Category: 5. Entertainment

HBO Max‘s international roll out continued this morning with 12 launches across Europe and Asia.

The Warner Bros Discovery-owned streamer has gone live in Albania, Armenia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Tajikistan. This comes after recent launches in Turkey and Australia, and takes it past the 90-territory launch mark.

In the new territories, subscribers will be able to access the likes of Sinners and A Minecraft Movie are available to stream at launch, along with the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies, Dune, Dune: Part Two, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the Lord of the Rings movies, The Batman, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Last of Us, The White Lotus, Euphoria, House of the Dragon, Succession, The Penguin, And Just Like That…, His Dark Materials, Peacemaker and Rick and Morty.

Sports will be offered as add-ons in certain countries, with action from the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes currently streaming. La Vuelta a España and the US Open tennis grand slam will be offered next month.

“With the addition of these 12 new countries, we are rapidly approaching availability in 100 markets worldwide, with major launches still to come early next year in Germany, Italy, and the U.K.,” said JB Perrette, CEO and President of Global Streaming & Games at Warner Bros. Discovery. “HBO Max is enjoying a year of great momentum as we see amazing programming ahead and further expansion.” 

WBD had 122.3 million streaming subs at the end of Q1 this year, adding almost 23 million in a year. HBO Max was also riding high at the Emmy nominations, where it picked up 142 noms, ahead of Netflix and the other streamers.

However, has also been through a somewhat embarrassing rebranding process, returning Max back to its original HBO Max moniker amid playful jibes from its own hosts and rival services. The ill-fated Max era lasted two years before reverting on July 8 this month.

Ed Sheeran might still be in the midst of his current run of tour dates, but the English musician is already making big plans for 2026, starting with return visits to Australia and New Zealand.

Sheeran announced a new run of tour dates on Tuesday (July 22), with the eleven-show visit to Oceania set to take place from January to March 2026. “Starting a brand new tour next year called the LOOP tour,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram. “New stage, new tricks, new set up, new songs and all the classics added in.”

The tour will see the musician performing at stadiums across the New Zealand cities of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Sheeran will then head west for Australian stadium dates in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, before wrapping up with a show at South Australia’s Adelaide Oval.

The tour comes just shy of two months before the release of Sheeran’s eighth album, Play, which is scheduled to arrive on Sept. 12. That release date occurs just days after Sheeran wraps up his current +–=÷× Tour (also dubbed the Mathematics Tour), which closes with three dates in Düsseldorf, Germany – almost three-and-a-half years after he first began the trek.

Sheeran’s Australian and New Zealand return will mark his first visit to the countries since February and March 2023. That tour also saw Sheeran break attendance records at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where, across two performances, he played to 217,500 fans. The two shows each broke the previous attendance record set by Sheeran collaborator Eminem, who played to 80,708 fans at the venue in 2019.

News of the upcoming run of tour dates has been expected for some time, with Sheeran taking to his private Teddy’s Vinyl Breakfast Instagram account in May to respond to fans asking about his 2026 plans. “Oz/NZ top of next year, then Latam, then USA,” Sheeran responded at the time.

Ed Sheeran – 2026 New Zealand & Australian Loop Tour Dates

Jan. 16 – Go Media Stadium, Auckland, NZ
Jan. 21 – Sky Stadium, Wellington, NZ
Jan. 24 – Apollo Projects Stadium, Christchurch, NZ
Jan. 31 – Optus Stadium, Perth, WA
Feb. 13 – Accor Stadium, Sydney, NSW
Feb. 14 – Accor Stadium, Sydney, NSW
Feb. 20 – Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, QLD
Feb. 21 – Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, QLD
Feb. 26 – Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, VIC
Feb. 27 – Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, VIC
Mar. 5 – Adelaide Oval, Adelaide, SA

HBO Max, the premier global streaming service from Warner Bros. Discovery is now live in 12 new countries. They are Albania, Armenia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, and Tajikistan.

Fans in these countries will be able to watch an incredible lineup of entertainment from HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios, Max Originals and much more. The global smash hits Sinners, and A Minecraft Movie are available to stream at launch, in addition to the ever-popular Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies, Dune, Dune: Part Two, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the Lord of the Rings movies, The Batman, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and many more.*

Hit series ready to stream include The Last of Us, The White Lotus, Euphoria, House of the Dragon, Succession, The Penguin, And Just Like That…, His Dark Materials, Peacemaker, Rick and Morty, and future series such as the highly anticipated Task, starring Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey, and IT: Welcome to Derry — as well as iconic series Friends, Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory, Sex in the City, The Sopranos, The Wire, True Blood, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 90 Day Fiancé from TLC, Gold Rush and Wheeler Dealers from Discovery and shows for kids including Batwheels, Teen Titans Go!, and The Amazing World of Gumball.**

From Eurosport, sports fans can catch all the action from the Tour de France, as the world’s most prestigious cycling race reaches its thrilling conclusion on July 27, following the start of the Tour de France Femmes on 26 July, with La Vuelta a España and the US Open tennis grand slam following in August. Fans can also follow the PGA Tour, Formula E season and major winter sports events later in the year. Sports on HBO Max are available as an add-on in select countries. Rights vary between countries.***

JB Perrette, CEO and President of Global Streaming & Games at Warner Bros. Discovery, said: “With the addition of these 12 new countries, we are rapidly approaching availability in 100 markets worldwide, with major launches still to come early next year in Germany, Italy, and the U.K. HBO Max is enjoying a year of great momentum as we see amazing programming ahead and further expansion.”

HBO Max offers two subscription plans****:

• Standard Plan – allows subscribers to stream on two devices at once with full HD resolution and up to 30 downloads for offline viewing (limits apply).
• Premium Plan – allows subscribers to stream on four devices at once with 4K UHD and Dolby Atmos (as available) and enjoy up to 100 downloads for offline viewing (limits apply).

HBO Max is available via major app stores, select mobiles, tablets, connected TVs and online at www.hbomax.com. Subscribers can pay via major providers including Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and PayPal.

HBO Max is now available in more than 90 markets globally, following the earlier 2025 launches in Australia and Türkiye. Additional launches are planned in 2025 and into 2026 as momentum continues to build for HBO Max. WBD ended the first quarter of 2025 with 122.3 million streaming subscribers, an increase of nearly 22.6 million subscribers in just one year.

Note to editors
*Title availability varies by market.

**Title availability varies by market.

***Rights, branding, and content vary between countries. Sport is limited to two of the subscriber’s available streams.

****Channels, live events and sports, where available, contain ads. All plans may include sponsorship, product placement, and Cross-Promotional Content.

About Warner Bros. Discovery
Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates and distributes the world’s most differentiated and complete portfolio of content and brands across television, film and streaming. Available in more than 220 countries and territories and 50 languages, Warner Bros. Discovery inspires, informs and entertains audiences worldwide through its iconic brands and products including: Discovery Channel, discovery+, BluTV, CNN, DC, Eurosport, HBO, HGTV, Food Network, OWN, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Magnolia Network, TNT, TBS, truTV, Travel Channel, HBO Max, Animal Planet, Science Channel, Warner Bros. Film Group, Warner Bros. Television Group, Warner Bros. Games, New Line Cinema, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Turner Classic Movies, Discovery en Español, Hogar de HGTV and others. For more information, please visit http://www.wbd.com.

About HBO Max
HBO Max is the premier global streaming platform from Warner Bros. Discovery that delivers the most unique and captivating stories, ranging from the highest quality in scripted programming, movies, documentaries, true crime, adult animation, and live sports and news (where available). HBO Max is the destination for prestigious entertainment brands such as HBO, Warner Bros., Max Originals, DC, Harry Potter, as well as iconic shows like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory,” all in one place.

John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn’t appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year.

His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world’s edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn’t that it exists; it’s no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it’s the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words.

It’s our great good fortune, then, that Burnside’s closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number – just 19 – but there’s no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence – thematic, imagistic and linguistic – and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality.

This isn’t, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: “the darkness-to-come”.

In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of “hospice” and funereal “white chrysanthemums”, offers a vision of “starlight at the far end of the ward / where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops / in theatres, when the actors leave the stage”. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word “last” (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes “Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; / the echo of someone going about / their business, making good or making hay / – you never know for sure, although you know / that something here is coming to an end”. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory.

It is memory – and its shadow, forgetting – to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful “trail / of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap”.

Burnside’s writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father’s bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry’s ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. “What if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day”, he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a “momentary // halcyon of everyone / together, voices, singsong in the dark”. To Burnside the afterlife isn’t a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past.

And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it’s not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the “evening dusk”, the “quince, or damson, strafed into the grass”, “the field where, once, / we played Dead Man’s Fall”. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: “a ruined / thicket, sump oil / rotting in the grass, a spill / of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock”.

This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it’s the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, “birch woods”, litanies of flowers (“foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis”). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost “performs its secret ministry”, there’s the sound of “small rain in the leaves”. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful – which makes the leave-taking unbearable too.

At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of “those mornings / when we shivered from our beds / and lit a fire / to magnify the dark”. If Burnside’s poetry – all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all – can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us.

It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we’re losing. Now we’ve lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out.

An entertaining-enough space-horror, a mishmash of storylines and character types that sees some special forces commandos abducted by a gang (herd? flock? troop?) of aliens whose intentions are aligned more closely with the likes of the predator than lovely little ET the Extra-Terrestrial. The pop culture off-worlders these beasties most resemble physically, however, are the xenomorphs from James Cameron’s Aliens – and not the massive multi-limbed queen, mind you, but the smaller foot-soldier guys who can be played by a fella in a suit.

This fella-in-a-suit aspect is the one of the film’s strengths. You might argue that it hinders the willing suspension of disbelief, because you always know you’re looking at a fella in a suit. But in truth there’s something about the physicality of even the hokiest practical effect that is more enjoyable than all but the most skilfully rendered digital efforts.

Another area in which the film recalls the earlier work of James Cameron is in the casting of Linda Hamilton (Terminator 2: Judgment Day) in the role of a tough, uncompromising military type. Lest fans get too excited by the Hamilton-heavy marketing for the film, she certainly gives good Hamilton while on screen, but she doesn’t appear for the first hour; it’s very much an “and Linda Hamilton” credits situation. And that’s fine: it’s better to have practical effects and a modest helping of recognisable actors than A-listers sleepwalking through expensive CGI glop for a paycheck. Osiris is far from a perfect film, and it’s certainly not an original one, but it understands the assignment and delivers.

Copner Way, North Peckham Estate, 1985

Newell says: ‘My grandmother and mother moved to the Redbridge Gardens estate, Peckham, in the early 60s when it was first built, and I was born in Peckham in 1965, where we lived until 1968. I returned permanently to London with my mother in 1976. Our first Peckham home was on the prewar Sumner estate. The estate was in a state of disrepair and the flats lacked central heating, which meant they were in low demand’

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Mix Tape

9pm, BBC Two
The will-they-won’t-they drama about two people who fell in love and parted 20 years ago takes a heartbreakingly dark turn, as we learn the real reason Alison (Teresa Palmer) left Sheffield without telling Daniel (Jim Sturgess). The pair finally meet up in Sydney, but it was always going to be an awkward reunion – especially as they both now have spouses. Was their love only ever meant to stay in the past? Beautiful, tragic and set to a top-notch soundtrack. Hollie Richardson

Bake Off: The Professionals

8pm, Channel 4
It’s the semi-finals, and the four remaining pastry pummellers must create an edible floating city. There’s also a special guest judge dropping by: Gabriella Cugno, the official chocolatier for the 2023 film Wonka. She’ll be challenging them to create a chocolate bar fit for a blockbuster. Ali Catterall

Coastal Adventures with Helen, Jules & JB

8pm, Channel 5
Helen Skelton, JB Gill and Jules Hudson explore more of the British coastline. On the itinerary: Tynemouth Long Sands, the new surfing hotspot in North Tyneside; a conservation project involving photographing porpoises in Pembrokeshire; and mustard being made in Norfolk. HR

My Life Is Murder

9pm, U&Alibi
The Auckland PI Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) may be less gung-ho than Lawless’s Xena: Warrior Princess but she gets the job done with similar good humour. Her latest case is a slippery one, not least because it involves murder at a family-run coconut oil firm. But there’s also a bubbly, babbling cameo from Bill Bailey as her former client Enzo. Graeme Virtue

10pm, Channel 4
The 1991 murder of Janine Downes is this week’s cold case that the Silent Witness star Emilia Fox and the former senior detective Dr Graham Hill are attempting to crack. Downes’s body was found in Wolverhampton’s red light district – interviews with key witnesses lead them to ask if she may have been the victim of a serial killer. HR

Creature Commandos

11.30pm, Sky Max
A very grownup cartoon from DC Studios’ James Gunn, following a black ops team that is a motley crew of monsters. There’s a harrowing flashback in this episode, as “the weasel” has a nightmare that shows his past – and he’s definitely not “dreaming about squirrels” like the others assume. HR

Film choice

Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022), 11pm, BBC Two

Based on the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, which was in turn based on true events, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is startlingly unconventional. The story of a Mennonite community in remote Bolivia whose women discover they have been drugged and raped, it centres on the discussion of how they should react. Do they leave, do they fight back, or do they do nothing? With a world-beating cast (Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy and Frances McDormand), the film is light on action but will linger long after the credits roll. Stuart Heritage

Live sport

Women’s International One-Day cricket: England v India, 1.45pm, Sky Sports Main Event The third one-day international in the three-match series.

Women’s Euro 2025 football: ITV1 7pm/BBC One 7.30pm The first semi-final. The second semi-final match is on Wednesday on ITV1 at 7pm or BBC One at 7.30pm.

The director of the latest I Know What You Did Last Summer movie knows about Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr.‘s chemistry in the new film.

Sony‘s feature reboot from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson hit theaters over the weekend, landing in third place at the domestic box office with $12.7 million. Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon round out the cast for the latest entry in the slasher franchise that kicked off with the original 1997 film of the same name.

A social media user’s post on Saturday about the film asked fellow fans whether they thought Hewitt and Prinze — who reprise their roles from the original movie and its sequel — “filmed their scenes together” in the new installment. “People are starting to notice the ‘cuts and separate shots,’” the post continued.

Robinson was quick to clear up any confusion surrounding the pair’s scenes. “They absolutely shot their scenes together. Hope this helps,” the Do Revenge filmmaker wrote, adding a heart emoji.

When the user who wrote the original post apologized and admitted to feeling embarrassed, Robinson replied, “No apology necessary! I totally get why people might think that cause of some of the coverage but they are absolutely acting off each other. It was electric!”

The new film centers on a group of five friends facing dangerous consequences after making a pact to stay silent about a tragic car accident. 

In his review of the latest movie for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Frank Scheck wrote about Prinze and Hewitt, “Both are in excellent form, providing connective tissue to the original film and its sequel.”