Category: Entertainment

Seth Rogen has starred in films that mirror his life, but none have hit as close to home as Babies. 

Directed and written by Lauren Miller Rogen, the comedy drama follows a husband (Seth) and wife (Anna Kendrick) who are questioning whether parenthood is the right path for them. For married couple Seth and Lauren, the film was a deeply personal project that reflected their own journey toward a child-free life.  

“ I think this movie is much more personal and much more reflective of my actual experiences,” Seth said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose, on Saturday. “I think Lauren has really made a very honest film in regards to her thought process and our thought process as a couple. When I look at it, it’s shocking how personal it is, honestly, and about very personal things in our lives. But, to me, it’s very brave to put yourself out there like that and to write about the things that are kind of the most personal things.” 

Lauren was first inspired to make the film when her friend, a divorced mother of one, moved in with the couple for one year about a decade ago. The director initially thought the experience would make for a great television series (“That’s an interesting setup for a TV show. People who don’t know if they want to have kids, has someone move in with a kid”) but the idea didn’t go anywhere, in part because Lauren wasn’t sure how her own story was going to end. 

“I didn’t know the ending at that point,” Lauren told THR. “I think once we had the kajillion conversations and done all the work and sort of found our own conclusion, then I was like, ‘Oh, now it’s a movie because I know the ending of it.’ I really started working on it as a movie not that long ago. I wrote the script pretty fast in January of 2025; it was done in the spring and we were shooting the next fall.” 

In Babies, happily married couple Annie and Aaron (named after Lauren and Seth’s middle names) welcome their friend (Kate Berlant) and her young daughter to stay with them after she separates from her husband. The couple get a chance to see the realities of parenthood up close, while Annie navigates her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease (Lauren’s own mother died from complications of early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2020). 

Anna Kendrick, who stars as Annie, joked that being that open about her own life on screen would cause her to have a “dissociative experience.” 

“I don’t know how [Lauren] did it because some of it felt so close to reality and so intense. I was like, ‘I think I’d be setting myself on fire on set,’” Kendrick said with a laugh.

For Seth, Babies also reflects people’s attitudes about parenthood — including the usage of the phrase “dad duty,” which he finds “obnoxious” — and his friend’s experiences being a parent. 

“A lot of these are conversations we’ve had with our friends in real life,” Seth shared. “We hang out with our friends and their kids a lot. An interesting perspective the film has, is that, you can like kids and be good with kids, and be very responsible people, and be in a very happy marriage, and tick every box that one would think you need to tick in order to be the perfect parent in many ways, and you could still just maybe not really want it. That’s a very under-shared perspective in a lot of ways.”  

Babies explores the decision to remain child-free, but Lauren wants audiences to know the movie was also made for “people who are choosing parenthood.” 

“We’ve been around our friends who have had beautiful families. We have amazing relationships with their kids,” Lauren concluded. “I think that it was about not just making [Babies] feel real and grounded to us, but also sort of honoring [what] we’ve witnessed so many times, and how beautiful that relationship is.”

Babies premiered at TIFF on Saturday and is scheduled to hit theaters in 2027. 

As the legal battle over the $110 billion Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger drags on, a coalition of state attorneys general is fighting to block the sale on antitrust grounds — and the buyer is threatening to leave California if the lawsuit succeeds. A leaked report now puts a number on the fallout: As many as 58,000 lost jobs and up to $21 billion a year in losses for California.

The report — from the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics, commissioned by Paramount itself — was leaked Saturday by Politico and lays out grim numbers for the motion picture industry. Leadership at Paramount-Skydance is negotiating with the gaggle of AGs, led by California’s Rob Bonta, and racing against an Oct. 1 deadline: If the merger hasn’t closed by then, the deal’s “ticking fee” kicks in, paying Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders $7 million a day. Paramount’s threat to relocate the studio to Georgia, Tennessee or Texas has been one of its central negotiating tactics — and has drawn uproar across the industry.

The new report quantifies just how much California stands to lose. It finds the state “would experience the permanent loss of approximately 28,990 to 57,980 full-time job-years statewide across all industries, and losses of between $10.6 billion and $21.2 billion annually in economic output.”

But Paramount’s post-merger commitment to produce 30 features a year for three years would generate an estimated 1,020 to 2,760 job-years in California, and between $377.7 million and $1.01 billion in economic output between Oct. 1 and Sept. 30, 2031. The totals reflects between 340 and 920 job-years and between $125.9 million and $337.2 million in statewide output every year for three years. 

The estimated job losses include direct, indirect and induced jobs — accounting for ripple effects through Paramount’s California supply chains and the broader economic activity tied to household spending. In other words, the total reflects job losses across all industries, not just film and TV.

An added blow would come from converting Warner Bros.’ soundstages to commercial or residential property, which the report says would “permanently strip” California of infrastructure built over a century — infrastructure that supports the vendors, crews and post-production facilities built up around it.

California remains the world’s fourth-largest global economy, with a nominal gross domestic product of about $4.1 trillion to $4.4 trillion. If Paramount were to exit, the report states, the best-case scenario would see the company slow-walk its departure as it reduces its spending in California. But the worst-case scenario would involve Paramount “substantially or entirely” relocating to another state, which would tank the state’s economy in terms of tax revenues. 

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin has set a Sept. 24 hearing to consider Paramount’s $1.88 billion bond request of the 12 states and the Writers Guild of America, which is also suing to block the merger. The studio made the bond requests as security to cover losses it would incur if the deal is not completed until after the trial.

If the parties do not settle ongoing negotiations, both are moving toward a March 2027 trial date.

Mahershala Ali and filmmaker Bassam Tariq were all set to make Blade, a Marvel film centered on the titular anti-hero, when the project spectacularly fell apart before being removed from Disney’s line-up in 2024. 

The project, which Ali officially walked away from in July, left him prepared and ready to perform action on-screen. Luckily, the connection he formed with Tariq laid the groundwork for their new film, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, which allowed Ali to show the physicality he has been perfecting for years. 

“I think [the movie] spoke to me so deeply,” Ali said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “It offered up an opportunity to engage and commit to the type of difficult I want to commit to because this work is gonna be hard regardless — whether you’re in a good film or a bad film. [The film] was something that was very exciting to me. It asked all of us to go very deep emotionally, but it also checked sort of an action, movement, physicality box for me that I had been really yearning to really invest energy in.” 

In Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim and contract killer who travels across Houston in an effort to protect his three children following the death of his wife. He is confronted with a series of dangerous obstacles, including John Cho’s Haun Yoon, an Army veteran and militant church leader who is determined to destroy what he deems are great evils. 

The action film was partly inspired by Tariq’s experience as a new father and “ not feeling like you’re enough as a provider,” the director told THR. Ali said that he was struck by Tariq’s vision when he first read the script. 

“Sometimes, you read things and energy starts going off,” Ali said. “It just resonates in a way where you feel called to it — almost as if you don’t even have a choice.  You just know that when you read certain things. If anything, it was just more of me having questions about how Bassam was gonna stitch very different worlds together. … You just had to dive in and trust. He is an amazing filmmaker and he was able to, in my humble opinion, stitch that world together in such a fascinating way.”

Ali is also set to star in the season two of HBO’s action-packed series Task, which began filming in July. The Oscar winner said that Emmy-nominated show allowed him to expand on the action techniques he wanted to perform on screen. 

“ I’ll just say that there is some physical work in that as well,” Ali teased. “It’s challenging in a very different way, but I’m getting through it.”

Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother premiered Sept. 12 at TIFF before being released by Amazon MGM.

Zack Snyder sat in the back of a cramped, beat-up van, drenched in sweat. Perspiration waterfalled down his face. His back was soaked. He was on the verge of passing out.

It could have been the triple-digit jungle heat. He was in the southern reaches of Colombia after all. It could have been from the triple-digit degree fever that he didn’t know he had. (He would later find out he contracted COVID.)  But he had a camera on his shoulder and what he did know was that he could not afford to stop shooting the scenes he needed to get that day. He was in the middle of finally making his passion project, The Last Photograph, and he was both director and cameraman. The movie was figuratively and literally on his shoulders.

When he returned to Leticia, Colombia’s southernmost city that sits on the Amazon River, a woman offered a trembling Snyder cough drops. “Halls is the answer?!” he thought to himself. “OK, fine. Fuck it.”

When I ask him if he tried wearing a mask, Snyder scoffs, “There are no masks in the Amazon. They don’t… there’s no masks. That’s hilarious.”

It’s now just under a year later. Snyder is sitting in his sleek, modern, aerie office high in the hills of Pasadena, prepping to go to the Toronto International Film Festival where Last Photograph will premiere Sunday. The score from Escape from New York is playing on a record player, adding mood to a day that surprisingly becomes rainy.

It’s been a 20-year journey to make the movie and in that time, Snyder went from a commercials and video director to a big Hollywood studio director, to then directing some of the biggest-budgeted, most heavily scrutinized movies of the century, Warner Bros.’s DC movies of the 2010s. His journey still not done, he endured a personal tragedy and the loss of control of DC mega-movie Justice League, followed by the storied affair of the #SnyderCut, and then a return via a pair, or maybe a trio, depending on how you want to count, of Netflix movies, Army of the Dead and the two-part Rebel Moon.

But Last Photograph saw Snyder working in a way he has never been before: As an independent filmmaker. There is no studio or streamer backing him. The scale is small, the budget smaller than some of the commercials he worked on earlier in his career.

“There’s no agenda to the movie. When you make a big studio movie, there’s a lot of things to consider about the product that you’re creating. Because it really is like a product much more than a thing that’s really a tone poem, you know what I mean?” he says.

He continues, “Like, the stakes are lower, right? You’re not trying to sell the audience something. You’re just giving them an experience and that experience doesn’t necessarily have to end with a sequel. I’m not trying to get them to go to another movie or buy a toy. The why of the movie is completely different.”

Making Last Photograph, he says, “was really singular and intimate and that was cathartic for me, to get the experience of making a movie that was really just true to itself and owed nothing but to the moments that we were trying to create.”

The story is set in an unnamed South American country and follows a heroin-addled war photographer who is the surviving witness to a mass murder that included a diplomat and his wife. When the diplomat’s brother shows up, the two men find themselves on a journey that takes them further and further away from the city and civilization, in search of the family’s kidnapped children. There is almost a mist-shrouded Knights of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail quality at times, with the pair looking for their own Grail that can heal them.

Last Photograph began life as more of a spy or war thriller, but it was always a two-hander. At one point, it had A-listers like Sean Penn and Christian Bale attached to star, when it was set up at Warner Bros., Snyder’s once-longtime production home. But after the suicide of his daughter Autumn in 2017, however, and in the years after leaving the studio, Snyder began approaching the material differently.

“Yes, the framing is very similar and the events are similar, but what it became was a meditation on death and redemption,” he explains, “And, for me, about how people see the world in different ways.”

Snyder acquired the rights to Last Photograph back from Warners (the studio let it go after it was clear Snyder would not be taking it to a competitor). Unshackled from a studio, and with a limited budget, he assembled a small crew, marshaling his longtime partners — wife and producing partner Deborah Snyder and executive Wesley Coller — along with Gianni Nunnari, the Italian producer with whom he worked on the 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. For his leads, Snyder tapped Scottish actor Stuart Martin and Irish actor Fra Fee, both co-starred in Snyder’s Rebel Moon.

In Last Photograph, none of the well-worn Snyder hallmarks appear: no slow motion or green-screen shot. (There is, however, a commando raid where a helicopter gets blown up.) The movie is beautifully photographed and artfully composed. Snyder decided he wanted act as cinematographer, something he did when he was starting out and directing commercials and finally returned to with Army of the Dead. 

“The budgets got bigger, the movies got bigger, and he would find himself further and further away from the camera,” says Deborah Snyder, who has produced her husband’s projects since first working with him on a Reebok commercial in the ’90s. With Snyder behind the camera, there was an intimacy to the shoot.

“It almost harkens back to his commercial and music video roots,” she says. “You have this smaller crew, but your visuals still look stunning. He knows how to make beautiful visuals, but you just don’t need all the bells and whistles, and all the people. You can move faster and shoot more. And I feel like that’s the evolution of him as a filmmaker.”

She adds, “When [the movies] got so big, you think you have more creative freedoms, but you actually have less, because you can’t move with agility.”

And agile Snyder was. It was a 32-day shoot, “the shortest by half of any movie I ever made,” he says. The crew averaged 40 set-ups a day.

“On our first day of shooting, I did 72 real camera [setups],” he says enthusiastically. “That’s insane. On Justice League, there were times when I did just four setups a day.”

Most of the movie is shot handheld, minus a dolly or two. Forget about any crane shots. Or a video village. Snyder remembers, “No trailers, no chairs, no nothing. It was just me and the camera, and literally a handful of people.” There was craft services, and the hotel everyone was staying in would offer live beetle grubs once a week for breakfast.

In our conversation, Snyder is energetic, bounding up and describing capturing a shot on the river against a setting sun. He reenacts shooting the commando raid and goes into detail about the process of using gas guns. And he talks about how Harvey Penick’s The Little Green Golf Book can also apply to filmmakers, especially the part about how you have to be good enough to give luck a chance. Luck and skill were on hand in the making of Last Photograph, even getting through the 100-plus degree fever.

“I really see in Zack a general,” says Nunnari, who recalls Snyder working through a sick wintery set in Montreal during the making of 300. “He knows he has to create something and he does it.”

Past the premiere of Last Photograph, Snyder is already putting the pieces in motion to return to IP filmmaking, currently puzzling over how to do a remake of the John Carpenter classic Escape from New York. (See, there was a reason why he had the movie’s record lying about.) The original, made in 1981, was set in a dystopian future in 1997. Snyder’s will also be set in 1997, a sort of futuristic period movie. The original captured his imagination as an impressionable 13-year-old Snyder and never let go.

“It is genre-defining and genre-defying at the same time because no one’s really been able to duplicate the kind of audacity that the movie has,” he notes.

He recently returned to Warner Bros for a special screening of one his favorite movies, John Boorman’s Excalibur. It was part of the private on the lot screening series led by studio heads Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca conduct. He was thrilled to be back — “I’m a huge fan of the vibes of that lot,” he says — and even subjected himself to an hour-long Q&A.

“There was some hard-hitting questions, too, like ‘What adversity have you faced in your career?’” Snyder thought about the irony of being asked this on the very studio lot where he lost his superhero universe. “I was like, ‘That’s a strange question to ask me in this room, but it’s cool.’”

One thing he has not fully returned to is watching DC movies. He has not, for example, watched James Gunn’s Superman.

“I just haven’t gotten around to it yet,” he says, letting out a little laugh. He quickly adds he is a supporter of Gunn’s and wants the DC division to do well.

Just as Last Photograph finds Snyder at his most contemplative, so too are his views on his DC legacy and the popularity of Marvel movies. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are the most popular and most recognized superheroes in the world, with the exception of Spider-Man. That should, theoretically, make them easier to sell to audiences.

In his view, Marvel has cracked the code on how to bend its characters into a very marketable way. He, on the other hand, was interested in what he believed was their inner and iconic core.

“[Marvel is] like an amusement park ride, right? The ups, the drops, the kind of cruising part, and then another drop. At the end, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was crazy, that was awesome.’ I had no interest in that. And you know, maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t think that way. I can’t do that. I’d rather just kind of talk about the mythology of them. And maybe that’s not as fun,” he muses.

And then he laughs.