Category: 5. Entertainment

Refresh for latest…:  It’s been largely a holdover weekend for the studios at the global and international box office, with results for some that will soon translate to big milestones. It was also a notable frame for local titles from India and Japan.

Studio-wise, last weekend’s champ, New Line/Warner Bros’ Weapons, was tops with another $18.4M in its offshore arsenal from 73 markets. The overseas cume is now $59.7M for $148.8M global. 

In milestones, Universal/Amblin’s Jurassic World Rebirth well surpassed $800M global, and both DC/Warner’s Superman and Apple/WB’s F1 are on their way to topping $600M worldwide, apiece.

Before we get into the details on the above, let’s look at what’s happening with some local titles that either had terrific debuts or are continuing on in expansion.

India’s got two movies in the mix: Rajinikanth-starrer Coolie, and Hrithik Roshan and NTR Jr.-starrer War 2. Each opened with a bang. Estimates we are hearing put Coolie at $45.4M global, including about $27M from India. For War 2, comScore has $31.5M worldwide. As we always note, India is extremely ornery to track, and we will update accordingly. Either way, great starts for each.

In other local news, this time in expanded overseas play via Crunchyroll/Sony, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle set new records with a $17.5M No. 1 opening in the eight Southeast Asian markets that debuted this weekend. The latest installment in the blockbuster anime franchise surpassed the entire regional lifetime for Demon Slayer – Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train as well as Frozen II for the highest all-time animated opening for this group of markets at current exchange rates. The launch was over twice as big as Inside Out 2, Super Mario Bros., Moana 2 and Ne Zha 2. 

In individual records, Indonesia, with $3.6M,logged the biggest anime opening ever and the highest opening weekend locally since Deadpool & Wolverine. Hong Kong, at $3.5M, had the largest anime opening ever and the top start since 2019. Thailand bowed to $3.2M, the best anime and animation opening of all time. Other anime records were set in Malaysia ($3.3M) and Vietnam ($2.5M).

Infinity Castle has, of course, already broken records since its July release in Japan and still has several markets to release including the U.S., Mexico, Australia, UK, Spain, France and Germany. The global cume is estimated at $192.8M through Sunday.

Turning back to the studio top-liners, New Line/WB’s Weapons pulled in another $18.4M from 73 overseas markets for a 33% drop from opening weekend. The international running cume is $59.7M and the global cume to date is $148.8M through Sunday.

Among strong individual holds were Chile (+2%), Sweden (-6%), Germany (-11%), Holland (-17%), Saudi Arabia (-22%), Philippines (-23%), Brazil (-25%), France (-28%), Italy (-29%), Mexico (-29%), Argentina (-30%) and Australia (-31%).

In like-for-like markets and using today’s exchange rates, the film is tracking ahead of Sinners (+47%), Smile (+42%), M3GAN (+41%) and 28 Years Later (+27%).

The Imax cume is $13.8M global.

Universal/DreamWorks Animation’s The Bad Guys 2 continued its staggered offshore release this session, adding $13.7M from 67 markets (-34% in the holdovers). That brings the international running total to $60.2M, which is above the original at the same point. Globally, Bad Guys 2 crossed the century mark for $117.4M to date.

New openers included China, where the gang bowed on Saturday amid stiff local competition (including an animated title), and stole away with $6.7M for the two-day debut — the biggest studio animation opening in the market this year. The start is above Elemental, and well above Trolls and The Bad Guys (which all opened on a Friday). The Maoyan score is 9.5 with the ticketing site predicting a $40M+ full run.

Drops were very good in majors like France (-13%), Korea (-25%) and Spain (-29%) while increases were seen in Argentina (+10%) and Netherlands (+7%), among others.

Still to release are Italy, Germany and Australia.

The Top 5 to date are: UK ($11.8M), France ($6.7M), Spain ($5M), Mexico ($4.7M) and Korea ($2.4M).

The Jurassic juggernaut continues for Universal with Jurassic World Rebirth adding another $9.9M in 83 offshore markets this 7th session. That’s a 39% dip from last frame and takes the international cume to $496.5M. Global is now well across the eight-century mark, with $828.6M worldwide through Sunday. 

This weekend, JWR surpassed the overseas box office cumes of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Jumanji: The Next Level.

Japan was a standout in its second frame despite local competition, already reaching $20.8M.

All markets have been released, and the Top 5 to date are: China ($79M), UK ($46.4M), Mexico ($36M), Germany ($31.6M) and France ($27.7M). 

Marvel/Disney’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps has reached a global cume through its fourth Sunday of $468.7M, still skewing domestic with a little over 47% from the international box office where the running cume is $221.7M.

This overseas frame was $9.3M with all markets released. F4:FS is the highest-grossing superhero genre title of the year across Latin America and was again No. 1 in Brazil this weekend. The overall overseas drop was 48% and included good holds in such majors as France (-26%), Spain (-28%), Italy (-39%), Japan (-42%), Brazil (-43%), Mexico (-47%), Australia (-49%), UK (-49%) and Germany (-50%).

The Top 5 offshore markets to date are: UK ($27.9M), Mexico ($26.2M), France ($14.3M), Brazil ($12.8M) and Australia ($10.6M). 

Meanwhile, last weekend’s new Disney pic, Freakier Friday, grossed $9.3M in 47 material overseas markets, taking the offshore cume to $31.5M and global to $86.3M. 

The reteam of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis dipped by just 37% internationally, and has been performing strongly in Latin America. This weekend it held the No. 1 spot in that region as a whole with great holds in some markets including Brazil (-22%) and Mexico (-32%).

Currently playing in about 85% of the overseas footprint, Freakier Friday opens next weekend in Taiwan and has such majors as Korea (August 27) and Japan (September 5) on deck.

The Top 5 to date are: Mexico ($5.7M), UK ($5.5M), Australia ($2.6M), Argentina ($1.8M) and Colombia ($1.4M).

Capping off the trifecta of movies grossing $9.3M internationally this weekend, Apple Original Films’ F1, via Warner Bros clocked only a 23% drop from last weekend – seriously impressive in the 8^th frame. The international total is currently $407.2M and the global running cume is $590M through Sunday.

In Korea, where audiences are driving hard, F1 is now the No. 1 movie of 2025, ahead of all local titles. In addition, this is the biggest film ever for Brad Pitt in the market and the 4^th biggest WB film ever.

WB/DC’s Superman is also headed to $600M global, now at $594.5M through Sunday.

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Dacre Montgomery said he took a hiatus from acting after his breakout role in Stranger Things as played Billy Hargrove.

In an interview with People, he shared that the success of the series was overwhelming, to say the least. “I think with Stranger Things — as any big show on Netflix — it’s kind of like you lose your anonymity overnight.” 

“It was amazing and overwhelming and a combination of many things, and I felt really lucky and really fortunate to have that opportunity,” the star added.

But the actor noted the Netflix show pushed his career in a direction he wasn’t initially interested in.

“I grew up really wanting to work with all tour directors on arthouse films and really explore how far I can push myself in terms of character development and really, really fall in love with stories,” the 30-year-old noted.

“And when Stranger Things came out, I felt like … I was really being pushed in a commercial direction,” he said.

Following the Netflix series, Dacre said he “took time to step back” to figure out what projects he should be doing. “That sort of stuff takes time to kind of reverse engineer a career that’s going one way into a different direction.“

“It takes time, and I can’t just generate a story, an amazing story [and] an amazing director in front of my eyes,” he noted.

Besides Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Dacre said he is more interested in appearing in indie movies.

Stranger Things season five, volume one, will be out on November 26.

Seeing so much of the world during a massive tour has to be an eye-opening experience. Even for someone like Lil Yachty, as big a name as he is, it still brings a lot of new perspective. Consequently, when touring under Tyler, the Creator with Paris Texas, he got to see the world and learn a lot from one of the biggest rappers working today. Now, he’s giving thanks to Tyler for the experience and everything he learned along the way.

Recently, Lil Yachty posted on his Instagram stories as his portion of the Chromakopia tour is wrapping up. There, he calls the Golf Wang visionary a mentor for him, expressing his gratitude for his wisdom and his companionship. “Last leg of this tour for me and I just want to take the time to thank you for your friendship, thanking you for giving me the praises i needed to push me on and holding me accountable when i do some ignorant s**t,” Yachty writes. “All in all, i’m grateful.”

Lil Yachty Writes Heartwarming Post to Tyler The Creator

“1 of the few mentors i have, always held me accountable, always challenged me,” he continues. “Forever grateful. “Young men need mentors. Need a line of proper guidance. Thanks Tyyytyyy.”

This connection between Yachty and Tyler, the Creator spans into musical inspiration as well. During an interview with Billboard in 2023, he reveals that his album Let’s Start Here gets a lot of its juice because of Tyler. Moreover, Lil Yachty desperately wants to make a collab album with him in the future.

“I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator]. He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has,” Lil Yachty explains. “I just want people to understand I love this. This is not a joke to me. And I can stand with my chest out because I’m proud of something I created.”

There is something slightly sweet about the new ITV2 show The Princess Diaries. It is a reality series about a girl nearing 18, trying to figure out what she wants her life to look like. Which is perfectly relatable. The girl is awkward and self-conscious, doing her best to navigate a world more complicated than she expected.

Except the subject of The Princess Diaries is Princess Andre, AKA Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther Andre, AKA the daughter of Peter Andre and Katie Price. This immediately makes things less relatable, because Princess has grown up under the spotlight, with the tabloid furore that her parents delight in whipping up on a daily basis. Would you be that well adjusted if newspapers flew drones over your bankrupt mother’s mansion to show the world how unkempt her garden was? Or if your dad found himself in the middle of a cultural appropriation storm after wearing a dreadlock wig for a film called Jafaican? Or if one of your middle names was Tiaamii?

This is the bind The Princess Diaries finds itself in. On the one hand, Princess desperately wants to appear as a regular teenage girl. But on the other, there is a distinct possibility that the show was made to capitalise on all the rubberneckers who want to see what sort of trouble Price has got herself into now.

If you are one of those hoping for news of Price’s exploits, you are going to come away disappointed. Because the main takeaway of The Princess Diaries is how relentlessly boring Princess’s life is. She is a 17-year-old girl whose job involves being an influencer. This means that her entire life is spent on her phone. She has “content days”, when she roams about, attempting to look carefree, in enough outfits to eke out a month’s worth of Instagram posts. She makes vague plans to launch her own beauty line, which at this stage means looking at pictures of other people’s beauty lines. She intermittently screws up her nose because a middle-aged man has DMd her a grotty message about her feet. It is excruciatingly monotonous.

Princess lives with Peter Andre and his second wife. Andre and Price do not get along. So while we do get glimpses of Price, they are via video chats (of which we get only the audio, not least because Price is undressed in some of them) and descriptions (such as when Princess reveals that Price got the date of her birthday wrong).

There is an undercurrent of impenetrable sadness. A little like the recent Alec Baldwin reality show, in which the scrappily chaotic idealism of his home life kept dropping away in segments where he addressed the accident when he shot and killed his cinematographer, there is a deep vein of melancholy to The Princess Diaries. For every film premiere and Ibiza fashion show, there is an introspective cutaway where Princess tells everyone how unhappy her childhood was, how she was picked on at school, and the feelings of self-hatred she experienced. But as soon as these bubble up, they are brushed away, because, look, a dog has just dribbled sausage grease on her new Louis Vuitton flip-flops! Everything’s fine again, promise!

It was inevitable that Princess Andre would get her own show. After all, as she points out, reality TV is all she has known since she was born. She has been sucked along in the undercurrent of her parents’ careers – she has either appeared in or been adjacent to Katie & Peter: The Baby Diaries, Katie & Peter: Unleashed, Katie & Peter: Down Under, Katie & Peter: Stateside, Peter Andre: Going It Alone, Peter Andre: The Next Chapter, Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion, Peter Andre: My Life and Katie Price: My Crazy Life.

However, on the basis of this series, it might have been worth waiting until Princess got her own gig. She is clearly smart and self-aware, and far better adjusted than you might expect. One day, when she has managed to clear the orbit of her ridiculous childhood, Princess Andre will be able to look back and put everything she has experienced into perspective. That day has yet to come. Instead, we have four hours of a 17-year-old girl looking at a phone. Surely that is too much reality for anyone.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

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Today’s Wordle puzzle sure has plenty of vowels. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has one repeated letter.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has three vowels..

Wordle hint No. 3: Start letter.

Today’s Wordle answer begins with I.

Wordle hint No. 4: First meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to individual magazines.

Wordle hint No. 5: Second meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can also refer to an important topic or problem for debate or discussion

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is ISSUE.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, Aug. 15, No. 1520 was LOUSY.

Recent Wordle answers

Aug. 13, No. 1516: KEFIR

Aug. 14, No. 1517: KNELL

Aug. 15, No. 1518: FELON

Aug. 16 No. 1519: MATTE

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

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Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is a tricky one. Frequent travelers might solve the blue group fairly easily. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group, to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: To show something.

Green group hint:  When you get one, take it.

Blue group hint: Think Marriott or Radisson.

Purple group hint: Timepiece.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Indication

Green group: Opportunity

Blue group: Hotel amenities

Purple group: Words before “watch”

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is indication. The four answers are cue, nod, prompt and signal.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is opportunity. The four answers are break, chance, opening and shot.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is hotel amenities. The four answers are breakfast, parking, pool and wi-fi.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is words before “watch.” The four answers are digital, pocket, stop and wrist.

Jennifer Aniston has spoken candidly about her past relationship with Brad Pitt, offering a rare reflection on their highly publicised split.

The remarks were made in a Vanity Fair feature ahead of the premiere of The Morning Show season four, where Aniston appears as the magazine’s September cover star.

While discussing her 2006 film The Break-Up, which she starred in alongside Vince Vaughn, Aniston noted how closely the timing aligned with her personal life.

“I might’ve just gone through a separation,” she said jokingly in a video clip for the shoot. “That little separation, I’m sure nobody remembers that.”

She explained that the project had an unexpected benefit during that period. “It was kind of cathartic to go right from that,” Aniston said.

She added that producers were initially hesitant to offer her the role, fearing it might be “insensitive” so soon after her divorce. However, Aniston recalled embracing the opportunity, saying it “would benefit her emotionally” and help serve the character and story.

In the accompanying interview, Aniston also reflected on the media attention surrounding her split with Pitt and the subsequent scrutiny of his relationship with Angelina Jolie.

She described it as a “vulnerable time,” remarking, “It was such juicy reading for people. If they didn’t have their soap operas, they had their tabloids… it was a shame it had to happen, but it happened. And boy, did I take it personally.”

Aniston’s comments mark one of the few times she has publicly revisited that chapter of her life in detail.

British actor Terence Stamp, who portrayed supervillain General Zod opposite Christopher Reeve in “Superman” and “Superman II” has died, his family announced. He was 87.

Stamp’s family shared news of his death in a statement sent to the Reuters news agency on Sunday, Aug. 17, saying that he died that morning.

The statement did not include information about his cause of death.

Stamp, born in London’s East End in 1938, had a career that spanned over seven decades. He booked his first part in 1960, according to IMDb, before landing the leading role in historical adventure “Billy Budd” as the titular character in 1962, when his fame took off. The part garnered him his first and only Academy Award nomination in 1963. Stamp also won a Golden Globe the same year for most promising newcomer.

He continued to regularly land parts in television shows and movies over the next decade before he was cast as Kryptonian military leader General Zod in the 1978 hit “Superman.” While Stamp had a smaller role in the first flick — as Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor was the main antagonist — he returned as Zod in the 1980 sequel “Superman II” as the major supervillain.

After the success of the “Superman” films, Stamp went on to appear in popular movies, such as “Wall Street,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of Desert,” “Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace,” “Get Smart” and “Valkyrie,” as well as television shows, such as “The Hunger.”

He re-joined the “Superman” universe to voice the role of Jor-El on The CW drama “Smallville.” His voice can be heard in 23 episodes across the show’s 10-season run, according to IMDb.

More recently, he had roles in the fantasy film “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” in 2016 and the HBO television show “His Dark Materials.”

Stamp’s final role was in the 2021 horror mystery “Last Night in Soho” alongside Matt Smith, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sam Claflin.