Category: 5. Entertainment

(Web Desk) – Deepika Padukone will no longer play the female lead in the Hindi adaptation of the 2015 Hollywood film The Intern.

After remaining attached to the project for nearly five years, she has decided to step back from acting entirely.

Instead, Deepika will focus solely on producing the remake under her KA Productions banner, overseeing its creative and logistical execution.

The Hindi version was initially planned with Deepika Padukone starring alongside Rishi Kapoor, but his passing altered the casting process significantly.

Following his death, Amitabh Bachchan was brought on board.

Now, according to reports, a fresh search is underway to cast a new leading lady.

It is believed that The Intern will be the first of five films Deepika Padukone aims to produce in 2025.

She has reportedly expressed an interest in backing stories with themes she believes can resonate with audiences worldwide.

The actress was last seen in the 2024 Diwali release Singham Again, which marked her return to the big screen after motherhood.

Her decision comes months after she walked away from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Spirit, starring Prabhas, over reported creative differences.

Her exit from Spirit was allegedly linked to conditions including an eight-hour workday, profit sharing, and substantial pay.

Reports also claimed she declined to speak her lines in Telugu for the film, leading to her replacement by Triptii Dimri.

Speculation later emerged suggesting Deepika might also step back from the Kalki 2898 AD sequel due to similar scheduling and workload preferences.

These rumours hinted that her reduced availability after becoming a mother might result in her role being cut or recast.

Alan Tudyk reflected on his career and revealed that there’s a reason why not many people know he played Sonny in the 2004 sci-fi action film I, Robot.

During an appearance on Toon’d In with Jimmy Cummings, Tudyk said that with test screening audiences, he tested higher than the film’s star Will Smith.

“They were doing test audiences with the movie and they score the characters and I got word back, ‘Alan, you’re testing higher than Will Smith,’” Tudyk recalled on the podcast from June 15. “And then I was gone. I was gone. There was no publicity and my name was not mentioned.”

He continued, “I was so shocked, I was like, ‘But wait, nobody’s going to know that I [play the robot].’”

Tudyk voiced Sonny the robot and was motion-captured for the CGI character, saying that he “put a lot into” his performance, adding, “At the time, I was very upset.”

Directed by Alex Proyas, I, Robot is set in Chicago 2035 as robots fill public service positions around the world. Will Smith plays Detective Del Spooner as he investigates the death of the U.S. Robotics founder, who believes that Sonny the robot murdered him.

The film also stars Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell, Chi McBride, Shia LaBeouf, Fiona Hogan, Terry Chen, Adrian L. Ricard, Jerry Wasserman, Peter Shinkoda, Emily Tennant, and David Haysom.

I, Robot was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Visual Effects, which it ultimately lost to the Sam Raimi-directed superhero action film, Spider-Man 2.

Watch Tudyk’s interview below.

Ozzy Osbourne’s longtime friend Andrew Watt recently reacted to the rock icon’s tragic death.

Watt, 34, who collaborated with the Paranoid singer in 2019 on the album Ordinary Man, paid tribute to the departed legend.

Taking to Instagram, the Grammy-winning American record producer shared a past video of the Prince of Darkness alongside a heartfelt caption.

He wrote, “Still processing saying goodbye to @ozzyosbourne. …. Someone said “Grief is the price of Love”. I say that to myself everyday but at the end of the day I just miss my friend so much. There is a new hole in my heart, something I will learn to live with…The music is obvious…how lucky I was to share in a little of Ozzy’s magic, but the friendship was the greatest gift of all…I will miss laughing with you forever Boss… Do you want a kick in the balls?”

This comes after the Crazy Train hitmaker passed away on Tuesday, July 22, at the age of 76.

Earlier in June, Watt reflected on his connection with Osbourne.

Speaking to Guitar World, he said, “Ozzy and I have a connection that’s unlike anything else I’ve never experienced. We made some music together that we really love, and we’ll continue making music together forever. More importantly than that, we talk every day and we’re really close friends.”

For the unversed, the Burning Man singer helped Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne produce a rock album. 

Deadline was the first to tell you that Lily James would be playing Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, the first to bring you a production photo and now we finally get the trailer.

The Hulu film Swiped also stars Myha’la, Jackson White, Dan Stevens and Pierson Fode, as Deadline previously announced. It begins streaming September 19.

Plot details for the film remain vague, as it’s said to be somewhat loosely inspired by Herd’s life and career journey, rather than a beat-for-beat recounting. Famously launching the online dating platform Bumble after co-founding and departing Tinder, Herd became one of the youngest self-made billionaires at age 31 when Bumble went public in 2021. While she stepped down as CEO last year, the app continues to be popular amongst the single crowd.

The trailer follows Herd’s rise among the Twitter boys club, her disillusionment and departure, and her effort to “change the rules of online dating” by empowering women to choose on Bumble.

Watch the trailer above.

In the past few weeks, rap fans have celebrated legendary mixtapes from Lil Wayne and Rick Ross being uploaded to streaming platforms, but their time on these services may be cut short. A source close to Wayne told Rolling Stone that his Dedication and Da Drought mixtapes, recently removed from Tidal and Apple Music, were “not legal [or] legitimate uploads,” even though they were on his official artist pages. (Reps for Tidal and Apple Music did not respond to requests for comment.) 

These uploads reflect potential flaws in the process of adding music to Digital Service Providers (DSPs). Streaming services like Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify require artists to utilize third-party music distributors such as Distrokid, TuneCore, and RouteNote to upload music to their platforms. However, the scale of music regularly uploaded to self-service distributors means anyone can upload a song or album without official rights, attribute it to any artist they choose, and sometimes have these uploads slip through regulation onto artists’ official pages. 

Coach Bombay 3000, a Brooklyn music manager for rapper Rome Streetz and several other acts, believes that it’s “pretty easy” for anyone to upload music to digital music distributors and have it appear on an artist’s official page. “There’s been times where there’s so much shit that says Rome Streetz [and] we never uploaded [it],” he says. “We’re like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ We got to issue strikes to get it taken down.” Bombay says he’s dealt with people trying to upload music to Rome’s streaming pages “three times” in the last month. 

He explains that when people use one of the digital music distributors, they can type Rome Streetz or Lil Wayne in the “primary artist” category of the upload form, add a link to the URL of the official artist page on the streaming service, and have a chance of the music bypassing quality control functions. He says that once the music is uploaded to streaming providers, his team has to ask the official distributor (an independent distributor or record label) to issue a takedown notice, which can take days. In the case of Wayne, it took almost a week for his mixtapes to be removed from Apple Music and Tidal. 

Another anonymous source, who works in the streaming world, confirmed the ease of illegitimate uploads, adding “it happens that way all the time,” and they’ve seen a “crazy influx of fraud” in recent months. Sometimes users upload unlicensed music onto artists’ official pages, while other times they use accounts featuring the artist’s misspelled name or a nickname as the “primary artist.” The source also notes that artists sometimes take it upon themselves to add their legitimate collaborators as a “primary artist” without permission. “Some artists don’t like being added as a primary artist without their permission because whatever they’re tagged on as a primary artist shows up as their latest release.” 

The source says that they’ll occasionally see these pending uploads fast enough to contact the music distributor or streaming platform, but sometimes they’re “not quick enough,” resulting in them going live on the platform. “It would likely come down to a shitty distributor or one with too much volume,” they said, likening the process to whack-a-mole. Bombay bemoans the “free-for-all” atmosphere on streaming platforms. “There’s no filter system,” he says. “There’s no process to make sure that everything that’s being uploaded is quality.”

While the mixtape scene allowed artists and DJs to release songs to blogs and sites like Datpiff and LiveMixtapes without regulation, streaming services are more stringent with unlicensed music, especially from popular acts. Wayne’s Dedication and Da Drought mixtapes feature him freestyling over beats from other artists who would have to clear them being used — ditto for his collaborators, who would have to approve their appearances for the projects to avoid copyright strikes. 

In recent years, artists have re-released their early career mixtapes on streaming services. In 2020, Lil Wayne dropped a truncated version of 2011’s No Ceilings, Drake celebrated the 10th anniversary of So Far Gone with a 2019 release on streaming platforms. Nicki Minaj reissued her seminal 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty in 2021, and Travis Scott commemorated the 10th anniversary of Days Before Rodeo with an official release on streaming last year, while J. Cole went on to re-release a trio of his early mixtapes two months later. In each case, the artists announced the impending releases; the mysterious recent appearance of Wayne’s mixtapes, as well as Rick Ross’ 2011 Rich Forever project, made some fans skeptical. 

When Ross was asked in May about clearing Rich Forever for streaming services, he said, “I really don’t wanna do it. That was at a certain point, I just wanted to do that for the streets.” There’s an entire wing of canonical mixtape music that’s available on YouTube, as well as platforms like LiveMixtapes and Datpiff, but isn’t officially on streaming platforms. 

In 2021, the late Prodigy’s friend and engineer Joe “The Engine Ear” told Complex about the tedious process of getting the rap legend’s music cleared for DSPs. Joe noted that after Prodigy’s 2017 death, his estate removed his music from streaming to ensure that samples were cleared, publishing splits were correct, and all credits were properly attributed. “It’s hard to explain the amount of work that it took to get The Book of Heroine near the finish line,” he said.   

While fans may sometimes circumvent overloaded or shoddy digital distributors to release unlicensed music, they usually won’t last long before being flagged. Still, Bombay notes, “the digital streaming platforms have no control over what goes out and what comes up.” The anonymous source expressed a slightly different sentiment, saying, “I think folks are trying to eliminate this issue. The problem is with rapid fans and hypebeasts, I feel they’ll always find a way.” 

Nicola and Brooklyn Peltz Beckham had a wedding so nice they decided to do it twice.

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For decades, print media has been transitioning to digital, with physical magazines, newspapers and newsletters declining in numbers and delivery cadence. But there are exceptions, just witness the New York Post’s forthcoming California edition.

On a smaller scale, Kevin Durant’s Boardroom plans to launch a new print magazine. Boardroom has only been a digital site, so it is moving in reverse order from the once-typical print to online migration. A trial issue is due out later in August with a cover feature on number one ranked female tennis star Aryna Sabalenka, and the plan is to print four times a year starting in 2026.

Durant and his business manager, Rich Kleiman, started Boardroom in 2019, following its sister company 35 Ventures (named after the jersey number the NBA star has worn much of his career), which houses their investment and media production arms.

The content is focused on athletes, musicians, film stars and other entertainers, so it’s not a pure sports site. A recent “cover” story is on R&B singer Giveon, with other links to stories including the FIFA World Cup, Nike FC Barcelona’s Kobe Bryant kits, and on the opening viewership for Happy Gilmore 2.

Why publish a physical magazine? Expenses are far greater than digital only, the publication has to be printed and delivered, and is typically out of date before it comes off the presses.

“There’s starting to be more and more of a value put on something in the physical because of how saturated the digital landscape is and just how much time we all spend on it,” said Kleiman, a music industry veteran before he partnered with Durant as his business manager and partner in 35 Ventures. “So it is not meant to become the main revenue generator of our business, that is built around subscription and brand integration … It’s not something that we’re seeing as a big driver in growth from a monetization standpoint, as much as a driver in marketing, and adds a level of kind of cachet and premium to our existing businesses.”

The magazine, also monikered Boardroom, will first be available later this month at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, and also next month at the sports business conference in Los Angeles the media platform hosts annually with CNBC.

“We’re calling it a mini mag, and we’re only making a few thousand of them, but starting next year, we’ll be putting out a quarterly, more traditional print magazine,” Kleiman said. The mini mag is set to run 50 pages, with 120 targeted for the quarterly next year.

There has been a slow drip of new print publications in recent years, testing the conventional wisdom that print is dead. To name a few, trailblazing online magazine Tablet this year put out a print edition; cultural toy brand POPMART launched a youth culture magazine this year called play/Ground; and last year rock online magazine SPIN relaunched its print edition.

Boardroom occupies a hard to define space. It’s not a sports publication, or a sports business outlet, because it also covers popular culture. It was ahead of the trend of sports sweeping into popular culture, whether it’s the explosion of women’s sports or the ubiquity of the NFL, and the cross over between sports and entertainment.

In addition to a story on Sabalenka, which is a Q&A that Kleiman conducted himself, the pilot issue has other items, including a piece on Rolex’s sponsorship presence in tennis. Boardroom does not plan to hire a dedicated staff for the magazine, Kleiman said, but largely tap into its existing employees who put out the digital news, including on the main site and in newsletters.

This back to the future moment of a new print publication Kleiman likens to the uptick in sales of vinyl records. It doesn’t harbor a return to the old way of doing things, he said, but is simply one more platform among many.

Jennifer Lawrence admitted to Vogue as part of Emma Stone‘s new cover story that she originally argued against Stone shaving all her hair off for Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming “Bugonia,” a reimagining of the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” that casts Stone as a pharmaceutical CEO who gets kidnapped by a pair of conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) convinced she is an alien set on destroying Earth.

“I really didn’t want her to shave her head,” Lawrence said about her two-time Oscar-winning friend. “I had already lived through the Billie Jean King haircut.”

Lawrence is referring to the hairdo Stone rocked in “Battle of the Sexes,” in which she played the iconic tennis player Billie Jean King. For “Bugonia,” Stone channeled her inner Natalie Portman in “V for Vendetta” and shaved her hair off on camera while filming a scene for the dark comedy in the back of a Range Rover. The actor broke down in tears in her trailer before shooting the shaving scene, as it reminded her of when her mother, Krista, battled breast cancer. As Stone put it: “She actually did something brave. I’m just shaving my head.”

But Stone ended up loving it, saying, “No better feeling in the world. The first shower when you’ve shaved your head? Oh my God, it’s amazing.”

The final result also had Lawrence admitting she was wrong, too. As Lawrence told Vogue: “Honestly, she looked beautiful. She pulled it off.” Even Stone’s mom reacted by telling her daughter: “I’m so jealous. I want to shave my head again.”

“The more challenging it gets, the more I like it,” Stone added about her acting career. “If you’re not growing or pushing yourself to different places—and I feel it’s the same for most people in almost any job—you get stagnant.”

Stone won her second best actress Oscar for “Poor Things,” also directed by Lanthimos. Lawrence happened to be on stage at the time and fellow presenter Michelle Yeoh handed off the Academy Award to Lawrence so that she could bestow it to her longtime friend Stone.

“In true Emily form, as soon as we got offstage and ran into the bathroom to scream and cry,” Lawrence said about the moment, “I whispered, ‘Two-time best-actress winner,’ and she replied, ‘I feel like that’s bad, though.’”

“Bugonia” is set to world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival before releasing in theaters Oct. 24 from Focus Features. Head over to Vogue’s website to read Stone’s cover in its entirety.