Category: Entertainment

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Walmart is offering up some new deals, discounts and special offers right now, including a way to get a Peacock streaming subscription for free.

While Walmart is touting its back to school deals right now, the retailer is also offering access to its Walmart+ membership program for just $1 for your first month. Regularly $12.95/month, the deal saves you a whopping 92% off one of the best shopping subscriptions online.

Included in your Walmart+ membership are perks like unlimited free delivery, free returns from home, early access to sales like Black Friday, exclusive members-only discounts, free tire repair and free road hazard warranty at Walmart Auto Care Centers, and fuel discounts of up to 10¢ per gallon at 13,000+ Exxon, Mobil, Walmart and Murphy USA gas stations across the country.

One of the best perks though is the Walmart+ streaming discount, which gets members a free subscription to Peacock. The offer comes as Peacock announced a price hike Tuesday (Aug. 18) to $12.99/month, up from $10.99. That marks the fourth price increase in four years for the NBCUniversal streamer.

Walmart+ members can now get access to Peacock for free, with no additional fees or restrictions. Simply log into your Walmart+ account and then click “Get Peacock” in the benefits section. You can use the same email and account info to start streaming Peacock’s library of TV shows, movies, live sports and specials for no additional charge.

This is one of the only ways to get Peacock online for free, as the streamer doesn’t offer a free trial unlike some streaming services, like Prime Video.

Get Walmart+ for just $1 for a limited time and then use your membership to get Peacock for free (note: your Walmart+ price goes back to the regular $12.95/month rate after your first month. You can also switch to an annual plan after your 30-day trial and pay $98 for the whole year — a $57 savings).

Don’t need Peacock? Walmart+ members can also choose to get a free subscription to Paramount+, which lets you stream live sports and programming on CBS, in addition to thousands of popular shows and movies like Survivor, Your Honor, Star Trek: Picard and more. Live sports include the NFL on CBS, UEFA Champions League and PGA, among others.

Walmart also recently teamed up with Burger King, to offer Walmart+ members 25% off orders at the fast food chain.

And Walmart+ subscribers can also take advantage of new grocery deals (with free home delivery) and travel discounts, including 5% back in Walmart Cash when booking trips with Expedia. Learn more about a Walmart+ membership here.

Reunions all around for Felicia Day these days: Amid a massive fundraiser for a movie reunion of her series “The Guild,” Day is reteaming with longtime friend and collaborator Wil Wheaton for a new kind of board game TV series.

Launching as fan-unlocked content tied to “The Guild: Ren Faire’d” movie’s ongoing Kickstarter campaign (which has so far raised $5.26 million, surpassing its initial goal of $1.5 million), the new 10-episode series is titled “Conludo,” which is Latin for “play together.” Each episode of the show will feature Day and Wheaton in conversation before they pick a board game that is applicable to their topic and invite some fellow celebs to join them in play.

Fans will recognize this project as reminiscent of Day and Wheaton’s “TableTop,” a web series that ran for four seasons from 2012-2017 on Day’s YouTube channel, Geek & Sundry.

“We’ve been FOMO-ing for over a decade, and we just want to play again, especially with some of those new content creators,” Day tells Variety. “Some of them I’ve met in the last couple years, and I want to play with them at the table. It’s a wonderful world to be in and I have faith that hopefully the show can last for a long time, and we highlight tons of different products and people from all walks of life, and that’s what I love about the web.”

Variety has confirmed exclusively that newly booked “Conludo” guest stars include Todd Stashwick, Anjali Bhimani, Grace Helbig, Mamrie Hart and John Ross Bowie. And this show will be more about Day, Wheaton and those guests than the games they play.

“With ‘TableTop,’ it was important to me that we showcase games that are in print, that are available,” Wheaton says. “After a few episodes, we realized, oh no, we have to tell distributors so they can up their buys because things are selling out so quickly. ‘Conludo’ will give us an opportunity to come at it differently because if ‘TableTop’ about what’s happening on the table, ‘Conludo’ is about what’s happening around the table while we’re playing the game together. The game is obviously important and fun and joyful, but it’s about the experience that you have when you’re hanging out. We can play games that there are 40 copies of in the world.”

Day says she’s excited to get back to her roots of making web content with “Conludo” amid the current popularity of actual-play TV series and “let’s play” content.

“I was really early on everything. I was told that people wouldn’t want to be watching people play board games,” Day says. “I was told that the web was not a place for narrative fiction. I was told that streaming D&D was a waste of money. And these are all things that I did first, so the fact that the actual-play world is so robust and so diverse and so well supported financially and just popular in the world now, it’s a wonderful time to come in and try to do something a little bit different because I just have a contrary nature. I always want to be first, or at least doing something that other people aren’t doing. I would rather stand out from the pack doing something different.”

When it comes to if and how “Conludo” could live on beyond the 10 episodes that will be produced under the Kickstarter campaign, Wheaton and Day are both interested in finding a home for it to become an ongoing series.

“It’s a question of whether we want to have our own channel and build that specifically, or we want to use somebody else’s platform to distribute,” Wheaton says. “And that’s something that we’re considering, and we’ll weigh and we’ll do the best thing for the audience because that’s always our first goal. It’s really important to both of us that it’s not difficult for someone to watch — and difficult can mean a lot of different things. It can mean reaching into their pockets for more money. It can mean downloading some app they would rather not have. Felicia has talked extensively about doing this in a nice, flat, democratic way that gets it out to absolutely everybody, which is another thing that very much puts us at odds with the standard business model in the entertainment industry.”

That said, Geek & Sundry founder Day says she has “no desire to create another company where I’m making dozens of shows.”

“I’ve highlighted a lot of other people as performers in the past, and now I’m all about just doing things for me and with my friends,” Day says. “‘Conludo’ really will be a focus in that area. I’m hoping that we figure out how to sustain this in as democratically available a way as possible, whether that’s our own YouTube channel or whether that’s another free-to-stream service, we’re going to explore a lot of that.”

On the topic of distribution partners, Day has made it a priority to first get “Conludo” delivered to the Kickstarter backers behind “The Guild” reunion movie project. Day plans for the movie itself, which will see Day and the rest of “The Guild” cast (including Wheaton) reprise their roles for the first time since the series ended in 2013, to release in 2027.

“Of course, our backers are No. 1. I want to make sure they’re happy,” Day says. “They get all their fulfilled goods. They get the movie first in exactly the format we promise them. We are talking to distributors about theatrical release, and then distributing past that, we’ll definitely explore other ways that movies are distributed.”

There are both digital and Blu-ray editions offered as part of the Kickstarter campaign, and Day says it was the Blu-ray option that “put us over the top” in funding.

“Our fans loved the Blu-ray; it was the minimum requested thing,” Day says. “I didn’t want to fulfill things in two ways, but everybody was OK paying extra shipping, so we’re going to offer that, and it will be available. I do believe that there will still be a different version of the Blu-ray out there in some form and stores, but it will not be this exclusive version that will include extra things.”

“The Guild: Ren Faire’d” Kickstarter campaign runs through Friday and is currently on track to surpass the “Veronica Mars” movie (which raised $5.7 million in 2013) to break the record for the largest crowdfunded film. But Day says they’re going to need all that funding to make the movie she envisions, as the project was recently denied a California tax credit.

“We didn’t make it past the first round,” Day says. “We definitely went through all the hoops but it is a very arcane situation. The simple thing is if we said we were going to shoot the majority of the movie in Georgia, we would get the tax credits and sell them to a big company immediately to have the money. So it is such an easy process.”

Day adds she believes the denial involved “something about the number of jobs that we would create” in comparison to other projects.

“I’ve talked to many other productions who have not gotten it, and I can’t name people, but they had A-list stars in them,” Day says. “There was an A-list showrunner, the first round they were knocked out. Having learned that only 5% of the money goes to anything under $10 million, that category is extremely competitive.”

Per the California Film Commission, 5% (or $37.5 million) of the allotted film and TV tax credit funds is earmarked for independent projects under $10 million and another 5% goes to independents above $10 million.

Day believes the credit “should be automatic for anything under $5 million or $10 million.”

“That is the way you revitalize this industry, not hoarding all the money for a couple $500 million projects where A-list stars are benefiting and A-list producers and big studios are benefiting, and then indies just don’t have a chance to stay in L.A.,” Day says. “I don’t want to move to Atlanta for two months, so I’m going to have to rewrite my script to make it work here. And if I can’t, then we’ll have to do something. But the fact that it’s so difficult and the price difference is so much is very upsetting.”

Day continued: “In addition, the California tax credit is not a credit that you get immediately, unlike other states. So essentially, you get the tax rebate — like we would get it in March of 2028, whatever money we would have gotten. Which means, as an independent creator, I would have had to take a loan out to float my production to be able to actually use the money when I need it, which means people are charging up to 20%, 30%, 40% of that money to be able to defer payment. So the mechanics of it are so unfriendly, especially to people who are independent and don’t have millions of dollars in a bank to float that it’s impossible. There’s no way that independent film will ever flourish in the home of film, and that is very sad to me.”

Hayden Panettiere was a seasoned professional by the time she auditioned for “Heroes” at the age of 16.

But unlike many actors who start working as kids, Hayden had no sense of jaded child actor quality to her. Although confident in her abilities, she was still guileless, sweet and always open to suggestions. It was a fait accompli that she would embody the role of Claire Bennet, aka the Cheerleader, from the moment we met her.

Hayden was a true team player, which was important for a show with a large ensemble cast. She was levelheaded beyond her years as a person and singularly talented as an actor, with an almost savant-like quality about her work. It wasn’t just that Hayden could learn lines with ease — it was her rare ability to find and explore the nuances of drama and humor and pathos in any scene she was in.

Looking back, her performance in “Heroes” was amazing. She was playing her actual age, which made for kind of a meta quality to the role because she had to understand her own teenage emotions in order to access them.

Most 16-year-olds don’t know how to interpret or articulate these emotions, let alone embody them. But she had a deep understanding of human nature that belied her age. As a result, she could find moments within a scene that always made it deeper, or funnier, or more powerful than it was on the page. As a writer, you yearn for a relationship with an actor who elevates everything that you write and finds hidden nuances that you didn’t realize were there. That happened very, very often with her.

RELATED STORY: Hayden Panettiere, Star of ‘Heroes’ and ‘Nashville,’ Dies at 36

I remember vividly that if a scene called for Hayden to cry, we would all marvel at how she could cry with intensity for 12 takes in a row. When the director yelled “Cut,” she’d go back to texting her friends or laughing with her castmates right up until the moment the director called “Action” for the next take. Then out would come the waterworks again.

She was a delight to work with, professional, joyful and willing to go out on a limb and experiment with a scene. She had this bull-in-a-china-shop quality — a determination that really influenced how we wrote her character. The best characters always meet you halfway between the actor and what’s on the page. And in “Heroes,” where Claire Bennet ended and Hayden started became a blurred line. She never had to change how she would say something to be Claire Bennet. It was the Hayden voice cadence that we got used to writing for.

“Heroes” was a success from the start, and there was no question that Hayden was a breakout star. Yet she always understood the ensemble nature of the show and had a genuine sense of gratefulness for everyone involved. I think she just liked being a part of the ensemble. She enjoyed her sudden success but never seemed enamored with it. She wanted to represent the show itself. And the cast members were very protective of her too. We all understood that she was a unique talent, and we felt the responsibility to caretake that talent for the short time we had with her on the show.

Hayden and I didn’t have too much contact after “Heroes” ended in 2010. A few years later, however, when I inquired with her agent about her availability for another project, Hayden called immediately and teasingly admonished me. “You don’t have to call my agent. Don’t be Hollywood about it. Just pick up the phone and call me,” she insisted.

As a showrunner, I have come to appreciate how rare it is to cross paths with a talent like Hayden’s. But more importantly, I will remember her as a kind and gentle person who was always a joy and an inspiration to work with.

Writer-producer Tim Kring created and served as showrunner and executive producer of NBC drama “Heroes” from 2006 to 2010.

(Pictured: Hayden Panettiere in Season 3 of NBC drama “Heroes” in 2009)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Sean Baker and his partner, producer Samantha Quan, as the co-chairs of the new Marquee Theater Committee, which reviews submissions and recommends venues to be included on the Academy Marquee Theater List. 

Additional chairs and vice chairs for the 2026-27 committees and affinity groups were also named, each serving a one-year term. The Academy’s committees and affinity groups are aimed to advance key initiatives and inform Academy policy while serving the interests of its memberships. 

“As a member-led organization, we are deeply grateful to all our chairs and vice chairs for their leadership and engagement across the Academy’s work,” said Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor and Academy CEO Bill Kramer. “Their dedication helps advance our mission while ensuring that the Academy is well-positioned for the future.” 

Baker won four Academy Awards in 2025 for his film “Anora.” Clockwork recently bought the distribution rights to Baker’s next project, “Ti Amo!,” which he previously told Variety was ”my love letter to the Italian sex comedies of the ’60s and ’70s.”

See the full list of Academy committees and affinity groups, along with an explanation of their purpose, and who is leading them below.

The International Feature Film Executive Committee oversees the awards rules, submission requirements and eligibility of the Oscars International Feature Film category. 

Michèle Ohayon (Documentary Branch), co-chair, International Feature Film Executive Committee
James Wilson (Producers Branch), co-chair, International Feature Film Executive Committee

The Short Films Qualifying Festivals Selection Committee determines festival eligibility criteria and reviews global applications to select which festivals and awards should be deemed Oscar-qualifying in the animated, documentary and live action short film categories. 

Summer Joy Main-Muñoz (Short Films Branch), chair, Short Films Qualifying Festivals Selection Committee

The Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee reviews submissions and makes recommendations for individuals and companies to receive Scientific and Technical Awards.

Darin Grant (Visual Effects Branch), co-chair, Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee
Rachel Rose (Visual Effects Branch), co-chair, Scientific and Technical Awards Executive Committee

MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEES

Branch and Category Executive Committees oversee branch-and category-related business, including awards rules, eligibility and the review of candidates considered for Academy membership.

Branch and Category Executive Committee chairs (alphabetically by branch and category):

Rita Wilson (chair, Actors Branch Executive Committee)
Marlon West (chair, Animation Branch Executive Committee)
Kim Taylor-Coleman (chair, Casting Directors Branch Executive Committee)
Paul Cameron (chair, Cinematographers Branch Executive Committee)
Daniel Orlandi (chair, Costume Designers Branch Executive Committee)
Patricia Cardoso (chair, Directors Branch Executive Committee)
Jean Tsien (chair, Documentary Branch Executive Committee)
Pam Abdy (chair, Executives Branch Executive Committee)
Terilyn A. Shropshire (chair, Film Editors Branch Executive Committee)
Gerald Quist (chair, Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch Executive Committee)
Laura C. Kim (chair, Marketing and Public Relations Branch Executive Committee)
Lesley Barber (chair, Music Branch Executive Committee)
Effie T. Brown (chair, Producers Branch Executive Committee)
Annie Chang (chair, Production and Technology Branch Executive Committee)
Kalina Ivanov (chair, Production Design Branch Executive Committee)
Chris Tashima (chair, Short Films Branch Executive Committee)
Andy Nelson (chair, Sound Branch Executive Committee)
Brooke Breton (chair, Visual Effects Branch Executive Committee)
Howard A. Rodman (chair, Writers Branch Executive Committee)
Keya Khayatian (chair, Artist Representatives Category Executive Committee)

The International Engagement Committee helps guide global Academy membership initiatives, promoting connectivity among members worldwide.

Peter Devlin (Sound Branch), chair, International Engagement Committee
Khadija Alami (Producers Branch), vice chair, International Engagement Committee

The London Committee provides advice and guidance on UK member screenings and special events.

Maggie Todd (Marketing and Public Relations Branch), chair, London Committee
May Leung (Visual Effects Branch), vice chair, London Committee

The New York Committee provides advice and guidance on New York member screenings and special events. 

Mia Neal (Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch), chair, New York Committee
Dana O’Keefe (Executives Branch), vice chair, New York Committee

MEMBERSHIP AFFINITY GROUPS

Academy Affinity Groups bring together members from shared backgrounds and affinities, with a focus on underrepresented and marginalized communities. They offer guidance on membership, awards and programming while fostering community and promoting networking and educational opportunities.

Academy Affinity Group chairs and vice chairs (alphabetically by affinity group):

Stephanie Lowry (Music Branch), chair, Asian Affinity Group
Guneet Monga (Producers Branch), vice chair, Asian Affinity Group
Taura Stinson (Music Branch), chair, Black Caucus
Renard T. Jenkins (Production and Technology Branch), vice chair, Black Caucus
Àlex Lora (Short Films Branch), chair, Disability & Accessibility
Chelsea Winstanley (Producers Branch), chair, Indigenous Alliance
Howard Berger (Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch), co-chair, Jewish Heritage Affinity Group
Steven Raphael (Marketing and Public Relations Branch), co-chair, Jewish Heritage Affinity Group
Carlos López Estrada (Directors Branch), chair, La Agenda
Carla Gutiérrez (Documentary Branch), vice chair, La Agenda
Andrew Ahn (Directors Branch), co-chair, LGBTQ+ Coalition
Kimberly Reed (Documentary Branch), co-chair, LGBTQ+ Coalition
Haifaa al-Mansour (Directors Branch), chair, MENA & WANA Alliance
Edie Ichioka (Film Editors Branch), chair, Women’s Affinity Group
Gennie Rim (Animation Branch), vice chair, Women’s Affinity Group

ACADEMY FOUNDATION COMMITTEES

The Academy Museum Inclusion Advisory Committee helps to ensure the Academy Museum experience is inclusive for all visitors by bringing diverse perspectives to programmatic discussions. 

Bird Runningwater (Production and Technology Branch), chair, Academy Museum Inclusion Advisory Committee

The Student Academy Awards Executive Committee guides the direction of the Academy’s international college student filmmaking competition, including approving rules and setting standards for judging the films.

Brooke Breton (Visual Effects Branch), chair, Student Academy Awards Executive Committee

The Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Executive Committee reads finalist screenplays for the Academy’s international program that supports emerging screenwriters and selects the recipients of the annual fellowships.

Kim Taylor-Coleman (Casting Directors Branch), chair, Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Executive Committee

The Science and Technology Council helps to guide Academy initiatives connected to scientific and technological standards and developments in filmmaking.

Annie Chang (Production and Technology Branch), chair, Science and Technology Council
Nick Cannon (Production and Technology Branch), vice chair, Science and Technology Council