Category: Entertainment

Sylvester Stallone is opening up about how decades of daredevilry have affected him—and why he considers himself an “idiot” for continuing to do his own stunts year after year.

In a recent interview with Fox News Digital, the “Rocky” actor said he has “millions, millions of regrets” about his action career. “I could literally spend a half hour talking about injuries, the amount, not even like one, I’m talking about 30 hours, 30 minutes of just individual ones, because it becomes compounded. I have been injured many, many times, but after ‘Expendables,’ I ended up with nine back operations, three neck fusions. Both shoulders ripped out, eye, you know, all kinds of lens put … it’s been brutal,” he said, adding that he’s never been “quite the same” since the surgeries.

Stallone starred in — and also directed — the action thriller “The Expendables” in 2010 alongside Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke and more. While filming a scene where Stallone got tackled by WWE legend Steve Austin, the stunt went wrong and left Stallone with dislocated shoulders and a fractured neck that required more than seven back surgeries. The “Rambo” actor needed a metal plate inserted into his neck and spinal fusions.

Stallone’s moral of the story is to “let other people do their job.” “Don’t be a stage hawk, or whatever you call it, a showboat. I know a lot of people are thinking about doing stunts … don’t. Don’t. Let the pro do it,” Stallone said. “You cannot beat gravity; when you hit the ground, you lose, and it’s going to come back.”

He continued, “I mean, just ask every football player in the world. So yeah, and people go, ‘Aren’t you proud of them?’ No. I think I’m an idiot for doing that. I’m proud that I broke myself in pieces. Like, duh, no.”

The actor shared a similar piece of advice ahead of the release of his memoir, “The Steps,” last month; Stallone told The New York Times that treating his body in the “masochistic” ways he did came “at a terrible price.” “If I could do it over again, I would say, ‘Let someone else carry the banner and don’t do your own stunts.”

A high-speed traffic accident leaves a college student in a wheelchair for life, but that’s merely the starting point of the narrative in “To Be Ordinary,” a sensitive, slowly enveloping film with scant interest in disability-drama cliché — instead offering an expansive portrait of how the young man’s entire family is affected by his accident over the course of more than a decade. Spanning marital strife, economic upheaval, coming-of-age pains and moral crisis, Taiwanese writer-director Lee Yun Chan‘s fourth feature — her first since 2010’s “Dancing Without You” — has a lot of story to wrangle, but does so with a mostly delicate, empathetic touch, with a script that treats all individuals in this unhappy scenario with equal care and interest.

Since her last film, Lee has done mostly small-screen work — directing, among other things, the 2022 Disney+ series “Women in Taipei” — and if a certain televisual strain of melodrama occasional creeps into “To Be Ordinary,” the film’s sturdy formal restraint and expansive story scope should still serve it well in cinemas. Following its premiere as the only Taiwanese production in Busan’s main competition, the film will play at the Tokyo Film Festival later this month, opening theatrically in Taiwan in mid-November. Further festival play is likely, particularly in Asian-focused programs, and the film is accessible and moving enough for limited global distribution, though specialist streaming platforms may be its best bet.

Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with “Women in Taipei” scribe Ginger Wang, wastes little time setting the story into motion, opening on a lovely, gliding nighttime tracking shot of 22-year-old Yu-jie (Junior Hsieh) on his moped, cruising the rain-slicked roads of suburban Taipei, as the grandiose strings of Cicada’s score conjure a false feeling of serenity. DP Ming Lee’s camera will certainly never be this free again; the reverie stops short when, at an intersection, Yu-jie is struck by a car, driven by the wealthy, elderly Mr Ma (Hsiu Shen Liang), who’s immediately beset with irremediable guilt.

Yu-jie survives the accident but soon learns, in hospital, that he’ll never walk again; a college student who has already started his own web design business, he accepts the bad news with remarkable stoicism, quickly adapting to life in a wheelchair and seeking ways to live the most normal, productive life possible — which includes a budding relationship with young hospital physiotherapist Yi-Han (Phoebe Chu).

If anything, the rest of his family has a harder time adjusting. His mother (Chang Shih Ying) and father (Weber Yang) were already at a fraught point in their marriage, and their son’s plight only drives them further apart, the situation exacerbated by Dad’s longtime unemployment. Meanwhile, Yu-jie’s younger sister Yu-ching (Pin Hsuan Chen), already facing the hormonal turmoil of early adolescence, feels sidelined by the tragedy — pressured to look after herself while, as her mother puts it, “there’s enough going on at home” — and begins to lash out.

At a pragmatic level, the family is aided by Mr Ma’s crushing conscience: In addition to the required legal settlement, he transfers ownership of his entire house to Yu-jie, and continues to contribute generously toward his medical bills and living expenses. But such generosity can itself become a burden of sorts to the benefactor, particularly as Mr Ma retreats into old age and ill health; avoiding drawing its characters along victims-and-villains lines, “To Be Ordinary” reserves compassion for all in this wretched turn of events, which gives it welcome dramatic complexity and maturity, particularly as the story spans 11 years of evolving consequences.

Thoughtful, closely-knit ensemble playing keeps the family dynamic believable even when the script takes a few convenient short cuts: Chen is especially affecting and volatile as a young woman growing up both as a kind of afterthought, and as a support system to her flailing parents. Lee directs proceedings with a handsome sobriety that befits the material, though between the persistently overcast visuals and the solemnly emotive writing, “To Be Ordinary” could stand an occasional injection of tonal surprise — an acknowledgement of the absurdity, hilarity or small domestic joys that sometimes disrupt hard times. Still, the film is never glib or unconsidered. There’s unassuming beauty in its even-handed, fair-minded worldview, and the space it gives its characters to reckon with sorrow, and find their own way out of it.

As “The Lowdown” Season 2 opens, citizen journalist (or “truthstorian”) Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is in a completely uncomfortable position: success. He’s about accept a local media award for a piece he wrote about the death of Dale Washberg (as detailed in Season 1 of the series), but isn’t happy about it.

Rather than accept his acclaim, a boozy Lee gets on stage and immediately tears into the crowd for being sellouts. It doesn’t go well. Series creator Sterlin Harjo admits to Variety that Lee’s inability to deal with a bit of acclaim comes directly from his own experience after the launch of his previous FX series, “Reservation Dogs.”

“I was living in a studio loft in downtown Tulsa, and all of a sudden I had a TV show,” he says. “I had been a kind of quiet independent filmmaker hoping to get some attention from anyone in this industry with my films. But then, ‘Reservation Dogs’ Season 1 truly changed my whole life. And I didn’t handle it well at first. You don’t know what to do. All of a sudden, there’s articles, and there’s all this stuff and you’re very exposed. It was fun thinking of that as Lee Raybon, because how does he handle the little recognition that he got? I bet he handles it really wrong, and I bet that there is a knee-jerk reaction to reject it.”

The theme of Season 2, Harjo says, is to figure out how to love yourself — and how that love will extend to everyone else in your life. After that initial shock of his “Reservation Dogs” success, Harjo is getting there. It helps that he has another critically acclaimed series on his hands.

Conceivably, “The Lowdown” could go on forever, given that there’s no shortage of story fodder about the amount of profligacy that exists in the world. After Season 1, “I wasn’t finished telling the story,” he says. “There was more of the corruption that I could tell.”

As Season 2 premieres on Oct. 14 on FX, Lee is soon recruited by public defender Ginger (Betty Gilpin) to investigate a new mystery: the disappearance of her client inside the Oklahoma prison system.

This time out, Harjo says he was inspired by the 1972 Lee Marvin/Gene Hackman film “Prime Cut,” 1981’s “Cutter’s Way” and the 1949 noir “The Third Man” to come up with the underlying concept.

“This idea of a missing man, I was like, how do we amp this up a little bit?” he says. “Well, it’s really hard to go missing in prison. There’s a sign-in sheet. How do you go missing from prison? That was such an intriguing question.”

Harjo says he, fellow exec producer Duffy Boudreau and Hawke began brainstorming the idea while doing their press tour for Season 1 of “The Lowdown.”

“That’s when we came up with kind of the bones of the plot,” he says. “Through lots of influences, and also just Oklahoma.”

Harjo says they also got to know Hawke’s cousin, a public defender in Ft. Worth, who shared stories about her experiences. “And I grew up in a town with a prison, and I saw how that affects a town,” he adds. “You really saw this shift in the town, and not a positive one. Because you have drugs, you have trafficking, you have drug trafficking of guards and prisoners.”

For inspiration, Harjo also remembers visiting his uncle as a kid in a McAlester, Oklahoma, prison, where he was doing time for repeat alcohol offenses. “The Lowdown” wound up shooting in that very same institution this season.

But that’s just one half of Season 2. The show’s other bombshell comes at the end of the opening episode: Tommy Lee Jones shows up as Lee’s estranged father.

“We talked a lot about being a father in Season 1. What’s it like being a son? And how do you forgive your father or a parent?” Harjo says. But just as Lee Sr. neglected his son growing up, Lee Jr. continues to mess things up with his own daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).

“He’s trying to not make bad decisions [like his father],” Harjo says. “And at the same time, he’s neglecting his daughter, which is a bad decision. And then, his father, who was a bad father, is connecting with his granddaughter.”

“The more complicated you can make all that stuff, the better, because you’ve got to fight your way out of it as a writer,” Harjo says. “It was a very painful writing experience, more painful than anything, because I had written myself into so many corners. There was stuff that I was writing, there was episodes being written deep into production. I hope I never have to do that again!”

After writing the first episode of Season 2, Harjo immediately thought of Jones for the part as Lee’s father. Both he and Jones are both represented by CAA — and once Jones read it, the actor wanted in. Jones had already watched Season 1 — and told Harjo that he specifically loved the bookstore security guards Waylon (Cody Lightning) and Cousin Henry (Jude Barnett), who provide some comic relief.

“He wanted to be with them, which that told me everything I needed to know,” Harjo says. “If you love the security guards, you love me and the show and the vibe. Because those characters wouldn’t necessarily be on a lot of shows. You would cut that. After the premiere the other day, [Jones] says, ‘Thanks for paying attention to the character Waylon, because most people wouldn’t. It’s characters and storylines like that I think make the show what it is.’”

Harjo also excitedly notes that Jones started watching “Reservation Dogs” while shooting “The Lowdown.”

“There was something amazing about every day coming to work and having Tommy Lee Jones describe an episode of the show that I created,” he says. “He’d be talking to Ethan or me about it, and it was nice that he appreciated it so much. ‘Reservation Dogs’ is the type of show that you might think someone like Tommy Lee Jones could miss and not get it, but he’s a sophisticated, really smart artist and he loved it. It was amazing every day.”

As for the character of Ginger, she’s clearly a love interest for Lee — a tough character who can go toe-to-toe with him, but has a humor to her as well. Once Gilpin came on board, Harjo says she helped redefine who Ginger could be.

“Lee can be a bit wild, and I needed someone to match that energy,” Harjo says. “Betty can do anything, and I already knew that she was great. And then she came, and it was like another level. All of a sudden she’s doing things in the first scene that I’m filming with her, and there’s things happening that I did not write. From that day forward, I’m trying to write toward her voice and what she’s bringing to that character.”

Harjo says he aimed to make Season 2 “go harder and faster with everything that we have established. It’s kind of like ‘Reservation Dog’ Season 2 as well. I’ve established the world. I feel like people that like the show will come with me. I have a meter of what feels real and what doesn’t, so I always sort of adhere to that. Let’s make ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ where it’s great and it stands on its own, but you also want more by the end. Gods of TV willing, we’ll be making a Season 3 of this show.”

The first two episodes of “The Lowdown” Season 2 premiere on FX and Hulu on Oct. 14 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays

Academy CEO Bill Kramer is set to make his first trip to Asia later this month. He will collect a leadership award at the Tokyo International Film Festival and also sit down with Toho president and CEO Matsuoka Hiro for a public conversation.

The festival’s 39th edition runs Oct. 26–Nov. 4 and has built a program titled Academy in Tokyo around the visit. Two colleagues will join Kramer in the Japanese capital: Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor and Meredith Shea, the organization’s chief membership, impact and industry officer.

The three executives will share a stage on Oct. 28 at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya Hall for a 90-minute panel moderated by TIFF festival director Hisamatsu Takeo. They will take the audience behind the curtain of the Oscars and outline the Academy’s international initiatives and membership programs. The conversation will also turn to how the organization views international cinema today and where it is heading.

Once the panel wraps, Kramer will receive TIFF’s Global Cinema Leadership Special Award. The festival said the honor recognizes his contribution to the growth of the worldwide film business and to film culture. Later that day, the Academy will hold a private reception for its members from across the globe.

Kramer returns to the same venue on Oct. 29 to sit down with Matsuoka. Their session will look at the state of the global film landscape and the outlook for theatrical and streaming distribution, along with ways to deepen cross-border partnerships. Both public events are free, though advance reservations are required. Booking details have yet to be released.

Kramer took the Academy’s top job in 2022. Before that, he ran the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as its director and president. The museum opened its doors in September 2021. As CEO, Kramer has pushed to broaden the Academy’s 11,000-strong membership and give it a more international makeup. He runs the organization’s global operations, from the Oscars and the Academy Foundation to the $500 million Academy100 campaign.

Howell Taylor is in her second term as president. She is an Oscar-nominated producer whose credits include “A Star Is Born,” “The Accountant,” “Captain Fantastic” and “Blue Valentine.” She joined the Academy’s Producers Branch in 2014. She also co-produced the 92nd Oscars telecast in 2020, which earned her an Emmy nomination.

Shea is the first person to hold her post. Her remit covers membership, awards administration and talent development. It also includes the Academy’s outreach to film festivals and international territories.

Matsuoka has steered Toho’s expansion overseas, including its acquisitions of Gkids and Anime Limited. He also oversaw the production of Oscar winner “Godzilla Minus One.” In 2025, Toho posted its best-ever results at the Japanese box office. Matsuoka also sits on the board of trustees of the Academy Museum.

TIFFCOM, the content market that runs alongside the festival, takes place Oct. 28–30.

Strength in numbers? Movie theater operators are hoping the adage proves true as four new movies aim to bolster the October box office.

Paramount’s video game adaptation “Street Fighter” will lead over fellow newcomers, with opening weekend estimates of $25 million to $35 million from 3,500 North American theaters. Disney’s survival thriller “Whalefall” should secure second place with $10 million to $12 million from 3,065 venues. Meanwhile A24’s much-hyped Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is aiming for a strong $7 million to $8 million from just 800 locations, and the Focus Features remake of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” is targeting $5 million to $8 million from 2,436 screens.

Although “Street Fighter” is projected to claim the No. 1 spot, the PG-13 action-adventure carries the biggest budget among the quartet and will need to stick around in theaters to justify its price tag. Legendary and video game developer Capcom co-financed the film for $82 million, with Paramount only on the hook for distribution. The long-gestating “Street Fighter” was originally set at Sony as part of Legendary’s pact with the studio and moved to Paramount once the initial deal expired. Overseas, “Street Fighter” is projected to earn roughly $35 million from 65 markets.

“Street Fighter” is the third movie based on the Capcom video game series. The first live-action film, released in 1994 and starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, was box office hit with $100 million, not adjusted for inflation. The second, 2009’s “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li,” was a major misfire for 20th Century, earning just $12.8 million against a $50 million budget. This reboot, directed by Kitao Sakurai and starring Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji, takes place in 1993 as two estranged fighters are recruited to enter a tournament that forces them to face off against each other.

“Whalefall” cost $60 million and also requires substantial staying power, since theater owners keep about half of ticket sales. Directed by Brian Duffield, “Whalefall” follows a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) who is swallowed by a sperm whale and has only one hour of oxygen left in his tank as he figures out how to escape. Reviews have been mostly positive, with one critic calling the film “amusing genre pulp.”

“You Can See Everything” cost around $7 million to produce, and exhibitors believe the movie could become the rare breakout documentary. Earlier this year, Amazon MGM’s “Melania,” a $40-million-budgeted glimpse at first lady Melania Trump, landed the biggest opening for a non-music or concert doc in over a decade with $7.1 million from 1,778 theaters. Most non-fiction films, however, would be lucky these days to earn that much by the end of their box office runs.

Hype for “You Can See Everything” has been high since A24 unveiled the top-secret project at Telluride Film Festival in early September. Comedian Nathan Fielder and “Primetime” filmmaker Lance Oppenheim quietly worked for more than three years on the movie, which offers an unhinged look at the Theranos founder a month before she began an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. The doc will benefit from stellar reviews and positive word-of-mouth; it holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman describing the unconventional story as a “one-of-a-kind [ …] circus.”

“Sense and Sensibility,” which carries a $25 million budget, hopes to serve as counterprogramming against the male-skewing “Street Fighter” and “Whalefall.” Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles star in the latest adaptation of the Jane Austen classic as sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who navigate love, loss and financial uncertainty as they are forced to leave their family estate in Sussex.

“Sense and Sensibility” has been reworked for the screen a number of times, most notably with director Ang Lee’s 1995 film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. That film was a critical and commercial smash, earning seven Oscar nominations and generating $135 million at the box office, not adjusted for inflation. Focus Features over the years has backed two prior remakes of Austen’s work, including the 2005 version of “Pride and Prejudice” with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen as well as 2020’s “Emma,” which starred Anya-Taylor Joy. The well-reviewed “Emma” was released digitally while theaters were closed due to the pandemic.

So far, the October box office has been uneven. Tom Cruise’s dark comedy “Digger” and Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook drama “The Social Reckoning” flopped, while Colleen Hoover adaptation “Verity” and “Other Mommy” with Jessica Chastain are shaping up to be modest wins. Luckily, it won’t take much to improve upon last October, which hit a three-decade low amid a pileup of disasters including Dwayne Johnson’s MMA drama “The Smashing Machine” and Disney’s sci-fi sequel “Tron: Ares.”

After 17 years of leadership, Bob Daly will step down as chair of the American Film Institute Board of Directors at the next trustee meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 21, Variety can reveal exclusively.

Daly, former Warner Bros. chair and co-CEO, joined the AFI Board in April 1981 and was named chair on Oct. 8, 2009, succeeding co-chairs Jon Avnet and John Cooke.

“In a career that brought me from running CBS to Warner Bros. to the Los Angeles Dodgers, I can honestly say that serving as Chairman of the AFI Board of Directors has been one of the greatest honors of my life,” said Daly. “This is a board that represents all aspects of the film and television communities, and to see they come together with a shared passion for the art form has been a wonder to behold. Long live the AFI!”

Daly’s expansive history in Hollywood touched some of the most powerful institutions in the entertainment business, including CBS Entertainment, Warner Music Group, the Los Angeles Dodgers and, of course, Warner Bros. He began his career at CBS as a gofer in 1955. He spent 25 years at the network and eventually served as its president, overseeing all television operations. After his time at CBS, Daly joined Warner Bros. as chairman and co-CEO in 1980. During his 19 years at the studio, he and his co-CEO, Terry Semel, were credited with 16 consecutive years of record earnings. They also supervised the release of 13 Best Picture Oscar nominees, and snagged three wins with “Chariots of Fire,” “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Unforgiven.”

Following his time at WB, Daly joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as chair and CEO for four years before selling the team in 2004. Daly also served as chair of the charity Save the Children.

“Leadership is an art in itself — and in that regard, Mr. Daly is a master,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI president & CEO. “Over the past forty years, no single person has had a greater impact on AFI’s work in preservation, celebration and education than Bob Daly — and we have promised to march forward each day with a promise to prove him proud.”

The AFI, founded in 1967, is a nonprofit organization created to preserve the heritage of the motion picture, to honor the artists and their work and to educate the next generation of storytellers. Former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy serves as chair of the AFI Board of Trustees, which includes Pam Abdy, Sean Astin, Alan Bergman, Halle Berry, Jim Breyer, James L. Brooks, Ava DuVernay, Jamie Erlicht, Mike Hopkins, Alan Horn, Patty Jenkins, Michael B. Jordan, Donna Langley, Eva Longoria, Bryan Lourd, Christopher Nolan, Edward James Olmos, Shonda Rhimes, Charles Rivkin, Jay Roach, Ted Sarandos, Chris Silbermann, Octavia Spencer, Steven Spielberg, Todd Wagner and Edward Zwick.