Matthew Monagle

Have you ever scrolled through Donald Trump’s IMDb page? Owing to his background as a New York City socialite, Trump has appeared as himself in many talk shows and entertainment news segments; at last count, Trump has approximately 266 appearances in movies and televisions shows ranging from Late Night With David Letterman to his many, many appearances on the various iterations of The Howard Stern Show. What’s more interesting, however, are his appearances that fall under the ‘actor’ category. How did Trump continue to pop into shows like Spin City and Sex and the City despite his questionable reputation among New Yorkers?

Today the world of comedy lost one of its brightest stars. Jerry Lewis was no stranger to controversy during his decades-long career, but his impact on both Hollywood and comedy in general cannot be denied. From his early days as Dean Martin’s partner-in-crime to his career-capping turn in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy  —  and countless box office success in the interim  —  Lewis’s impact on Hollywood will be a source of much discussion for years to come.

As with any landmark television show, one of the fun parts of revisiting Downton Abbey is seeing the number of careers it launched. Abbey served as a pretty incredible pipeline of talented British actors and actresses, all of whom seem to be landing solidly on their feet in Hollywood. That’s the good news for Abbey fans: the bad news is that with increased success comes increased scheduling difficulty. This wasn’t a series like Firefly where you basically only needed to lock down a handful of actors; to do Downton Abbey right, you’d want to bring in a dozen-plus members of the original cast, and that’s an increasingly tough proposition.

You know those rare moments when everyone on the internet seems to be talking about the same thing? Sports, politics, entertainment, whatever… those are the moments that make social media both a blessing and a curse. Take, for instance, a talented (if not slightly unknown) actress named Jodie Whittaker. If you were to go to Google Trends right now and look up her name, you’d see a sudden spike in searches, indicating that everyone everywhere is suddenly obsessed with learning more about her career. Why on earth could that be?

This just isn’t fair. Only hours after we found out that horror icon George Romero has passed away, we’ve also learned that the world has lost veteran character actor Martin Landau at the age of 89. According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, Landau passed away unexpectedly after a short illness, leaving behind a legacy of television and film work that any actor would be proud to call their own. From his breakout role in North by Northwest to his regular work with Tim Burton, Landau has been a versatile

If we’re lucky, every few years we’re treated to a will-they-or-won’t-they love story that sparks our imagination and warms our hearts. Ross and Rachel from Friends. Jim and Pam from The Office. Daniel and Barbara from Bond 25. Yes, these are classic, iconic love stories, where two people who are destined to be together must nevertheless fight through a series of unfortunate events before going public with their mutual love and affection. Which is all a complicated and jokey way of saying, c’mon, Daniel Craig and Barbara Broccoli, we know y’all are going to make Bond 25 happen, so just do it already!

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, Edgar Wright fans: did the filmmaker’s action-packed Baby Driver score big with audiences? Or does this weekend belong to sequels, sequels, and more sequels? This weekend was always going to belong to Despicable Me 3— it’s a big hit with the kiddos, don’t you know— but there’s definitely some room for optimism in how the rest of the weekend Top 10 shook out. Here’s the numbers as of Sunday afternoon:

It’s a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the world, which means it’s time for your weekend box office updates! While this was a disappointing weekend overall for a handful of new releases, there’s good news to be had: after a disappointing $144 million total gross last weekend, the box office bounced back to $187 million total over the past few days. That takes some of the pressure off Wonder Woman to, you know, save the summer blockbuster as we know it. Here’s the totals as of Sunday afternoon:

Hold onto your (well-toned) butts, ladies and gentlemen, because Zac Efron’s career is about to kick into high gear. After a few years spent as a teenage heartthrob  —  and a few more years spent revamping his image in movies like Neighbors and Baywatch as everyone’s favorite ‘sex idiot’  —  it looks like Efron is gearing up to pivot yet-again into the dramatic stage of his career. What type of dramatic turn, you ask? A troubled artist? A struggling musician? You’re close! How about infamous serial killer Ted Bundy?

On Thursday evening, plenty of executives went to bed with dreams of big opening weekend numbers in their head. Could the movie about a magical king unseat the movie about a talking tree? Or would a mother-daughter comedy with just the right release date unseat a pair of battling sisters? Now that we’ve reached the end of the holiday weekend, we finally have the numbers, and it turns out the answer was no and no, respectively. Here’s this past weekend’s grosses as of Sunday afternoon:

Since Dennis Miller hosted the very first MTV Movie Awards back in 1992, the music channel’s annual award ceremony has been something of a fun dalliance into a world where the artistic merit of a movie is less important than its popular clout. This year marks a couple of big changes for the format: not only did the award show change its official name  —  it is now known as the MTV Movie & TV Awards  —  it also has become arguably the most inclusive award show to date, honoring titles like Moonlight, Get Out, and Jane the Virgin alongside its stalwart categories like Best Kiss and Best Villain.

Audiences don’t turn their back on family. That’s the lesson to be learned from this past weekend, anyways, when The Fate of the Furious proved that this is one franchise showing no signs of slowing down. It was never a question of whether The Fate of the Furious would take the top spot this weekend, but even the most optimistic of projections couldn’t have expected the global domination that this movie undertook. Here’s the box office estimates as of Sunday afternoon:

After several weeks of limited movement, a handful of new releases prompted a pretty thorough shakeup of the Box Office Top 10. While Beauty and the Beast continued its unstoppable assault on the domestic box office, we also said hello this weekend to three new movies and goodbye to a handful of old favorites from the first few months of the year. Let’s start with the estimated numbers as of Sunday afternoon.

With Hugh Jackman’s Logan opening in theaters this weekend, the top spot of this list was never in doubt. The questions were always whether audiences would respond well to the first major R-rated superhero movie. Was the big opening of Deadpool an abberation or a sign of things to come? If today’s numbers are any indication, the answer is, maybe a little bit of both.

As a teenager in the ’90s, no actor better represented blockbuster movies than Bill Paxton. Although Paxton wasn’t typically a leading man in those movies  —  he would often play the brother, the second-in-command, or the comic relief  —  he served as a kind of talisman of quality. If you saw Paxton’s name in the opening credits of a movie, you knew that the film was going to be better for it.

Ah, the Pokémon franchise. It seems like only yesterday that millions of people were wandering the streets of their hometowns, eyes locked to their smartphone screens as they flung Pokeballs at imaginary creatures hovering over local businesses. The Pokémon Go craze, with its innovative use of technology and beloved cartoon characters, brought the popular animated series back into the public spotlight. And with news that Legendary Pictures would shoot a new live-action Pokémon movie in 2017, it was only a matter of time before some of the original films found their way back into theaters.