‘Succession’ Team Debated Splitting Final Season Into Two Parts With Up to 16 Episodes, but That Wasn’t the ‘Muscular Way to Go Out’

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jada Pinkett Smith is finally ready to talk about the Will Smith Oscars slap, revealing to People magazine that she originally thought it was a skit when Will took to the stage after presenter Chris Rock made a joke about Jada’s bald head. Rock was presenting the Oscar for best documentary feature at the time. It’s the first time Jada has addressed the slap outside of posting an Instagram graphic just after the slap that read: “This is the season for healing.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s new self-help book and memoir “Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life” recalls the crazy things he had to do to pull off his most iconic film roles. Most wildly, he reveals that he bit into a real, deal vulture while filming takes for 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian.” Schwarzenegger writes that the film’s director, John Milius, forced him to do “terrible shit” during the making of the film. “I learned to ride horses and camels and elephants.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Baz Luhrmann is set to world premiere his upcoming miniseries “Faraway Downs” on the closing night of the upcoming SXSW Sydney Screen Festival, closing the loop on a filmmaking journey that began nearly 20 years ago. “Faraway Downs” is the expanded TV version of the director’s 2008 theatrical release “Australia,” an epic romance starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman that flopped at the domestic box office with less than $50 million.

People just can’t get enough of “The Crown.” After years of awards season wins, the series has begun to tease its sixth and final season. Well, Part 1 of the final season.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Guillermo del Toro sent “Star Wars” fans into a tizzy in late September when he confirmed on social media that he was once planning a trip to a galaxy far, far, away as the director of a “Star Wars” movie. The Oscar winner provided no further details at the time, but he’s now confirmed to Collider’s Steven Weintraub that his axed “Star Wars” movie centered on Jabba the Hutt. Considering del Toro’s love of monsters, it’s hardly a surprise he’d pick Jabba as the focal point for his own “Star Wars” movie.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director With Disney’s beloved sports comedy “Cool Runnings” celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, director Jon Turteltaub and the cast reunited for an interview with The Independent and revealed their battle against Disney over the film’s Jamaican accents. Loosely based on the debut of the Jamaican national bobsleigh team at the 1988 Winter Olympics, the film got its start outside of Disney with a script that was full of “drugs, racism and the characters were getting laid a lot,” cast member Rawle D. Lewis recalled.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Working on Bradley Cooper‘s “Maestro” meant incredibly long hours for prosthetics master Kazu Hiro and his makeup team. Hiro, an Oscar winner for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “The Darkest Hour,” revealed at the New York Film Festival (via Entertainment Weekly) that he needed to be on set at 1 a.m. during parts of the film where Bradley Cooper appears as Leonard Bernstein in his 70s.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Sofia Coppola told the Wall Street Journal that her “Priscilla” budget was so “strained” at times that she thought of raffling off a pickleball game with her star Jacob Elordi in order to raise funds for additional shooting days. “Euphoria” alum Elordi plays Elvis Presley in the film opposite Cailee Spaeny in the title role. Spaeny won best actress honors at the Venice Film Festival for her performance.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Steve Nicks all but confirmed in a new interview with Vulture that Fleetwood Mac is done and will no longer perform following the November 2022 passing of singer-songwriter and longtime band member Christine McVie. Nicks’ comment echoes similar thoughts that Mick Fleetwood shared in February when he told the Los Angeles Times, “I think right now, I truly think the line in the sand has been drawn with the loss of Chris. I’d say we’re done, but then we’ve all said that before.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “The Hunger Games” film franchise is returning to the big screen after an eight-year hiatus with the upcoming release of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” a prequel film starring Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow. With one prequel down, Entertainment Weekly asked franchise director Francis Lawrence — who has helmed every installment except the first — and producer Nina Jacobson about making more, perhaps centered on fan-favorite characters such as Finnick (Sam Claflin) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson). Their answers were similar: Only if author Suzanne Collins lays the groundwork.

With “Succession” over, HBO has an opening for its next premier drama. There are couple of candidates for the slot already, like “The Last Of Us” and “The White Lotus.” But if “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong had cut the show’s final season in two, as he considered doing at one point, HBO wouldn’t have a gap to fill at all.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director David S. Goyer is the co-architect of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy. The director recruited Goyer to help him flesh out the story and co-write 2005’s “Batman Begins,” before Nolan and his brother Jonathan penned the scripts for 2008’s “The Dark Knight” and 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises” based on stories cracked by Goyer.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director In a career-spanning interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, “Man of Steel” writer David S. Goyer agreed with host Jake Horowitz that Warner Bros. should’ve developed a standalone Superman sequel with Henry Cavill instead of rushing to create a universe with “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” The studio did so in order to compete with Marvel and create its own superhero universe.

Succession fans are making the same joke after Lachlan Murdoch was appointed the new chairman of News Corp and Fox Corporation.As announced on Thursday (September 21) in a note to employees, media mogul Rupert Mordoch said he was stepping down as chairman of both companies, with his eldest son Lachlan set to take over.Rupert Murdoch, who will transition into the role of chairman emeritus for both firms in mid-November, wrote in a note (via the Guardian): “For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change. But the time is right for me to take on different roles.”Murdoch has been married four times and has six children, the majority of which have followed their father’s footsteps in working for the family business.Succession creator Jesse Armstrong previously confirmed the HBO series is partially based on the Murdochs, along with other media mogul families like the Redstones and Mercers. In the series, family patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) leads media company Waystar RoyCo, as his children vie to become his successor.“The amazing thing about this stuff is that it’s everywhere,” Armstrong told The New York Times in 2019.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Howard Stern and Bill Maher are “no longer friends,” according to Stern. The SiriusXM radio host told listeners (via Entertainment Weekly) that Maher made a “sexist” comment involving Stern’s first wife and “was actually dumping on me” during an episode of Maher’s “Club Random” podcast. “He took a big shot at me,” Stern said.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Steven DeKnight, who served as the showrunner on the first season of Netflix’s “Daredevil,” recently took to social media to criticize Disney for running a scam with its upcoming reboot series “Daredevil: Born Again” (via Entertainment Weekly). The 18-episode series features the returns of Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jon Bernthal, who starred on the original Netflix series as Daredevil, Kingpin and Punisher, respectively.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Chris Evans said in a new GQ profile that he agrees to an extent with Quentin Tarantino’s recent claim that Marvel killed the movie star. The filmmaker said last year that people go to see a Marvel movie because “Captain America is the star or Thor is the star,” and not because they want to see Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth. Evans somewhat agrees.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “John Wick” producer Basil Iwanyk told Collider that Keanu Reeves begged the team behind the long-running action franchise to kill him off at the end of “John Wick: Chapter 4.” It was par for the course for Reeves, who is so physically drained after filming each “John Wick” installment that he rarely is motivated to return for more. In this case, the producers once again did not entirely listen to their star. “After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally,” Iwanyk said.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Whoopi Goldberg is defending Hasan Minhaj, who has ignited a fierce debate after admitting to embellishing stories in his stand-up routines over the years. “That’s what we do,” Goldberg said on “The View” about the role of the comedian (via Entertainment Weekly). “That’s what we do, we tell stories and we embellish them.” “If you’re gonna hold a comic to the point where you’re gonna check up on stories, you have to understand, a lot of it is not the exact thing that happened because why would we tell exactly what happened? It ain’t that interesting,” she also said, adding later, “There’s information that we will give you as comics that will have grains of truth, but don’t take it to the bank.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Leslie Jones told People magazine while promoting her new memoir, “Leslie F*cking Jones,” that her longtime friend Chris Rock went to counseling after Will Smith slapped him at the 2022 Academy Awards. Rock wrote the foreword to Jones’ new book. “That shit was humiliating.