Tag: Entertainment – Variety

To paraphrase Aaliyah: Cast size ain’t nothing but a number. In the realm of the theater, no one exactly equates the number of headshots on a Playbill page with the ultimate fulfillment a stage show provides. Still, a question may arise: How few people can you have in a musical and still generate just as many killowatt-hours of energy as a full ensemble production?

It’s not a theoretical question. An answer strongly comes to us with the musical now playing at Pasadena Playhouse, “Mexodus,” a two-hander that can feel like a 20-hander as you’re going with the boisterous flow and forgetting to do the math. The show has Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson as both its writers and its stars, and these are two fellows who ought to be able to write their own tickets for some time to come, on the basis of this (asterisk: at least to the extent that anyone in the theater can), as actors and/or songwriters. Heck, if either of them decided to go really minimalist after this and do a one-man show, I’d be among the first in line.

But in “Mexodus,” it takes two to tango, or to collaborate on a mixture of musical styles, with the complementary flavors of hip-hop and traditional Tex-Mex balladry at the top of the list. It very much feels like a spawn of “Hamilton,” in that it’s a period piece set in a century well before ours with a considerable amount of rapping at the outset. That’s an anachronism you may enjoy or even feel exhilarated by, even as you’re hoping maybe not the entirety of the show plays out in that style. It doesn’t, of course. Part of what gives “Mexodus” such a kick is how expert Quijada and Robinson turn out to be as writers and singers in a surprising number of genres that expand throughout the show in a kind of beautifully inverse proportion to the number of actual players on stage.

Two things to know straight off: One, “Mexodus” is a good time at the theater. And, two, it’s a slavery story. If those two key factors seem like they might cancel each other out, you won’t be the first to wonder how a narrative spun off from the United States’ greatest shame, set in the days before emancipation, can be reconciled with feel-good entertainment. There’s an easy answer to that: Most of the action takes place south of the border, after the enslaved Henry (Robinson) has made his escape to Mexico, where he finds an uneasy benefactor in a rancher, Carlos (Quijada). The horrors of what Henry has left behind — and could easily be returned to — are hardly skipped over. But ultimately it’s a story about the sometimes tentative, sometimes tight relationship between Black and brown people… ostensibly in the 1860s, but by historical extension the 2020s, too.

The question is set up: Can Latinos and Blacks form a more perfect union as they both deal, with varying degrees of deadliness, with white America? In exploring that coming together of two marginalized (to say the least) North American cultures, “Mexodus” finally lands in a place of not just cautious optimism but a good reason to throw a musical-theater party.

Before the narrative starts up in earnest, the show opens with a good stretch of fourth-wall-breaking, as Quijada and Robinson greet the house and explain the rules of how all the music will be created in the intermission-less hour-and-a-half to follow. A full vocal and instrumental sound will be put together via looping, which will not require much explanation for anyone who knows anything about, say, Ed Sheeran’s live performances. (Ariana Grande even has a looping exercise in her current tour.) For a less pop-savvy theater crowd that might require more backstory on the gambit, it involves Robinson and/or Quijada singing a background part, or playing a drumbeat or acoustic guitar riff, then having these bits lap and layer over one another, with the use of a turntable or pedal or knob or offstage assistant. There’s an impressive magic effect that occurs when one or two men are able to quickly turn themselves into a pit band, or off-Broadway chorale. But to the duo’s credit, there’s at least as much kismet happening when they aren’t messing with these effects at all but knocking us out with, say, an unexpected Spanish-guitar duet. There’s probably a version of this show that these two could pull off without any of the looping tech; it’d be interesting to see and hear them try doing a “Mexodus Unplugged.” But probably no one in the audience will begrudge their ability to come up with a full sound and heavy pulse by the time a mirror ball lights up at stage right.

“Mexodus” does mean to be a history lesson, without becoming too pedantic a peda. In their narrator mode, Quijada and Robinson offer a stat that an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 enslaved people made their way to freedom on a lesser-known Underground Railroad that went south instead of north. Once the story gets underway, they don’t break in with too many more factoids. But each of the two principals does get a sort of time-out in the action in which they recount what seems to be an actually autobiographical memory of interaction earlier in their lives with “the other” — not the white other, but with Blacks, in Quijada’s case, and Latinos, in Robinson’s. It’s easy to imagine a director less sensitive than David Mendizábal trying to convince the writer-actors that the show doesn’t need these twin outlier moments. But these anecdotes serve as lovely grace notes in reminding the audience that the relatively happy outcome to the fictional-historical story isn’t meant to suggest that the Black and brown populi have exactly been in perfect alignment since the mid-1860s. Robinson and Quijada make such a perfect dream team, you want to believe that everyone they’re standing in for in real life is as sympatico as their characters turn out to be. These reflective, personal bits help ground the show in the inevitable realization that things are tense all over… still.

But you come to “Mexodus” to be elevated, not to keep crashing back to earth. It’s a show where issues of melanin meet melatonin, and if that sounds at all like a forced marriage, you haven’t seen the ease of how Quijada and Robinson’s writing and performance styles are wed here.

It may help that L.A. is getting this show about as fresh out of New York’s heat and humidity as theatrical productions come. Quijada and Robinson initially performed it in a twice-extended run at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York in 2025, then quickly revived it for an additional engagement at the Daryl Roth Theatre that wrapped up on June 14 — with NYC being enraptured enough to give the show four Lucille Lortel Awards, four Outer Critics Circle Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, Off Broadway Alliance Award and a Drama League Award. After all that, they barely had time to take a cross-country flight before picking things up in Pasadena, whose Playhouse barely had time to usher out its acclaimed “Brigadoon” revival in time to make way for this two-man tuner. It feels like Pasadena just got in a big shipment of adrenaline, in other words.

And almost regardless of the merits of the show itself (but not quite), it’s worth catching even if you’re just a fan of hungry and talented actors going above and beyond in making work — ultra-high-quality work — for themselves. Now, here are two guys who know how to build, if not quite an actual Underground Railroad, one hell of a funicular.

“Mexodus” continues at Pasadena Playhouse through Aug. 2. Ticket information can be found at PasadenaPlayhouse.org.

So, a Homerist, an archaeologist and a dentist walk into a bar. 

Fresh from a Thursday night showing of Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey,” a group of 17 spent the evening doing what scholars have done with Homer’s epic for nearly 3,000 years: arguing about it.

“We had a really robust debate,” says Joel P. Christensen, editor of “The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey.” Christensen was accompanied by retired Homer scholars (often referred to as Homerists), editors, professors, historians and various public intellectuals. “And my wife is a dentist,” he adds, “so she was the red herring in the crowd.”

The conversation ranged from Nolan’s decision to make Polyphemus (the Cyclops that Matt Damon’s Odysseus stabs in the eye) nonverbal to the film’s depiction of language itself. Each intellectual was fervently dedicated to a different academic discipline, yet Homer’s “The Odyssey” is one of the few works that transcends any single field of literature or history.

“I was surprised by how many academics liked it,” Christensen says. “I had to be restrained a few times by my wife. Everybody knows that I’m the worst audience for the film.” After a long pause, he continues, “I’ve been saying to myself: ‘This is not Homer’s “Odyssey.” This is Nolan’s “Odyssey.” And it needs to be judged on different terms.’”

There’s a palpable excitement around “The Odyssey” that movie theater exhibitors have been yearning for. Beyond its colossal box office projections, it’s the first feature shot entirely with Imax cameras. Over 95% of Imax 70mm screenings (the format Nolan says the film is intended to be seen in) have already sold out for the first five weeks. The spectacle is also fueling a cultural revival for classic literature in a way that academics have rarely seen before.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this,” says Monica Cyrino, a classics professor at the University of New Mexico who has spent decades studying ancient worlds on screen. “It’s had the impact of the OG ‘Gladiator,’ but even that didn’t have the same run-up. There’s already been hundreds of published academic articles — and the movie hasn’t even come out yet. It’s crazy!”

In the months leading up to its release, Nolan’s film has become a flashpoint for online culture-war debates. Critics have argued that the “woke” castings of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, along with certain production design choices, are historically inconsistent with the Mycenaean world traditionally associated with “The Odyssey.” But after Variety spoke with leading classicists and historians, it became clear those weren’t the issues driving the conversation in academic circles. 

“I’m really disturbed that so much of the conversation has been about how ‘woke’ or progressive this film was going to be,” Christensen says. “I actually think it’s a very conservative film. The roles for women are constrained. The interracial casting is women of color who just get to be married to white men, which is not progressive.”

From a filmmaking perspective, literature and film experts alike will argue that no Hollywood epic portraying the ancient world has ever achieved complete historical accuracy, instead reflecting the cultural assumptions and audience preferences of the time.

“These are fictional characters,” film critic Alonso Duralde notes in his review of “The Odyssey” on the “Breakfast All Day” podcast. “There probably wasn’t actually a Helen of Troy. There probably weren’t actually a lot of these folks. And if there were, the ancient world was a lot more mixed than we think from all the Italian sword-and-sandal epics we were given in the ‘50s and ‘60s. You had people from Africa, Asia and Europe. They had boats, y’all!”

As for critiques of the film’s production design, whether it’s the polished Trojan Horse or the costumes (many fans online argued Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon looked more like a Batsuit than Bronze Age armor), Nolan has described his philosophy as: “What is the best speculation and how can I use that to create a world?” That approach didn’t seem to ruffle the feathers of classicists, many of whom have tempered their expectations for what a Hollywood blockbuster is designed for: entertainment.

“Nobody cared,” Christensen laughs, speaking for his academic cohort. “Even the head archaeologist didn’t care. Because here’s the thing: ‘The Odyssey’ is filled with anachronisms. Homeric poetry contains different historical layers. What’s important is that the depiction functions as a vehicle for the audience’s fantasy about the past.”

While the majority of classicists are embracing the spectacle of Nolan’s blockbuster, opinions start to diverge when discussing his adaptation of Homer’s language for the screenplay. As Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy puts it, there is no single “original” version of “The Odyssey” in a modern sense — that’s because the poem emerged from an oral tradition.

“‘Homer’s Odyssey’ was already historical fiction, reimagining an ancient past when it was first composed,” says Richard P. Martin, a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Stanford. “Fellow classicists are happy with Nolan’s version because we all recognize it is a version. There is no ‘correct’ treatment, because every generation makes its own version of the poem, either by retranslation or revisualization in various media. All publicity about Homer is good publicity.”

Just as Odysseus assumes different identities to survive his arduous homecoming trek, there’s a long-standing debate over whether “Homer” was a single author — or, as Friedrich August Wolf first argued in 1795, that the poems were the product of “the whole Greek people” and were edited several times to suit changing contemporary tastes.

Famously, Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation made “The Odyssey” into a text about polite manners and tact, while Richmond Lattimore’s 1960s translation sought to preserve the rhythms and formulas of the original Greek language. Laura Slatkin, one of the leading Homer scholars, says Lattimore’s translation often feels “archaic” for her students at New York University because the diction is too quaint and formal.

“None of them are definitive,” Slatkin says. “That tells you something about the problem of translation, but it also tells you something about ‘The Odyssey’ because it’s not simple enough for a definitive translation. You’re building on existing resources from previous songs, from previous poetic traditions, but you’re not simply repeating them or recapitulating them. You’re … assimilating them.”

More recently, Emily Wilson’s translation suggests “The Odyssey” was socially progressive for its time and “meditates on what women [and other suppressed groups, broken down by race or economic status] might be capable of.” She argues that “Homer is, and is not, our contemporary,” and that her translations (along with all the others) should be contextualized as a “text that exists in two different temporal and spatial moments at once.”

Slatkin described Nolan’s screenplay, which Variety’s chief awards editor Clayton Davis predicts will compete for best screenplay at next year’s Academy Awards, as “the newest song” in a lineage of adaptations. “The Odyssey” has always been a tale that contains multitudes — balancing realism and fantasy, moral certainty and reconciliation, strangeness and familiarity. Just as the ancient Greeks (and every civilization that followed them) used “The Odyssey” to express their own ideas about morality, Nolan is doing the same.

“The consensus I’ve heard so far is that it’s going to generate a lot of discussion in the classroom,” says Justin Arft, a fellow Homerist and associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “Even with all the omissions and changes, no one’s too upset about that. Honestly, we’re all curious — maybe confused, at times — but really interested in this as a piece of art. Nolan’s film is a piece of art, and Homer is a piece of art.”

Once that classroom discussion begins, academics will surely have some more words for all the creative liberties Nolan’s movie takes. Martin, Christensen and several other classicists knocked Nolan for watering down the “sophisticated” morality of Homer’s poem and devoting more narrative time to spectacle, such as the fall of Troy. 

“I understand where the critics are coming from because I can speak in both registers,” Cyrino said. “What they don’t understand is the near-term and long-term benefit this has for us as a discipline. Humanities programs are being cut everywhere, especially classics programs. I’m a department chair, and I guarantee my Greek classes are going to be fuller this year!”

She concludes, “You know what Hollywood does: one thing succeeds, and 10 more follow. This is going to be great. As my husband always says, business is booming!”

Activision wants “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4” to be your new obsession. Its first big step in that plan involves a sports fan convention and “Obsession” star Inde Navarrette.

Taking place at the Javits Center in New York City this weekend, Fanatics Fest 2026 will welcome 150,000 attendees between its kick-off Thursday through Sunday’s closing day. During that time, sports from Formula One to FIFA to the NBA will be showcased through panels, events and athlete meet-and-greets. And featured right alongside those top brands will be the Xbox-produced “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4,” the first-ever video game to take a headlining spot at Fanatics Fest.

While “CoD” players may not be the first group you think of attending a sports fan convention (with all due respect to the massive esports industry), Activision chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl says there’s a clear logic to the choice.

“It started with an insight: A lot of people that buy our game, they usually buy one or two games a year; us and maybe a sports game,” Bahl tells Variety. “And the overlap between us and sports is really powerful. It’s always been there. We see the players shouting us out in interviews, on podcasts. We see them talking about the communication. That when they play together, it actually helps their communication on the field. We saw that with the Chiefs. We heard that with the Knicks players.”

Following two years of back-to-back “Black Ops” releases, Bahl and the Activision team wanted to approach the marketing for this year’s new “Call of Duty” installment — a “Modern Warfare” game from Xbox’s Infinity Ward studio — differently by getting as many fans to demo the game as possible before its Oct. 23 release.

“We were thinking about how one thing we really wanted to do this year that was different is we haven’t put the game in people’s hands before it came out,” Bahl says. “We have betas and things like that. But I think getting back to those days of going to events, going to experiences, and allowing people to play — we knew we wanted to do that.”

Because the “Venn diagram is so strong” between “Call of Duty” gamers and sports fans, Bahl and co. thought of Fanatics Fest as one option that would give them easy access to thousands of players. But the Activision CMO says even the event organizers weren’t anticipating what the “Modern Warfare 4″ team had in mind.

“I don’t think they were thinking that we’d come as big as we’re coming,” Bahl says. “I can remember the first conversation, and I think they thought we’re just gonna have a small little booth someplace, and maybe somebody playing some video games. But I think in a lot of ways, we made it very clear that we wanted to be there and really have a presence. It’s F1, FIFA and us as you walk in.”

For “CoD,” going “big” at Fanatics Fest includes activations with Aston Martin and Polaris, celebrity grudge matches between Knicks, Yankees and WWE stars, tons of swag and a live panel featuring Bahl, NBA star and “Call of Duty: Mobile” actor Kevin Durant, Infinity Ward director Mark Grigsby and “Obsession” star Inde Navarrette.

Yes, Navarrette, who was asked to join Saturday’s panel about the impact “Call of Duty” has had on pop culture because the actress is a hard core “Call of Duty” player who has spent years streaming her gameplay.

“We just want to celebrate her and the amazing success of ‘Obsession’ and to see her blow up,” Bahl says. “We’ve been following her, we’ve seen her streams and she’s super competitive. So what’s been fascinating for me to watch is, as we’ve made the announcement, you look in the comments, and some people might not know that she was a ‘CoD’ streamer, and all of her fans are coming out and kind of defending her and going, ‘She’s legit. Go back, watch the streams. She was super competitive.’”

That’s not to say a formal partnership or project between Navarrette and the “CoD” franchise is “off the table,” per Bahl, but this event is about having the star “come back and connect with the ‘Call of Duty’ community, given that that’s how she got her start.”

“My older brother started playing ‘CoD’ when I was seven or eight years old, I believe,” Navarrette tells Variety in an email interview. “He started me on ‘Modern Warfare 2.’ We would play Local Party and duo each other. My favorite map was Rust, with my primary being the SCAR and my secondary being the THUMPER … He would usually win.”

Navarrette adds: “For me, ‘Call of Duty’ completely overtakes my mind. There are so many moving parts that you constantly have to keep your head on a swivel. It almost turns off my brain in a way and I don’t think about anything else. It’s also such a nostalgic part of my childhood that I love to return to.”

Along with drawing a connection between sports, pop culture and “CoD,” Activision’s mission this weekend is to capitalize heavily on Fanatics Fest’s location in New York City — a setting in “Modern Warfare 4.” Bahl wants to highlight how much NYC culture, including the Wu-Tang Clan’s music, will be included in the game that’s primarily about a war that breaks out between North and South Korea.

“This game is two stories: One is the South Korean/North Korean narrative, but the other one is our iconic characters of Task Force 141. And [‘Modern Warfare’ character Captain John] Price starts the whole story in New York City, and he’s in a nightclub and he’s on the run but he’s also chasing [‘Warfare’ villain Vladimir] Makarov,” Bahl says. (Don’t worry, he’s not giving anything away ahead of Saturday’s “Modern Warfare 4″ panel — that was featured in previously released footage.)

“So to have that scene in our trailer to be in New York City, with so much going on, it was really serendipitous,” Bahl says. “You have the World Cup final. You have the Knicks winning the championship. We have Yankees-Dodgers going on. We have Jay-Z doing Yankee Stadium. You have Price in New York in [‘Modern Warfare 4’]. I think all of those connections — you have the Wu-Tang connection and stuff — it just made sense for us.”

It’s a bold new strategy for the “Call of Duty” franchise, which has seen lackluster sales over the past few years but appears to have a renewed energy leading into the release of “Modern Warfare 4″ and amid buzz for Taylor Sheridan’s “Call of Duty” movie. Bahl is remaining tight-lipped about any news regarding that Paramount Pictures project, directed by Peter Berg, that might be revealed this weekend.

“There might be a small announcement or association with the film,” Bahl says. “Well, it’s a big announcement for us. I think the fans will be really excited. But I think we’re saving that for Saturday.”

When asked if she’s interested in becoming involved with the “CoD” movie, Navarrette said: “I am excited to see what direction they decide to go. Especially since there are so many stories already inside the game with the campaign aspect. I would love to join as a computer voice for sure!”

The years that directly succeeded the COVID pandemic were marked by a dire, almost apocalyptic view on the future of cinemagoing. Audiences who were already thinning out before global lockdowns became even scarcer, with streamers growing their market share and smaller arthouse cinemas closing down as audiences failed to return through their doors once they reopened. 

Yet, in the last two years, this sentiment of sheer doom has slowly and steadily begun to give way to a tentative yet very much present hope. The same pandemic years that decimated older arthouse audiences have brewed a new generation driven by a cinephilia built upon internet archives, social media and platforms like Letterboxd, with young film fans queuing up for repertory screenings and special events in major U.S. capitals and other cities around the world.

Speaking at the Costa Rica Media Market, Senior Vice President of Acquisitions and Business Development at Utopia Distribution, Charlie Sextro, explained how this phenomenon helped reshape Utopia’s release strategy in the last year. 

Sextro, who served as Sundance Film Festival’s senior film programmer and curator for 13 years before joining Utopia in March of 2025, said it is a “very difficult time right now” for releasing films. “In the United States, it is maybe as tough as it’s ever been to really connect and get traction, but I feel like everything is being destroyed right now to be rebuilt into something new.”

“What I love is that it really feels like it’s based on young audiences falling in love with arthouse movies and going to independent films,” he added. “The independent film world has always been driven by older audiences — that was the cornerstone of releasing a foreign language or arthouse film. But that went away with COVID, and we now have this young generation that is driving arthouse, which, to me, is the dream. It’s what I’ve always wanted in my life. Young cinephiles are the greatest thing in the world, so I am incredibly hopeful about what’s coming.”

The exec brought up the success of films like Curry Barker’s “Obsession” and Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” to exemplify how everyone these days is looking for “fandom that can help drive excitement.” This notion has helped shape a recent pivot for Utopia Distribution, which will shrink its number of yearly releases in favor of dedicating more time to each film with heavily curated, event-driven strategies. 

“We’re a small company,” Sextro pointed out. “We’ve been around for about seven years, which is really long for an indie distributor. We used to release nine to ten movies a year, it was pretty regular, one campaign after another in that old school way of just putting a really well-reviewed film in theaters. That doesn’t happen anymore. So our pivot is that we’re pulling back on numbers because it’s not sustainable. We want to be transparent, and we need to change the way we release.”

Sextro said that, although it remains incredibly hard to “stick in movie theaters” with a small indie run, they can have success in “creating really cool events and eventivizing releases.” “What we’re doing now as a company is that we are going to release about four to five movies a year, where we are releasing only one movie at a time, and we’re willing to do a complicated roadshow style of release that most companies similar to us won’t do because it takes a lot of work. But we know that if you build something pure for an audience and don’t just fall into traditional ways, people show up and they love it. They love having something created especially for them.”

The veteran exemplified the strategy by bringing up their recent release of the Chloe Sevigny-produced doc “Summer Tour,” directed by Mischa Richter. Utopia decided to tour the documentary about The Grateful Dead fans for six weeks ahead of general release, playing solely in music venues and followed by a 90-minute live concert by the Grateful Dead cover band featured in the film. 

“We’re creating material for six weeks before we go into art houses,” he said. “We use the first six weeks to promote the art house instead of just spending money. We’re creating revenue by generating events that [sell.] I always believe the movies are great, and there are audiences. The thing that needs fixing right now is how [films] are being connected to audiences.” How audiences are being engaged with movies is what needs to change from the old-school, traditional ways.”

This shift is also a direct response to another industry-changing phenomenon: a dramatic decrease in VOD licensing. “In the past year alone, we’ve gotten no major streaming licensing deals from any of the streamers,” he said. “Every time they see our movies, they say [they] are too small. They’ve kind of given up on independent film, on arthouse film, and that has taken away a major point of money that was going to come into the release.”

“VOD and streaming like rentals, Amazon, Apple get smaller and smaller every year,” he went on. “There is no discovery of arthouse movies on Apple and Amazon.”

Asked by Variety about the reason for his visit to Costa Rica, particularly given Utopia has a varied catalogue but still almost no Latin American titles, Sextro emphasized the company is “agnostic.” “We release documentaries; we release foreign language films; we do release a lot of American indies.”

“In the United States, there is a massive Spanish-language-driven audience,” he added. “There are a lot of films where that is the highest percentage of ticket buyers, so there’s a massive space for it. We are open to the movies that we love, that we believe in, and that we see a potential audience for. That is the thing we are looking for in a movie, something where there is going to be passion within the release.”

The exec noted Utopia is looking for films led by filmmakers with a wealth of ideas. “We rely heavily on filmmakers to be partners in the release, generating ideas, helping us with the creative. The filmmakers are the ones with the best ideas because they’ve been living with these movies for years and years and years. Yes, I think there’s incredible potential in releasing Latin American films, even Spanish-language films in general, in the United States. It’s such a strong cause.”

The beef between Tom Brady and Logan Paul continues.

On Friday, the future NFL Hall of Famer and YouTuber-turned-WWE superstar shared the stage at Fanatics Fest in New York. But when their panel ended, the sports stars got into a heated exchange that ended with Brady slapping Paul in the face. New York Knicks star Karl-Anthony Towns and Chris Costa quickly stepped in to help break things up before things got out of hand.

Fanatics posted the clip on social media — with Brady, Paul, WWE and the NFL as collaborators on Instagram — and the footage went viral instantly, with more than 17.5 million views on Instagram and 6.9 million on X.

Brady and Paul’s feud began in February when Paul said his WWE career made him as athletic as NFL players, which Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl champ, did not appreciate. The pair continued trash-talking one another ahead of and during the Fanatics Flag Football Classic in March.

For the Fanatics Fest dustup, the audio of the sports stars’ heated conversation is largely inaudible, so Paul hopped online to offer his side of the story.

“This happened bc I was roasting Tom for beating him in flag football. And he tries to smack me?? Horrible example for the kids,” Paul wrote on X, reposting a clip of the incident. “Aura -100,” he added. “Blocked. With a torn tricep.”

Brady kept his explanation short and sweet, firing back with one word: “Dork.” He also replied to Paul directly, commenting, “I tried America… will try again next time I see this nerd.”

Many commenters wondered if the altercation was staged. Paul is a professional wrestler, after all, and, on Thursday, Brady expressed his interest in getting into the WWE.

“I need to get an invite. I’ve been waiting for [WWE president] Nick Khan to come up with some storyline for me to get in the mix,” Brady told WWE superstar Cody Rhodes during a live taping of the “What Do You Wanna Talk About?” podcast at Fantastics Fest. “I feel like I’m retired from football, and I have an opportunity to go out there and still showcase that I’m a little bit of an athlete. My boy [Rob Gronkowski’s] done it. I’ve seen, obviously, Logan Paul do it. I think I could get in there for at least one match, right?”

And if Brady were to enter the ring, he said he’d probably be a heel. “I’ve always been a bad guy,” he said, explaining that because he was usually on winning teams, the opposing fans loved to hate him. “When you go on the road and you’ve had some success in the NFL, they don’t like you. It’s an incredible feeling when you work that entire day to basically try to send the crowd home early.”

So, will Brady and Paul eventually work things out in the WWE ring? That remains to be seen, but Brady certainly got the first lick in.

Bollywood stars Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda visited London’s Wembley Stadium to celebrate the first anniversary of “Saiyaara,” unveiling a collector’s edition vinyl LP of the Yash Raj Films blockbuster – a package built to give fans and music enthusiasts a definitive way to revisit the film’s complete sonic journey.

“Saiyaara,” directed by Mohit Suri and produced by YRF CEO Akshaye Widhani, grossed over INR580 crore ($69 million) worldwide and is credited as the highest-grossing love story in Indian cinema history.

The choice of Wembley as the launch venue carries direct resonance with the film itself. In one of “Saiyaara’s” pivotal scenes, Panday’s character Krish Kapoor spots Padda’s Vaani Batra on the stadium’s giant screen, recognizing her by her eyes alone; the film’s finale concert sequence also unfolds at the same venue.

The release is a two-disc set. LP-1 compiles all nine tracks from the soundtrack, while LP-2 expands the listening experience with 25 recordings: 16 original background score compositions and nine of the film’s most prominent dialogue sequences. The collector’s package is rounded out by a “Saiyaara” diary containing notes from director Suri, producer Widhani, stars Panday and Padda, and music contributors including Tanishk Bagchi, Faheem Abdullah, Arslan Nizami, Irshad Kamil, The Rish, Vishal Mishra, Raj Shekhar, Sachet-Parampara, Mithoon and John Stewart Eduri. Also included are an ink pen reminiscent of Vaani’s notebook from the film and two character bookmarks depicting Krish and Vaani.

Widhani said: “‘Saiyaara’ was a deeply personal film for us because it marked our return to romance, a genre that has always defined YRF and inspired some of our most sweeping love stories. We wanted to deliver not just a film but also a music album that is timeless in this genre and I have to thank Mohit Suri for delivering this in spades. As we celebrate ‘Saiyaara’s’ first anniversary, we are delighted to mark the occasion with the launch of an exclusive collector’s edition Vinyl LP, giving fans and music lovers the ultimate ‘Saiyaara’ listening experience through its music, it’s sounds and its dialogues. We wanted to create something that they could own, revisit and treasure for years to come, a definitive keepsake that preserves the complete emotional journey of ‘Saiyaara’.”

Suri added: “Music is the soul of any love story – be it in life or in films. With ‘Saiyaara,’ I felt that even more. The depth in Krish and Vaani’s relationship, the everlasting feeling, the innocence, and the magic wouldn’t be the same without the songs. I am truly grateful and overwhelmed for the love people have shown the film because of its music. Vaani said ‘The mind forgets but the heart doesn’t, and great music stays in the heart…. forever.’ And it’s amazing that the music has stayed with you long after the film. The feeling is surreal, because the core of ‘Saiyaara’ was always the fact that a song has the power to take you back to a moment, bring back a memory… bring back love. That’s why this LP isn’t just a collection of tracks. It’s a chance for people to experience the film all over again – one emotion, one melody, and one memory at a time. We thought very carefully about every single aspect of this record to bring your ‘Saiyaara’ experience back to life! I really hope you love it.”

The “Saiyaara” collector’s edition vinyl LP will be available to buyers worldwide.