Professional golf’s premiere event, The Masters, brands itself as “A tradition unlike any other.”™ (A Nantz line from the ’80s, but Augusta National owns the rights to anything said during Masters broadcasts.) There’s a little bit less tradition thus far this year.
ESPN shoehorned Kelce, a retired (terrific) NFL center and the brother of active (terrific) NFL tight end Travis Kelce, into its early Masters coverage — an effort to make its broadcasts and streams of a stuffy golf major championship more enticing for our doomed doomscrolling culture. (How buttoned up is The Masters? The winner literally gets a sport coat.)
Through no fault of (Jason) Kelce’s, America could probably use a break from the bearded big fella. ESPN has gone to new heights deploying the New Heights podcast co-host in every possible way. Some say in too many possible ways.
Kelce, officially an ESPN NFL analyst, is at the exclusive Augusta National Golf Club this week in Augusta, Ga. “conducting interviews with players and their families,” according to an ESPN press release. This is ESPN’s 19th year of live coverage from the Masters Tournament. Its rights include main telecasts (ESPN and ESPN Deportes) of the first two rounds, plus “Featured Groups coverage,” as well as Holes 4, 5 and 6, Amen Corner, 15 and 16 (streaming). On Wednesday, ESPN presented exclusive live coverage of the Masters Par 3 Contest on the ESPN app and Disney+. That’s where this first went wrong.
Donning a full Masters-caddie jumpsuit and rooting for holes-in-one, in a brief TV hit that was not especially a hit on social media, Kelce attempted to fire up the crowd and earn a few yucks — two things he is good at. Problem is, to borrow a title from Netflix (which itself just bastardized baseball in the name of self-promotion), nobody wants this. Golf fans want The Masters to be The Masters, and The Masters is anti-“fun” by design.
At Augusta National, spectators cannot bring in their cell phone or wear (overly) branded clothing. They can’t sit on the hallowed Bermuda grass (overseeded with Perennial Ryegrass) or run, and wearing a hat backwards is strictly prohibited. It’s like church, just with no tipping (another rule). Yet every year, roughly two million applicants will enter a lottery system for a long shot to join the congregation. Golf fans are lured to Augusta because of the lore, and TV viewers want the closest possible facsimile.
To be fair to ESPN (and Kelce), the Masters Par 3 Contest is the lightest fare here, but even that comes with convention. Typically, the children or grandchildren of the tournament’s competitors and legends carry the pros’ bags — or they try to — and they’re adorable in the effort. No offense to Kelce, but his act just isn’t cute here.
Attempts to reach ESPN for comment on this story were not successful. Again, no cell phones.
Golf is supposed to be the quiet sport. ESPN brought in the loudmouths.Though Kelce seems to be bearing the brunt of the frustration, comedian Kevin Hart was there as Bryson DeChambeau’s “caddie.” It was, of course, in the name of content.
ESPN desecrates #TheMasters because it fails to understand this tournament doesn’t need selling. It is both the sizzle and the steak. And, to quote Kevin Costner, who somehow isn’t on this broadcast, they built it & we came. Let the new audience come to #TheMasters as we did. https://t.co/1pKh5KHAiS
WWE Superstar The Miz made a not-beloved-cameo on ESPN’s coverage of The Masters on Thursday.
There is a counterargument to be made — and it’s not unreasonable. Golf needs to find a new generation of fans as its old one, gets, well, really old. The game is late to adapt, but it’s tried.
There’s the LIV Tour (a Saudi-funded, team-based alternative to the PGA Tour), TGL (a sophisticated virtual golf league started by Tiger Woods and the reigning Masters champion Rory McIlroy), Grass League (a franchise-based par 3 startup), Top Golf (a hi-tech alternative to driving ranges that’s fun… once), footgolf (a dumb combination of soccer and golf that ruins golf courses more than geese) and disc or frisbee golf (which hit its peak as “frolf” in 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Summer of George”).
YouTube Golf has been a successful outlier — DeChambeau has 2.65 million subscribers — TikTok and Instagram too. But even the founder of Good Good (2.07 million YouTube subscribers) Matt Kendrick will tell you it will never replace the real thing. Or at least that’s what he told me last year.
As it turns out, the best golf is golf, and the best representation of golf is The Masters (1934-2025). The solution to golf’s viewership problem can possibly be solved with time: Let young people get old. That’s definitely going to happen — it is a traditional unlike any other.
And organizers of the Canadian industry conference have teamed up with the inaugural TIFF: The Market during Toronto’s 2026 edition to offer joint programming sessions and a dual pass option to allow global creators and decision makers to attend both events.
“At a time when the industry is rethinking how it connects and does business, collaborations like this feel both timely and necessary. Bringing TIFF: The Market and Access Canada Summit into closer alignment creates a more focused and effective environment for creators and decision-makers to engage and helps move the global conversation forward”, Maer Roshan, editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, said in a statement on Thursday.
The formal collaboration includes a more affordable Market + Access Canada Summit Combo Pass for the Access Canada Summit, to run Sept. 14 to 16, and the Sept. 10 to 16 TIFF: The Market and co-programmed sessions for both events.
“Access Canada Summit, powered by The Hollywood Reporter, and TIFF: The Market each play a unique and important role in the industry, and this initiative is about creating a more seamless pathway between them. At a time when the industry is demanding more value, more efficiency, and more access to decision- makers, this joint offering delivers exactly that,” Access Canada president Ferne Cohen added.
In September, the Toronto festival will stage its first official marketplace, where buyers and sellers will set up shop to movies, TV, gaming as well as XR and immersive content under one roof. Ahead of the inaugural run, TIFF has aligned with Access Canada Summit to attract more industry professionals.
“Building a market that supports creators and decision makers across film, series and innovation has always been our goal. Creating more opportunities for series professionals, both in Canada and globally, in partnership with Access Canada allows us to achieve our common objectives and put the needs of professionals first,” Charles Tremblay, head of TIFF: The Market, said in an another statement.
The inaugural Access Canada Summit last year, in partnership with THR, focused on Canada’s content industry as it drives onto a global entertainment stage and was backed by keynote speakers and panels and dealmaking between top creatives and decision makers.
Harrison Ford, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, has, over the course of more than 50 years in Hollywood, arguably entertained more people than anyone else, and inarguably become a living legend.
Ford is, of course, best known for his work on the big screen. He played a trio of everymen-turned-heroes around whom some of the biggest film franchises in history were built: Han Solo of Star Wars, Indy of Indiana Jones and Deckard of Blade Runner. And he also showcased his chops and box-office appeal in a host of other classics including American Graffiti, The Conversation, Witness, Working Girl, The Fugitive, Air Force One and 42.
Collectively, his films have grossed more than $10 billion worldwide. The National Association of Theatre Owners selected him as the Star of the Century, Empire magazine placed him at No. 1 on its list of the top 100 movie stars of all time, the Wall Street Journal described him as “a living reminder of shared movie moments that perhaps billions of people across generations and continents hold deeply” and the New York Times described him as “one of the last true movie stars, a man whose name alone could sell tickets.”
Over the last five years, however, he has devoted much of his time and attention to the small screen — and has done some of his best work yet, particularly on Shrinking, the Apple TV comedy on which he plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the acerbic senior member of a psychotherapy practice in Pasadena, who is battling Parkinson’s disease. Last year, the show’s second season brought him the first Emmy nomination of his career; this year, its third season — which just finished rolling out this week — might well bring him his first Emmy statuette.
Jason Segel and Harrison Ford on season three of Shrinking
Apple TV
Over the course of a 90-minute conversation at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, the 83-year-old reflected on how depression during college led him to acting; the fateful events that resulted in him moving to Hollywood, becoming a contract player at the tail-end of the studio system, and landing his life-changing role in Star Wars; why he quickly developed a desire to escape being a “leading man” and to instead play “character parts,” and what he made of the opportunity to do so in projects such as The Mosquito Coast, 42 and Shrinking; what it is about Shrinking that he finds so challenging and rewarding; how he feels about the future of moviegoing; plus much more.
Here are a few key excerpts of the conversation (lightly edited for clarity or brevity), which you can listen to in its entirety at the top of this post or via any major podcast app…
On how clinical depression led him to acting…
“I had a single room and I had classes to go to, but I rarely ventured out. I would get up out of my single bed, go to a phone, order a pizza, go back and lay down in bed until the pizza came. I would eat the pizza, throw the wrappers in the corner, go back to sleep. And on the rare occasion I did go to the classroom, I would often touch the door on the outside of the building, and turn around and walk back. I was more than depressed. I think I was ill. I was socially ill, psychologically not well. And I never found a community at college until I accidentally — in an attempt to get my grade-point-average up — took a class called ‘drama’ without reading the full description of the class. It started out in the description talking about reading and analyzing plays, but I didn’t read the part where it said that you had to actually be in them as well, so that was a surprise. I’d never done anything like that. And I was surprised that the people that I had considered to be fellow geeks and misfits were, in fact, some of the most interesting people I knew. They were doing something that I hadn’t really understood, and they were telling stories about life and life, and some of them were exceptional in their capacity to understand human behavior. And so I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers. It really changed my world, changed my life.”
On a fateful meeting — arranged by the man who wrote the incidental music for a play in which Ford was appearing, Ian Bernard — with a casting director at Columbia Pictures…
“He suggested that he had a friend or he knew somebody at Columbia Pictures who might help in my career, and so he made an appointment for me. I had not been a big movie fan, and really didn’t know the names of the major motion picture studios, so this was the first time I was ever in a studio. I was ushered into a waiting room with an English secretary and walnut walls and waited for about 45 minutes to be seen by a man who was sitting behind a desk on two telephones… I was ushered into the office for a minute or two while he went through this routine, and then he turned to me and he said, ‘Who sent you?’ I said, ‘Ian Bernard’… He didn’t know who it was. He took out a little three-by-five card and he said, ‘How tall are you?’ I said, ‘Six feet.’ ‘How much do you weigh?’ ‘175 pounds.’ ‘Can you ride a horse?’ ‘Oh yeah, I can ride a horse. Sure.’ And, ‘Can you speak Spanish?’ Which came out of nowhere. ‘No, I can’t speak Spanish.’ ‘Well, if we find anything, we’ll let you know.’ I was out of there in five minutes. I went down the hall, pressed the button for the elevator, realized I had to take a pee. The men’s room was right next to the elevator. I went into the men’s room, I did my business, and I came out of the room seconds later to the guy who had been behind the desk running down the hall saying, ‘Come on back, he wants to talk to you!’ And I went back and he said, ‘How would you like to be under contract?’ I didn’t know what that meant. I said, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘It means $150 a week to start.’ ‘Oh, wow!’… Now I was under contract at Columbia Pictures for seven years.”
On how he wound up in two very different projects directed by George Lucas four years apart, American Graffiti and Star Wars…
“He [Lucas] had made it clear to the agents of all of the performers in American Graffiti that he would not be using anybody [again in Star Wars] — he was looking for new faces. [Post-American Graffiti] I was working at Francis Ford Coppola’s offices installing an elaborate millwork portico to his office, an entrance. I had been working there for a couple of weeks at night — I refused to work during the day, because I didn’t want to confuse people about who I was and what I was doing — and one morning I was sweeping up and finishing up for the day, and in walks George Lucas with Richard Dreyfuss, who figured quite prominently in American Graffiti, and he was there for the first interview for Star Wars, and there I was, with a broom in my hand and my carpenter’s tool belt! But fortune continued to smile on me. I was asked by Fred [Roos, the casting director] if I would do them a favor and read with the actors that were reading for the parts, without any indication that I might be under consideration, so I did that. People would come in and they’d be given two pieces of paper, some lines to read, and they’d read it, and they’d look at me and say, ‘What is this? What’s this about?’ And I would explain to them, in as few words as possible, because a lot of people were coming through. I mean, I read with everybody… And then at the end, they told me that they wanted me to do it.”
Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in Star Wars
Courtesy of Everett Collection
On wanting to escape ‘leading man’ roles and play character parts…
“When the part can be described as a ‘leading man,’ you have certain responsibilities. You have to make the audience happy to be with you. You usually end up supplying an easy answer to a difficult dilemma that’s been driving the film, and then you end up with a soft solution, as it were… I always wanted to be a character actor. I had never thought that I would be a leading man… I got to play leading parts because the films I was in had success, and that success carried me along.”
On the joy of making Shrinking…
“I find it really fulfilling doing what I do, and I enjoy it as much as I ever, ever could possibly have imagined. Now I’m doing something I never thought that I would be doing: a television show now in its fourth season, a comedy, playing a shrink? Come on!… There are a few things that really make it fun. You work faster, and that’s fun for me — I like getting there, getting the work done, and going home. I love the challenge. I love the danger, if you will, of the work that I’m able to do. And I like the company.”
On sharing scenes with Michael J. Fox during season three of Shrinking…
“Here I am now, playing a guy with Parkinson’s, and I’m sitting next to Michael J. Fox. This is serious shit, man. This is not insignificant for me.”
On the future of the theatrical moviegoing experience…
“I’m terribly concerned. I came up at a period of time when the movie business was at its zenith, when the movie business captured the zeitgeist of a culture, and there was a transference, a cross-feeding, and the culture captured the zeitgeist of the movies. There is no zeitgeist anymore. We’ve been disassociated. We’ve been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political economic units. There is an empty center that needs to be filled, to bring the culture back together, to bring the culture and the movie business back together, for the movie business to be useful in the consciousness of an audience, a culture, a community.”
Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox on season three of Shrinking
A first look photo from Lukas Dhont’s Coward, the Belgian director’s latest feature headed to Cannes in competition, was released on Thursday by The Match Factory.
“I am deeply honored to once again take part in the competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Coward is the work of many and my most ambitious project yet. A film about love and death, creation and destruction. A film about survival and how, sometimes, even in darkness, something beautiful manages to grow. Coward is a tribute to those who, throughout the centuries, were sent to fight—and those who tried to escape it at any cost,” Dhont said in a statement on news of his return to Cannes.
The first photo for the First World War drama (shown above) reveals Pierre, a young Belgian soldier, as he grapples with cowardice and heroism on the battlefield. Behind the frontlines, Pierre meets Francis, who is asked to find a way to boost morale, according to a synopsis from the producers.
After delivering back-to-back Cannes darlings with the Camera d’Or winner Girl (2018) and Grand Prix-winning Close (2022), Dhont is returning to Cannes with his third feature and his first period piece. Coward reunites the director with longtime co-writer Angelo Tijssens and is produced by Michiel Dhont under the Reunion banner founded by the Dhont brothers.
Coward is also produced by Lumen, Topkapi Films & Versus (Opus), as part of a co-production with Cine+ OCS, France 2 Cinéma, VTM, RTBF, Proximus, BeTV & Orange. In the Benelux, the film is distributed by Lumière and in France by Diaphana Distribution.
“Wednesday” Season 3 has added three to its cast in guest star roles.
Lena Headey (“Game of Thrones,” “The Abandons”), Andrew McCarthy (“St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Brats”), and James Lance (“Ted Lasso”) will all appear in the third season of the hit Netflix series, which is currently in production.
As with past seasons, the third is being shot in Dublin, Ireland. Jenna Ortega will return in the role of Wednesday Addams, who viewers last saw riding off with her Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) to attempt to rescue her friend and roommate Enid (Emma Myers) from being trapped as an alpha werewolf.
Aside from Ortega, Myers, and Armisen, the cast of “Wednesday” includes: Hunter Doohan, Joy Sunday, Moosa Mostafa, Georgie Farmer, Isaac Ordonez, Billie Piper, Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo, Victor Dorobantu, Evie Templeton, with Luis Guzmán, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Joanna Lumley.
The show is based on characters created by Charles Addams. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar developed the show and serve as executive producers and showrunners. Tim Burton serves as director and executive producer. MGM Television is the studio.
Headey is repped by TMT Entertainment, CAA, and Kraditor & Haber. McCarthy is repped by CAA, Liebman Entertainment, and Hirsch Wallerstein. Lance is repped by United Agents and Industry Entertainment.
Minutes after unveiling a lineup dominated by European auteurs for Cannes’ 79th edition, festival chief Thierry Frémaux was hit with a barrage of questions about Hollywood’s absence. This year’s roster features a nearly unprecedented number of French-language films and, for now, one single American filmmaker — Ira Sachs — in competition. That could still evolve, however, as Frémaux confirmed to Variety he is hoping to add James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” at a later stage.
“We saw James Gray’s film, which is a wonderful film — a very James Gray film, very indie. It’s the James Gray of ‘Little Odessa,’ it’s the James Gray who has never stopped being himself,” Frémaux said, noting the project was “complicated to put together” and that “there are still some contractual issues to resolve.” He added, “I hope they’ll be settled very soon and that we’ll be able to announce the film.”
But the European flavor of this year’s competition is no coincidence, he stressed — it reflects a broader industry shift. “It’s true that there’s been a bit of a geographical realignment. Europe is strong, perhaps because the United States is a bit weaker, since studio films are less prevalent. Studios are less prominent,” he said.
The momentum, he said, reflects the strength of the European film ecosystem and France’s growing role within it. Many of the foreign language films that were nominated at the Oscars and premiered at Cannes last year, notably Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” were either produced or financed with French players.
“France has a stable film industry, a strong film industry, one that supports foreign cinema … The French ecosystem is a fairly strong ecosystem,” he said, noting that producers, buyers and distributors are actively working across borders, helping to position the country as a creative and financial hub.
The trend will be visible on the Croisette, as three of the French-language films premiering in competition are directed by foreign directors: Asghar Farhadi with “Parallel Tales,” starring Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve; Ryusuke Hamaguchi with “All of a Sudden,” starring Virginie Efira and Mari Morisaki; and Laszlo Nemes with “Moulin,” starring Gilles Lellouche as French Resistance hero Jean Moulin.
“Artists — and this year it’s particularly impressive — have come to shoot in Paris … They found a home here, they found a refuge through very friendly professional relationships,” Frémaux said. “Perhaps in their eyes, France continues to be a country of cinema, and they want, in a way, to be part of that cinematic landscape.”
Even as Hollywood studios scale back, Frémaux argued that American independent cinema remains vibrant. As such, a number of American filmmakers will present their latest works, notably Jane Schoenbrun with “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” and Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut “Club Kid” in Un Certain Regard; while Steven Soderbergh and Ron Howard will also each show new documentaries in the Special Screenings section on John Lennon and photographer Richard Avedon, respectively.
“There are people in America who want to continue making films their own way, independently… without necessarily working with the studios, without necessarily working with streaming platforms, or by doing both,” he said.
Still, the absence of major studio titles also comes down to the cost of attending Cannes, Frémaux argued. “They need to relearn how to travel light. What we want to show are films. A film, a director — that’s enough,” Frémaux said, adding that studios are now more focused on domestic release strategies and U.S. theatrical constraints.
Below, Frémaux speaks more with Variety and unpacks this year’s lineup.
There are a huge number of French-language films in the official selection this year, especially in competition. What does it say about the creative landscape today and the evolution of the industry?
It’s true that there’s been a bit of a geographical realignment. Europe is strong, perhaps because the United States is a bit weaker, since studio films are less prevalent. Studios are less prominent, and at the same time, there is still a significant independent American film scene. But there are also new countries carving out a small niche for themselves, not just in the official selection we just announced, but even in the selection process itself. Films from 142 countries were represented in the selection we’ve seen. I believe this opens up opportunities for these countries to make their mark. There’s a bit of a geographical redefining of the world.
And France — which has a stable film industry, a strong film industry, one that supports foreign cinema — is a country that, as a result, may be gaining more importance. It has nothing to do with Cannes. It has to do with French professionals who are on the lookout, who support cinema elsewhere, who have buyers and sellers who go abroad.
The competition will also showcase foreign filmmakers like Laszlo Nemes, Asghar Farhadi and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who made their films in France and with French talent.
Yes. There’s the fact that artists — and this year it’s particularly impressive — have come to shoot in Paris. It remains the work of the Japanese filmmaker Hamaguchi and the Iranian filmmaker Farhadi, but they found a home here, they found a refuge through very friendly professional relationships with their co-producers or distributors. Alexandre Mallet-Guy [founder of the distribution company Memento], for example, plays a key role in the relationship between Asghar Farhadi and France. It’s the same with Hamaguchi. Something began with “Drive My Car,” which he made when he was young, and so on. And now, they’re settling in. And perhaps in their eyes, France continues to be a country of cinema, and they want, in a way, to be part of that cinematic landscape. And we’re proud of that. This is how the year has shaped up. We’ll also have French-language films from Belgium. A lot of these films revolve around France, around Europe. And let’s not forget that while Italy isn’t here, Spain is very strong. So, maybe next year, Italy will be here and Spain won’t. Europe continues to have a very strong film industry.
And America — we’ve talked about the studios scaling down, but what about independent films? Do you think the U.S. indie industry is in good shape based on what you’ve seen?
Yes, we work a lot with creators, agents and directors, of course. There are people in America who want to continue making films their own way, independently, without necessarily working with the studios, without necessarily working with streaming platforms, or by doing both. One doesn’t exclude the other. But I find that there’s still a renewed emphasis on the idea of creating a cinematic work as a prototype. A cinematic work is a singular film that isn’t a series, as the name implies. A feature film is a single film. And an artist might feel more like they’re truly creating, inventing stories and characters, with a feature film. And you get the sense that, in any case, it remains the dream.
Could James Gray come to Cannes with “Paper Tiger”? What message would you like to send to him today?
We saw James Gray’s film, which is a wonderful film — a very James Gray film, very indie. It’s the James Gray of “Little Odessa,” it’s the James Gray who has never stopped being himself. And it’s a film that was complicated to put together because, for him, to do his work as a filmmaker, he doesn’t just snap his fingers — films have to be put together. So there are still some contractual issues to resolve. I hope they’ll be settled very soon and that we’ll be able to announce the film.
There are a lot of studios and directors who are hesitant to go to a festival now. Why are they so afraid of criticism?
No, I don’t think so. Criticism was perhaps much more intense in the past, and filmmakers used to come. No, something has changed a bit, perhaps, in the attitude of Americans — because the rest of the world comes willingly to Cannes. Americans in the industry all come to Cannes — the artists — but the studios, there’s perhaps also a certain reluctance to … They need to relearn how to travel light. What we want to show are films. A film, a director — that’s enough.
But today, the world has changed; the media world has changed. Coming to present a film at a major festival like Cannes requires you to prepare in a certain way. And then, I think — and I can understand this very well — that the studios also want to prioritize the domestic market. They want to take into account, above all, the scheduling constraints tied to the U.S. territory and to U.S. theaters. And I can’t blame them for that. First and foremost, we have to protect cinema in theaters and cultivate new generations of audiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
If there were any lingering doubts about the widening fractures between President Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem that helped return him to power, Megyn Kelly all but erased them in March.
The former Trump critic turned second-term ally used her platform to accuse the administration of misleading the public about the death toll from the U.S.-Israeli military operation in Iran — a striking rupture for a figure who, in recent years, has largely moved in lockstep with the president.
“I don’t think those service members died for the United States,” the ex-Fox News anchor said of the 13 Americans killed so far, many in an Iranian strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. “I think they died for Iran or Israel.”
Kelly has been openly critical of the Iran operation, but the bluntness of her remarks marked a clear escalation — fusing moral outrage with biting derision — as she mocked Trump’s framing of the conflict as a “fun little excursion into Iran” while invoking the “lost limbs” and “severe head wounds” of more than 300 injured.
She went further still, venturing into suggestions of a potential cover-up — rhetoric that would until recently have been almost unthinkable from a former network news anchor, but now feels entirely at home in the conspiratorial grammar of the online MAGA sphere.
“We don’t believe we know the full extent of the deaths either,” Kelly said on her daily web show, the centerpiece of her expanding media operation. “And we don’t believe we know the full extent of exactly how all these planes have come down — that we’re getting the full story.”
In many ways, Kelly’s trajectory is less an outlier than a case study: What happens when a traditional television career collides with the influencer economy, falters, then reconstitutes itself around a very different set of incentives.
Kelly, 55, is no stranger to reinvention. “I don’t think she has fixed political principles,” says one longtime colleague. “But she has an uncanny ability to adjust herself to the prevailing political winds.” She first gained national prominence as a Fox News anchor who, during the network’s first Republican primary debate in 2015, pressed Trump on his treatment of women — a confrontation that triggered a very public feud and helped precipitate her exit from Fox in 2017. That departure was bound up in something larger: Alongside Gretchen Carlson and others, she accused then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes of sexual harassment — a reckoning later dramatized in the 2019 film Bombshell, which cast her as a complicated but ultimately sympathetic figure of institutional defiance.
Megyn Kelly on the set of her hit Fox News program The Kelly File in December 2013. She left Fox in 2017 amid a public feud with President Trump.
Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post/Getty Images
But not long after achieving mainstream respectability, Kelly’s career unraveled abruptly. Her much-hyped NBC morning show, Megyn Kelly Today, was canceled after less than a year following widely condemned remarks defending blackface Halloween costumes — a public rupture that not only sidelined her from traditional media, but also appears to have reshaped her relationship to it.
Her makeover has been swift and, by most metrics, successful. In 2020, she launched The Megyn Kelly Show as an independent podcast. By March 2025, she had expanded into MK Media, a growing podcast network under her Devil May Care Media banner, with ambitions to rival established conservative outlets. Her YouTube channel now exceeds 4 million subscribers and drew 138 million views in February.
But scale, in this ecosystem, is not neutral — it exerts pressure. And increasingly, that pressure runs toward provocation. As she works to expand her empire, Kelly has found herself navigating a shifting political and media landscape. Her proximity to political commentator and conspiracy peddler Candace Owens, and her reluctance to distance herself from Owens’ escalating claims, has become a defining — and increasingly uncomfortable — feature of her brand.
In the arms race for attention that defines political podcasting, few figures have expanded their reach as rapidly as Owens. Since January 2025, she has added an estimated 10.9 million followers across all platforms while generating roughly 805 million YouTube views and more than 81 million TikTok likes, according to Media Matters.
As her audience has grown, so too have the controversies that fuel it. Over the past year, Owens has promoted a series of extreme and often unsubstantiated claims — including repeated assertions that French first lady Brigitte Macron was “born a man,” at one point declaring on Piers Morgan Uncensored that it was “beyond obvious” Macron “has a penis.” The remarks prompted a defamation lawsuit from the Macrons in July.
Owens also has advanced a series of increasingly baroque narratives surrounding the September killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, alleging — without evidence — the involvement of multiple governments and intelligence agencies and suggesting the killing was tied to a broader “deep state” agenda. Among her claims: that Kirk was a literal time traveler and that he had been monitored by CIA-linked operatives since childhood.
Her rhetoric around Jews and Israel has grown even more incendiary. Owens has promoted Der Talmudjude, a 19th century antisemitic tract, and suggested it exposes what Jewish public figures “really think.” She has also repeated long-debunked claims about Jewish involvement in the slave trade and cast Holocaust education as a form of “indoctrination.”
Since January 2025, Candace Owens has added about 10.9 million followers across platforms while generating roughly 805 million YouTube views.
Screenshot/YouTube
Critics, including her fellow conspiracist Alex Jones, have raised alarms about her rhetoric. But the backlash has done little to slow her rise.
What matters here is not just what Owens says, but how many people are listening — roughly 24 million across platforms — and what that scale demands of everyone else in the right wing conversation. Her ascent is not pulling conservative media in a single direction so much as forcing a sorting mechanism. On one side is a personality-driven ecosystem — Owens, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and, increasingly, Kelly — where provocation, institutional distrust and conspiracy-adjacent rhetoric are not bugs but features. On the other is a more traditional faction — Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and the Turning Point USA orbit — that, while firmly right wing, has drawn clearer lines around overt conspiracy and antisemitism.
The divide is less about ideology than structure: a collision between legacy conservatism and an influencer economy in which attention — not credibility — is the primary currency.
That tension has left Kelly in a narrowing lane. To break with Owens is to risk audience erosion; to embrace her is to risk becoming indistinguishable from her. For now, Kelly appears to be choosing a third path: saying just enough to signal independence while stopping short of a full rupture — a balancing act that grows harder to sustain as the incentives of the system keep pulling to the extremes.
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
The influential shareholder proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services recommended that Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders reject the golden parachute pay packages for CEO David Zaslav and other top executives at the company, noting the “extraordinary” nature of the agreements.
But ISS also urged shareholders to approve WBD’s sale to Paramount Skydance, writing that “the proposed transaction is the result of a competitive sales process and public bidding war between NFLX and PSKY, which provides shareholders comfort that the proposed deal is the best available.”
With regard to the golden parachutes, shareholders have an advisory vote, meaning that even if they reject it, the payments may still go through. That said, companies are often responsive to shareholder concerns around pay.
ISS notes that the cash severance for top executives other than Zaslav are “reasonable,” in both their size and in the fact that they are “double trigger,” meaning that two things have to happen in order for them to receive the payments: A sale triggering a change in control, and the executive leaving for “good reason” or terminated without cause.
Instead, ISS focuses on Zaslav’s potential $886 million payout, a big chunk of which is comprised of what ISS calls a “problematic” excise tax gross-up approved by the board last month.
“Excise tax gross-ups represent an extraordinary cost that are inconsistent with common market practice, and most companies have eliminated such entitlements as a matter of good governance,” ISS writes in its recommendation. “The value disclosed in the golden parachute table for CEO Zaslav at over $886 million represents one of the highest golden parachute estimates ever observed,” though the proxy notes that this value may decline depending on merger timing.
The advisor firm also notes that the vast majority of Zaslav’s equity is also single trigger, meaning that he will be paid as soon as a change in control occurs.
“The auto-acceleration of unvested equity is not a best practice, and the full vesting acceleration of very recently-granted equity intended to cover multiple years represents a windfall,” it adds.
ISS is among the most influential proxy advisory firms, with many institutional shareholders following its recommendations, though in high-profile deals like the Paramount deal, those investors may often make their own calls on the things being voted on.
The Writers Guild of America has reached a deal with the studios, but most of the staff of its West local remains on strike.
In a letter on Wednesday, California Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas urged the guild to bring an end to the 51-day work stoppage.
“Every day this strike continues is a day the Guild is not at full capacity to carry out its mission,” Smallwood-Cuevas wrote. “I therefore urge you to end this strike by taking the WGSU‘s invitation to make a fair deal.”
About 110 members of the Writers Guild Staff Union walked off the job on Feb. 17, after five months of on-again, off-again negotiations failed to result in a contract.
The staffers are demanding better pay and job security. A key sticking point is the WGSU’s demand for seniority protections in promotions and layoffs, which the staffers have said is necessary to combat favoritism.
The WGA West has said it is offering a fair deal, which includes $800,000 worth of salary increases. The two sides talked on March 17 and March 24 but have not been able to reach a breakthrough. The WGA West has told members that the strike will end when the WGSU accepts a deal or decides to return to work without one.
The striking staffers lost health care coverage on April 1, as more than a month had passed without qualifying employment.
Four members of the Los Angeles City Council signed a letter of support for the WGSU in March — Eunisses Hernandez, Katy Yaroslavsky, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Tim McOsker. Smallwood-Cuevas endorsed the WGSU’s demands in her letter to leadership.
“They deserve the standard union contract provisions that they’re fighting for, including an equitable wage step scale, layoff protections, and seniority in promotions,” she wrote. “A fair contract is not only a matter of basic dignity for these workers; it is essential to ensuring that guild staff can do the best possible job on behalf of WGAW members.”
Olivia Munn said during a recent appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show” that one of her former male co-stars refused to be saved by her in a scene and stopped production for “45 minutes” to fight off the story beat.
“There have been a few times where I’ve been filming something, and my character was either like CIA, or a cop, or something, and there’s been scenes where my character has been the one to save the other character,” Munn said. The scene in question featured Munn and her male co-star fighting side by side in a bunker.
“If you read the script, it was that he was guarding his side, I was guarding my side, then we switch sides and then there’s a guy that was coming for him [who] was gonna shoot him in the back, so I shoot him,” she recalled. “And then we’re about to shoot and, somehow, I guess he didn’t read the script, and in that moment, he realized, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. She can’t save me. No, no. She can’t save me.’”
Munn said her co-star then halted production and became “comative with the director” over the moment. She added that he had “no insecurity about being obnoxious and everyone hearing this and being like, ‘She can’t save me! We’re not doing this.’”
“Finally, after like 45 minutes of just stopping down, I said, ‘OK, how about instead of my character saving you, it’s just that we switch because it’s time for us to switch and so this is my guy to get,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘OK.’”
This isn’t the first time Munn shared a bad on-set experience with a male co-worker. During an episode of Dax Shepherd’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, she said a director she worked with on HBO’s “The Newsroom” tried to “ruin her chances” of getting a film role by telling the studio she was “really combative” while filming.
“I was on the one-yard-line for the movie and my manager calls me and says, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get the role. But first, I guess there’s another director who they know and he says that on “The Newsroom” you were late all the time and really combative,’” Munn said. “I lived seven minutes from there. I was never late. I was like, ‘I know who this is.’ He just was trying to bash me. And I told my reps, ‘Please tell the directors this.’ And then I still got the role. But I will always remember that just because of our conflicts of how we approached a role, he wanted to ruin my chances of getting anything else.”
