Tag: Entertainment – Variety

Voices across Hollywood and Washington are speaking out after Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour for making pro-Palestine comments on stage.

“Hacks” star Hannah Einbinder, one of TV’s most politically outspoken stars, wrote on her Instagram stories on Tuesday, “Ed Sheeran i say this as a ginger. i hope you get a REALLY bad sun burn. the kind on the back of your entire body where it hurts to lie down or walk or sit.”

YouTuber and children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel also took to Instagram to call out Sheeran. She wrote on Monday, “Ed Sheeran had an opportunity [to] show that we won’t be bullied into punishing people for supporting Palestine. Instead he caved to people who refuse to accept what the world knows. A genocide is happening in Gaza. We all need to speak out against it.”

She added, “If more than 20,000 white children were killed in another part of the world, everyone would be shouting about it at their concerts. Treating some children’s lives as less worthy of outrage is racist. Silence during a genocide is not neutral.”

“Wicked” star Marissa Bode, who is in a wheelchair, said in a TikTok video, “Ed Sheeran, my legs may not work like they used to before, but at least I have a fucking spine. Free Palestine, bitch!”

Sen. Bernie Sanders posted a statement on X, slamming New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whom Macklemore partially blamed for his removal from the Loop Tour in a statement about his exit. “In the United States of America, billionaire stadium owners should not be able to silence artists because they speak out on political issues. Today it is the genocide in Gaza. What’s next? If they can silence one artist, they can silence anyone,” Sanders wrote.

On Sept. 4, Macklemore sang out “Free Palestine” during his set at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. The comments made headlines, and the rapper was removed from Sheeran’s Loop Tour on Sept. 14. The same day, Macklemore released a lengthy statement on Instagram explaining his side of the story. He wrote, “Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”

He added, “Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words ‘Free Palestine’ and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public facing, ‘I don’t take sides.’”

On Sept. 15, Sheeran released his own statement. He claimed that he spoke with venue owners “at length all week to try and build a bridge” after Macklemore’s comments. Sheeran also asserted that dropping Macklemore was “the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.”

“I would never let down the fans who had made plans, nor would I abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living,” he added.

Despite Sheeran’s comments, openers Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and Irish band Beoga all left the tour after Macklemore was dropped.

On Wednesday, Macklemore announced that he will donate the $1 million net earnings he received from the Loop Tour to organizations that support the Palestinian people.

“With everything that has happened over the last 48 hours, I want to bring the conversation back to where it belongs: to the Palestinian people who are still being killed, still living under military occupation, and still fighting for their freedom,” he wrote on Instagram. “I will be donating the entire $1 million of my net earnings from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour to six organizations working directly to support the Palestinian people. And I invite Robert Kraft to match my donation. Whatever we disagree about, perhaps we can agree on this: Palestinian lives are worth protecting. A Palestinian life is no less valuable than any other life on this earth.”

Shortly after Macklemore’s announcement, Kraft put out a statement saying that he and Sheeran are donating $2 million each to the Palestinian cause. The statement, released on the Gillette Stadium X account, read, “I have dedicated much of my life to building bridges between all people. I believe deeply that all lives are worth protecting. Earlier today, before Macklemore challenged me to match his donation, Ed called me and asked me to commit $2 million to match his donation to aid in the region to fight this humanitarian crisis. Ed now plans to reach out to other venue owners and our goal is to continue to work together to build bridges”

Richard Christiansen was working in the offices at Flamingo Estate, his farm and lifestyle brand in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, when Pamela Anderson’s son, Brandon Lee, called him to ask if he’d be interested in collaborating with his mother.

“He said, ‘Would you like to do something with my mom? She’s a big gardener,’” Christiansen recalls. “They don’t have the same surname, so I didn’t know who he was talking about so I was like, ‘OK, who’s your mom?’ He said, ‘Pamela Anderson.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit!”

At that point, Flamingo Estate was making a name for itself, among other things, for its celeb honey collaborations. Christiansen had already partnered with Julianne Moore and LeBron James to create their limited-edition lines of honey. All Flamingo Estate celebrity partnerships benefit not-for-profits. The celebs do not get paid for their work.

When Anderson arrived for their first meeting, Christiansen gave her his customary honey pitch. “I wanted her to do a honey, like many of the ones we’ve done,” says Christiansen, who grew up on a bee farm in Australia. “Honey’s easy for us. I take my hives to someone’s house to do. Like we tied them to LeBron’s roof or for Ed Ruscha recently, we put the hives in his studio. Julianne Moore’s honey was from her garden in Montauk. It’s some of the best. It’s dark and it’s almost molasses, like whisky.”

But Anderson had another idea. “She said matter-of-factly, ‘I want to do pickles with you. It’s my aunt’s recipe,’” Christiansen says. Anderson’s $38 jars of pickles raised $500,000 for the California Wildlife Center.

I am talking to Christiansen on Zoom shortly before the release of his new book, “Pleasure Principles.” The gorgeously illustrated and designed 408-page tome, subtitled “An Almanac from the Garden,” features recipes, DIY projects and musings on a range of topics from the cinematic history of the moon to celebrity restaurants in L.A.

If anything, “Pleasure Principles” serves as a look inside Christiansen’s very creative and colorful mind. “I don’t have a car,” he explains. “I ride my bicycle everywhere, and when I’m on my bike, I dictate into my phone. That’s maybe why everything’s short, these short little stories.”

Christiansen’s latest Hollywood collaboration is a first for him, a movie tie-in with “Practical Magic 2.” Not only do several Flamingo Estate products, including bottles of olive oil and Green Goddess candles, appear in the movie, but Christiansen has also curated a gift box inspired by the Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock film.

It’s a few days after Dolly Parton passed away in August. I ask Christiansen to name a celebrity he’d love to work with. “We were going to do a coffee with Dolly called ‘8 to 6’ instead of ‘9 to 5,’” he says. “We had some lovely conversations about it, and then it didn’t end up happening because we were too young at that point and our distribution probably couldn’t handle the weight of her reach. That was the one that got away.”

The long-awaited film of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath‘s final concert has finally set a release date for later this year.

The movie, now titled “Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning,” will bow in theaters worldwide on Oct. 28. It is directed by Ben Wainwright-Pearce, who also helmed “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” for Disney+, with the press release promising a “fully immersive audio-visual experience.”

Filmed just 17 days before Osbourne died, the concert in Birmingham, U.K. functioned as both a homecoming and farewell for the heavy metal legend, who performed a solo set as well as playing with original Black Sabbath members Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward for the first time in 20 years.

“’Back to the Beginning’ came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy,” Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and manager, said in a statement. “And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

Osbourne died on July 22, 2025 following a yearslong struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

The concert, which was hosted by Jason Momoa, also saw an array of other metal and alternative artists performing throughout the event, including Disturbed’s David Draiman, Halestorm, Travis Barker, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Slayer, Pantera, Tool and Alice in Chains. 42,000 people attended the event in person at Birmingham’s Villa Park stadium on July 5 last year with another 3 million watching via a paid livestream.

Tim van Someren directed the live concert, which was produced by Jim Parsons, Jamie Silk and Dan Seliger.

Trafalgar Releasing are distributing the film, which was produced by Mercury Studios. Tickets are set to go on sale on Sept. 24 via backtothebeginning.com.

“Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning concert was a landmark cultural moment,” said Marc Allenby, CEO of Trafalgar Releasing. “Bringing it to cinemas worldwide is an opportunity to further cement Ozzy’s legacy and impact. We are really looking forward to giving fans around the world a chance to experience this final celebration of Ozzy and Black Sabbath together on the big screen.”

TBS drama “Vivant” outdrew every other streaming title across Asia last month, excluding China and India, becoming the first Japanese show to top ampd Analytics’ regional monthly ranking since the measurement firm began tracking the market.

The finding comes from a new ampd Vision report titled “Vivant: A TV Broadcast Hit, Streamed.”

“Vivant,” which launched its second season in July as part of TBS’s Sunday Theater slot, pulled in 15.6 million unique viewers regionwide in August, with 15.1 million watching in Japan alone. That figure equals a quarter of the 61.4 million viewers ampd tracks across Japanese VOD, according to the report from ampd Analytics, the streaming measurement arm of Media Partners Asia (MPA).

The series follows Yusuke Nogi, a Japanese trading company employee drawn into an international conspiracy tied to a shadowy government intelligence unit known as Beppan. Season 2 picks up immediately after the first season’s cliffhanger and was shot partly on location in Azerbaijan.

Much of that reach came through TVer, the free platform operated by Japan’s broadcast networks, which drew 10.2 million of the show’s viewers. Only two other titles have ever pulled 10 million viewers on one platform in a single market within a month, according to ampd: broadcasts of the World Baseball Classic in Japan and the Korean drama “Teach You a Lesson,” both distributed on Netflix. TBS made the new season available on TVer at no cost within an hour of its Sunday broadcast, reserving paid streaming exclusively for U-Next. That arrangement created a second viewing peak each week, on Monday nights, and 92% of viewers who came back for a new episode had already watched the previous one by the time it aired.

The show’s popularity also lifted viewership of its first season elsewhere. Netflix’s audience for “Vivant” grew more than eightfold between May and August, from 300,000 viewers to 2.5 million, while U-Next’s viewership rose over the same period from 100,000 to 2 million. That shift happened even among subscribers who already had access to the show elsewhere: an estimated one in eight Prime Video subscribers and one in 10 Netflix subscribers in Japan chose to watch “Vivant” on TVer rather than on the services they already pay for.

Beyond the streaming platforms, “Vivant” built a substantial following on YouTube, where related content drew 13.2 million viewers, nearly matching its VOD reach. That audience was spread across more than 1,600 videos posted by 450 channels, totaling 8.8 million hours watched at an average of almost 40 minutes per viewer. A companion show TBS produced alongside the drama, “Villains’ Meeting Room,” averaged more than 1.3 million viewers an episode.

“‘Vivant’ is a distribution story as much as a content story,” said Sam Yousif, managing director of ampd Analytics. “A quarter of Japan’s tracked VOD audience watched one drama in a single month, and premium subscribers moved to a free platform to follow it. Japan is the largest VOD market we measure, with the closest relationship between broadcast and streaming anywhere in the region, and measuring a title today means measuring it everywhere it lives, including YouTube, where ‘Vivant’ reached almost as many people as it did on VOD.”

The drama’s success did not extend much beyond Japan’s borders. Some 97% of all “Vivant” viewing came from local audiences, ampd found, a pattern consistent with Japanese dramas’ broader struggles abroad: they land in Netflix’s global top 10 outside Japan just 0.3 times a month on average, well behind Korean dramas at 4.1 times and Japanese anime at 1.4.

“La Bola Negra,” Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s Cannes Festival sensation, is Spain’s submission for the 2027 international feature film Academy Award.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beloved, ”starring Javier Bardem, and Alauda Ruiz de Azua’s Goya and San Sebastián winner “Sundays” also figured in Spain’s international feature shortlist, arguably the strongest in Spanish history.

Any other Oscar entry choice from Spain than “La Bola Negra,” announced Wednesday by Alejandro Amenábar on behalf of Spain’s Academia de Cine, would have been a shock.

Amenábar, whose “The Sea Inside” won Spain’s most recent international feature Oscar in 2005, opened the envelope and announced “La Bola Negra” at the Academia de Cine’s Madrid headquarters.

The choice came after a second-round vote by Academy members, following the Sept. 3 selection of “La Bola Negra,” “The Beloved” and “Sundays” as the country’s three shortlisted titles.

World premiering in Cannes main competition, “La Bola Negra” first caught attention by scoring a 16 minute standing ovation at its world premiere on the Croisette. It caused a further splash winning best director, shared with Paweł Pawlikowski for “Fatherland.”

Picked up by Netflix for the U.S. and later Canada, “La Bola Negra” again moved waves when Netflix announced that it would open the feature theatrically on Oct. 16, setting a 47-day U.S. theatrical window the longest form any movie in the streaming giant’s history, a sure indication that the film will feature strongly among the streamer’s awards priorities for the fall.

Though already regarded as one of the frontrunners in the international feature film category, “La Bola Negra” is already being talked up as a candidate for multiple other categories. “La Bola Negra’ has mucho heat,” Variety has asseverated.

Sweeping, unapologetically passionate and hugely ambitious, “La Bola Negra” braids three connected stories, each shot in a different film style, chronicling the travails and legacy of Spain’s gay experience in 1932, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, and 2017. It picks up on the first four pages in an unfinished novel by legendary poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, bludgeoned and shot to death by Franco’s troops in 1936 for being a social activist and homosexual, “un maricón” in the Spanish macho slur.

The film features a feisty turn from Penélope Cruz as a cabaret dancer and a cameo from Glenn Close as a modern-day hispanist, accompanying Spanish stars Miguel Bernardeau, Guitarricadelafuente, Milo Quifes and Carlos Gutiérrez in lead roles.

From the get-go, the Javis set out to make “a super production that is auteur-driven but also very queer,” Ambrossi told Variety before the Cannes world premiere.

Heavily researched, “La Bola Negra” reflects not only the ambitions of Los Javis, as its writer-director are known, but also Movistar Plus, the biggest Spanish pay TV/SVOD operator which produced with Los Javis newly launched Suma Content Films. It is co-produced by Pedro and Agustín Almodovar’s El Deseo and France’s Le Pacte, with the participation of Spanish network Atresmedia. Sales agent Goodfellas has practically sold out the world.

After “lighting up” Telluride, Variety has reported, “La Bola Negra,” the film bowed Tuesday in Toronto. It won the Audience Award at Australia Sydney Festival, will open New York’s LGBTQ+ film festival NewFest on Oct. 15. “La Bola Negra” will have is Spanish premiere at the San Sebastián Festival on Saturday, where it has already sparked a feeding fever for tickets.

The shortlist for the 2027 Oscar nominations will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Dec. 15, with the final selection announced on Jan. 21. The 99th Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place on March 14 in Los Angeles.