films, like Fjord, Coward, Rose, All of a sudden or Possible Love. Let’s just say it won’t have it easy at all.

Los Javis, an artistic duo (and formerly a romantic one) already dazzled international audiences with series like Veneno, after which they were offered the chance to work in Hollywood straight away, La Mesías or Paquita Salas, but we’d been waiting for their second film since their debut with La Llamada. Now it doesn’t look like things are slowing down. The era of Los Javis has only just begun.

Although there are still many die-hard followers of the video game series who remain angry about Zach Cregger’s take on Resident Evil, the truth is that those who’ve seen it have nothing but wonderful things to say about it. There must be a reason. We’ve suffered through endless sequels, reboots and new adaptations that have led nowhere, and finally having a good film in the series is something so unheard of that many have chosen not to believe it despite virtually all the reviews being positive.

A franchise that’s back from the dead

In fact, quite a few are calling it, outright, the best video game adaptation of all time, which, at this point, is saying a lot. Mark Cassidy, for example, thinks “it may not feature recognizable characters and stories, but by capturing the games’ unending tension, Cregger has delivered the most faithful version so far. Very bloody, very fun, and it made me jump at least 3 times (and that’s not easy)”.

If you’d rather not believe him, listen to Jordan Moreau, at Variety: “Zach Cregger is the fucking man and Resident Evil one of the best video game adaptations ever made, and one of the best recent horror movies. 10/10”. And what does an expert like Moviedeaths think? “Holy. Fucking. Shit. It’s a masterclass in directing and genuinely one of the most enjoyable and craziest experiences I’ve had in a movie theater. And Austin Abrams? I could watch this guy react to the insanity happening around him for two hours with zero complaints”. No joke.

In fact, there are no negative opinions, with people saying “The first half is almost perfect and the second loses a bit but it’s still great, loads of nods to the games, humor and, my God, some of the best scares I’ve seen” and “It hits the accelerator in the first scene and never touches the brakes”, this is one of the best horror films of the last few years and, without a doubt, one of the best video game adaptations brought to the big screen. Now all that’s left is for the fans to accept it and stop complaining on social media.