‘Love Actually’ Director Regrets Film’s Weight Jokes, Which ‘Aren’t Funny’ Anymore: ‘I Was Behind the Curve…I Was Unobservant’

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Marvel Studios is set to launch a new banner titled “Marvel Spotlight” with the upcoming release of the limited series “Echo,” starring Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez. The character made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in “Hawkeye,” but knowledge of that series and the MCU at large won’t be a requirement to watch “Echo.” Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, recently told Marvel.com that Marvel Spotlight “gives us a platform to bring more grounded, character-driven stories to the screen, and in the case of ‘Echo,’ focusing on street-level stakes over larger MCU continuity.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Studiocanal and Universal Pictures are re-releasing Richard Curtis’ holiday classic “Love Actually” worldwide this year in a new 4K restoration. The Working Title film, whose all-star cast includes Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Bill Nighy and Liam Neeson, will also be released on home video and digitally in the U.S. and France.

Caroline Brew editor From the pen of “Love Actually” writer-director Richard Curtis comes a new holiday comedy — but this time the magic of the season is literally magic. Premiering on Peacock on Nov. 22, “Genie” follows Melissa McCarthy as Flora, the titular character, who comes to the assistance of a despondent Bernard (Paapa Essiedu).

Peacock has unveiled a trailer, premiere date and first look photos for Genie, its previously untitled holiday fairytale comedy, starring Melissa McCarthy and Paapa Essiedu, which Love Life creator Sam Boyd directed from a script by Richard Curtis, the Oscar nom best known for Love Actually.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed on “The Graham Norton Show” that he once hired an accent removal coach to try and do away with his thick Austrian accent for good. Aside from his jacked muscles, the action star’s accent is his most definitive quality as a performer.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Bridgerton” actor Ruby Barker called out Netflix and Shondaland for failing to support her during two psychotic breaks that occurred in the wake of the romance series’ blockbuster success. Barker was a series regular during the show’s first season and returned as a guest actor for Season 2. She played Marina, a Featherington cousin whose scandalous pregnancy makes her a social pariah in Regency-era London.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Disney confirmed in June that a third “Hocus Pocus” movie was in development, and now screenwriter Jen D’Angelo confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the latest Sanderson Sisters tale is still in the story development phase following the end of the WGA strike. “We’re still in the story phase, we’re still working on it,” D’Angelo said.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director The “Fantastic Beasts” movie franchise is “parked,” director David Yates said in a new interview with Total Film magazine. The franchise, headlined by Eddie Redmayne, is a prequel to “Harry Potter” that was designed by author J.K. Rowling as a five-film series.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Horror fans hoping the PG-13-rated “Five Nights at Freddy’s” might go the “M3GAN” route and release an R-rated cut on streaming at a later date are not in luck. Director Emma Tammi has stated in several interviews ahead of the film’s release that her film was always designed to be PG-13 and an R-rated cut is not in the works. Rumors have circulated online that Universal will eventually release an R-rated “Freddy’s,” but Tammi is denying such claims.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Kingsman” director Matthew Vaughn knows a thing or two about bringing comic books to life on the big screen as the filmmaker behind acclaimed outings such as “Kick-Ass” and “X-Men: First Class.” In a recent interview with ScreenRant, the director shared his thoughts on the current era of comic book movies. He said poor visual effects are negatively impacting superhero movies, while also sharing his belief that Marvel needs to take a “less is more” approach. “I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero [genre] in the sense that, I do think, maybe we all need a little bit of time off from it,” Vaughn said.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Emily Blunt is getting ahead of a potential scandal by telling People magazine she is “appalled” about a September 2012 appearance on the UK’s “Jonathan Ross Show” in which she called a waiter “enormous.” The actor was promoting her role in Rian Johnson’s “Looper” at the time. A clip of Blunt calling the waiter “enormous” must’ve started circulated as she issued a statement to People in which she apologized for her language.

Screenwriter and director Richard Curtis has a few regrets when it comes to the jokes in several of his films — especially the fat-shaming ones made in the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Gwyneth Paltrow briefly entered the “nepo baby” discourse in January when she commented on an Instagram post of Hailee Bieber wearing a shirt with the moniker on it and wrote: “I might need a few of these.” Now Paltrow, the daughter of actor Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow who is an Oscar winner in her own right, entered the discourse more forcefully by telling Bustle the term “nepo baby” is an “ugly moniker.” “Now there’s this whole nepo baby culture, and judgment that exists around kids of famous people,” Paltrow said when her 19-year-old daughter Apple got brought up. “She’s really just a student, and she’s been very…She just wants to be a kid and be at school and learn.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Julianna Margulies is speaking out against Hollywood for staying silent on antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war. The Emmy-winning actor attended the Variety Hollywood & Antisemitism Summit, presented by The Margaret & Daniel Loeb Foundation and Shine A Light, and said she is continually asking herself why many major Hollywood stars are not speaking out in support of Jewish people. Margulies added that she’s “disheartened” by the silence, and she’s “trying to understand and work around why every single person in our industry isn’t standing up.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director The upcoming release of “The Color Purple” musical film marks a full circle moment for Oprah Winfrey, who is producing the new adaptation 38 years after playing Sofia in Steven Spielberg’s take on Alice Walker’s seminal novel. Oprah earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress, and now “The Color Purple” musical could earn her another one as a producer if it lands a best picture nomination. Oprah produced the film along with Spielberg, Scott Sanders and Quincy Jones.

Richard Curtis is looking back at his early films like Bridget Jones’s Diary, Notting Hill and Love Actually and regretting he was not “ahead of the curve” in terms of the jokes and portrayal of women.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Don’t Breathe” and “Evil Dead” director Fede Álvarez is reviving the “Alien” franchise next year with the release of a new sequel (reportedly titled “Alien: Romulus“), which he co-wrote with Rodo Sayagues. The film will tell a new story within the “Alien” universe after the film franchise came to a halt following Ridley Scott‘s prequel films “Prometheus” (2012) and “Alien: Covenant” (2017). The latter’s middling box office ended Scott’s run.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director The version of “Killers of the Flower Moon” that is opening in theaters this weekend is far different from the “Killers of the Flower Moon” that director Martin Scorsese first attempted to bring to the big screen. Originally, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth planned to more faithfully adapt David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name and wrote a script from the perspective of the FBI agents who investigated a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s. Scorsese recently told BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine that this first script “was going to take four-and-a-half hours just to read it.” “Our script was over two hundred pages,” he also confirmed to The New Yorker about the original “Flower Moon” screenplay.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director In a lengthy new cover story for GQ magazine, Timothée Chalamet reveals that Tom Cruise sent him an email after they met following the production of “Dune” in which Cruise offered up a list of all the stunt trainers, motorcycle coaches and more that Chalamet could reach out to. “He basically said, in Old Hollywood, you would be getting dance training and fight training, and nobody is going to hold you to that standard today.

Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.The director and screenwriter expressed regret over decisions in his previous films during an appearance at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival where he was interviewed by his daughter Scarlett.During the interview Scarlett raised that there had been “growing criticism around the ways your films treated women and people of colour”, citing descriptions of Bridget Jones as having “tree-trunk thighs” and the lack of diversity in 1999 film Notting Hill (“one of the birthplaces of the British black civil rights movement”).In response, Curtis said: “I think because I came from a very undiverse school and a bunch of university friends, I think that I hung on to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. I think I was just stupid and wrong about that.“I felt as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t look outwards.”Speaking specifically about fat jokes, Curtis said: “I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word ‘fat’ again.’ Wow you were right.