Tag: Entertainment – Variety

The 31st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has unveiled a Special Program in Focus honoring the late Korean screen legend Ahn Sung-ki, while the festival’s market arm has named Thailand the first-ever recipient of a new top-tier country partnership.

“Those Beautiful Years, Ahn Sung-ki” serves as the grand finale to the nationwide tributes paid to the actor, who died earlier this year. The six-film lineup was hand-picked by Ahn himself before his passing and centers on his 1980s and 1990s peak, including “A Fine, Windy Day” (1980), “Whale Hunting” (1984), “Chil-su and Man-su” (1988), “Gagman” (1989), “White Badge” (1992) and “Festival” (1996). Each screening will include a guest visit featuring longtime collaborators, among them directors Lee Jang-ho, Bae Chang-ho and Chung Jiyoung, along with actors Kim Bo-Yeon and Bae Jong-ok. BIFF will also publish an essay collection on Ahn’s career and legacy, co-hosted with the Korean Film Archive. Ahn’s screen career stretched nearly seven decades, from his 1957 debut as a child actor through his later years as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and longtime member of the BIFF festival committee.

Elsewhere at the festival, the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) has launched a Country of Honor program, its highest-tier country partnership, naming Thailand as the inaugural recipient for 2026. The designation builds on a long history of ties between the two markets, including Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s “Ploy,” picked for the Pusan Promotion Plan in 2006, and Aditya Assarat’s “Wonderful Town,” which took the New Currents prize at the festival in 2007. More than 540 foreign film and TV productions shot in Thailand last year, drawn in part by cash rebates of up to 30% for eligible projects.

Chookiat Sakveerakul, president of the Thai Film Directors Association, said, “Thailand is deeply honored to be named the first Country of Honor at ACFM 2026.” He added that the partnership would “open new doors for Thai films and content to reach wider international audiences, while strengthening collaboration between Thailand, South Korea, and partners across the global industry.”

The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs Oct. 6-15, with the 21st Asian Contents & Film Market held Oct. 10-13.

India’s Epic Studios has partnered with Rusk Media Private Limited (RMPL) to produce 50 original vertical drama series, aiming to build the country’s largest library of owned vertical-drama intellectual property.

The slate will span genres including mythology, drama, mystery, thriller and romance. The series will premiere on Alright! TV, Rusk Media’s platform for original vertical-drama content, combining Epic Studios’ background in television, streaming and film development with Rusk Media’s digital-first distribution reach.

Aditya Pittie, managing director of The Epic Company, said, “Vertical dramas are experiencing massive global and domestic growth, reshaping how content is consumed. For us, this partnership is about driving true scale and building the biggest library of owned vertical-drama IPs in the country. A slate of 50 original series is just the beginning – by the middle of next year, we aim to have over 250 titles, and becoming one of the largest independent IP owners in this space. Partnering with Rusk Media and Alright! TV creates a seamless, one-stop ecosystem that blends powerful storytelling with unprecedented volume.”

Karanvir Sofat, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Rusk Media, cast the deal as a continuation of Alright! TV’s push to build high-quality content for younger Indian audiences, saying, “Epic has been a long-standing partner and this slate collaboration reinforces the commitment to deliver premium, engaging entertainment for digital audiences, that combine compelling storytelling with the pace and accessibility today’s viewers expect.”

The Epic Company, formerly known as IN10 Media Network, is the parent of Epic Studios and is led by Pittie. Epic Studios, itself formerly Juggernaut Productions and MovieVerse Studio, is headed by Vivek Krishnani as CEO of its film division and Samar Khan as CEO of its OTT and TV division.

Rusk Media, founded in 2019, produces mobile-first entertainment aimed at Gen Z and millennial audiences. Beyond Alright! TV, its content reaches viewers through platforms including Amazon MX Player and JioHotstar, alongside its advertising arm, Rusk Ads.

Uh oh, Spaghetti O’s!

Dane Cook‘s brother stole $12 million from the comedian and hid bricks of cash inside pasta sauce, a new documentary reveals.

Premiering on Sept. 29, “Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story” delves into the financial drama that absorbed the blockbuster comedian in 2008, when his half-brother and business manager, Darryl McCauley, was charged with embezzling at least $12 million from Cook.

McCauley pleaded guilty to larceny, embezzlement and other charges (along with his wife, Erika) and was ordered to pay back the $12 million. He served a six-year prison sentence and then disappeared entirely. “Where is he? What has he done? How does this end?” Cook narrates in the documentary trailer.

In “Funny Money,” Cook says growing up, he and McCauley both wanted to be stand-up comedians. McCauley ultimately became a corrections officer, while Cook went on to become one of the most commercially successful comics of the 2000s. Cook describes McCauley in the documentary as “a person who spent so much time pretending to be something he wasn’t.”

Working as the handler of his finances, McCauley began withdrawing sums of $20,000, $50,000 and even $100,000 from Cook’s accounts without him noticing. “I was starting to feel something that I couldn’t really identify,” Cook admits in the trailer. “Was he hiding it in different places, stockpiling this money?”

Finally, it was revealed that McCauley had stolen a massive amount of money from his famous brother, hiding piles of cash in a safe and even wrapping it in plastic before stashing it inside pasta sauce containers — a storyline straight out of “The Bear.”

While an investigation determined that McCauley had embezzled at least $12 million, Cook believes the amount could be even higher. “I do believe that there’s money out there,” he says in the trailer. “I believe there’s people that know more.”

“Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story” will be available to stream on demand beginning Sept. 29.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigation into Hayden Panettiere’s death, according to ABC News.

The DEA is entering a joint effort with South Carolina’s Greenville Police Department and the local coroner’s office, according to TMZ.

Panettiere died Sunday night at age 36. The official cause of death has not yet been determined. In her 2026 memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” Panettiere went into detail about her years-long struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.

After news broke of Panettiere’s death, tributes from across Hollywood came pouring in online. On Wednesday, Jack Coleman, who played her father on “Heroes,” shared an emotional tribute on Instagram.

“I’m heartbroken. I couldn’t begin to put my thoughts into words until now, and they will be inadequate,” Coleman wrote. “I’ve loved Hayden since day one of the pilot of ‘Heroes,’ 20 years ago, when she introduced herself by shouting ‘daddy’ and throwing her arms around me. From that day on, she called me daddio. She was Haydini, because she was a magician.”

Christy Carlson Romano, the Disney Channel star who played Ren Stevens on “Even Stevens” and voiced the titular teen spy on “Kim Possible,” likewise shared a remembrance for Panettiere on Wednesday. In an essay for Elle, she compared the trauma of childhood fame to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head.

“The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold,” she wrote. “We are children when the public wants to feel protective of us, professionals when the industry wants to profit from us, and spoiled celebrities when we eventually show symptoms of having been both… Early fame is like CTE. Not as a diagnosis. As a way of thinking about repeated impact. We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure, and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood.”

By the early ’90s, it had become clear that “Die Hard” was the most paradigmatic thriller of its era, imitated in scores of knockoffs that kept the spirit but changed the locale. Thus, we got “Die Hard on a Plane” (“Passenger 57,” “Air Force One”), “Die Hard on a Bus” (“Speed”), “Die Hard on a Train” (“Under Siege 2: Dark Territory”), “Die Hard in the White House” (“Olympus Has Fallen”), and the one that finally ran the cycle aground — “Die Hard on a Boat,” which served the first “Under Siege” well enough but stalled the overblown, too-slow-for-speed “Speed 2: Cruise Control.”

But “Mutiny,” a revenge thriller set aboard a giant cargo ship, shows you that there’s life in the “Die Hard on a Boat” concept. The film makes you think of Bruce Willis in other ways too, since its star, Jason Statham, boasts a macho chrome dome and offs his enemies with a blithe viciousness that evokes Willis at his ruthless best.

From Sly and Arnold to “John Wick,” mano-a-mano fight scenes in movies tend to revel in their showdown-to-the-death choreography, the more elaborate the better. “Mutiny” is different. The killings happen as fast as Cole Reed (Statham), a fallen-London-cop-turned-bodyguard out to avenge the murder of his Bangkok tycoon boss, can make them happen.

With bring-the-pain timing, he smashes heads and snaps arms and uses whatever cutting tools are available, at one point ripping a foe’s cheek with the hook of an open lock; moments later, when he jabs a dagger deeper into that same wound, it’s the essence of efficiency. Cole, who has to maneuver his way around 20 savage crew members, each of whom will need to be killed, doesn’t waste a homicidal movement. Yet it all feels brutally spontaneous. At one point he smashes the thug he’s holding, pauses to machine-gun another, coldcocks the original guy, then guns down two more, all in the space of nine seconds. The way Statham works, we should call this “Die Easy.”

In the film’s opening half hour, set in the luxe steel-and-marble corporate echelons of Bangkok, Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), the worldly but now retiring Thai shipping-magnate boss Cole has become close to (the two love their chess games), celebrates the sale of his company, though a traitor within has other plans. As Cole is driving Tibu back from a passing-of-the-torch party, the two are ambushed, and Tibu is killed. The cops are in on it; it’s a major conspiracy. (Is Tibu’s ingenuous son, played by Chaneil Kular, in on it too? The film keeps you guessing.) Cole sneaks his way aboard the Artemis, the cargo ship on which one of the conspirators is set to make his escape, and it’s there that he discovers an ever darker conspiracy, in the form of a shipping container that’s full of desperate human cargo from Thailand, most of them children.

That feels like a lift from Angel Studios, but in its way it enriches the revenge plot. Cole isn’t just getting even — he’s saving the world from some very sick evil. His ally is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the ship’s third mate, who’s an embattled innocent in all this. His antagonist is Marko, the ship’s captain, an amusingly middle-aged European bruiser played by the Danish actor Roland Møller in tattoos and an elegant beard, with an accent that’s a little bit Arnold, a little bit this-is-Matthias-Schoenaerts-in-15-years. He’s no Alan Rickman, but he’ll do.

“Mutiny” was directed by Jean-François Richet, who made the pretty good Gerard Butler movie “Plane,” and here, once again, he shows a flair for staging extreme misanthropic violence with a human touch. Richet turns the ship into an enthralling character, with its pipes and catwalks and tunnels and tubes, some of which become weaponry. Statham is one of the film’s producers, and you can tell that he wants you to feel each smashed limb and gunshot to the face. The ship’s crew members are anonymous enough, yet each killing is staged as an instant execution. It’s not that the violence is shocking — it’s that Jason Statham means it. (He’s a true actor of action.) At the preview showing I attended, people near me were laughing at the killings, something I almost never do, but at the climax, when Cole reached for a harpoon gun and used it, I had to give in and chuckle myself. It’s all in the timing — the rhythm of revenge murder that’s perfect, because it’s done by any means necessary. Jason Statham is keeping that dream alive.

In an era where AI music generation has ruptured the music industry, a social-forward music remixing app is aiming to stand out among the rest — with the help of one of the major labels.

Hook, an AI-powered app where fans can create minute-long clips that remixes or mashes up a licensed artist’s track to share on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, has struck a licensing deal with Universal Music Group to bring aboard a suite of the label’s artist catalogs from its host of sublabels — including Republic Records, Capitol Records, Virgin Music Group and more — for fans to experiment with. The deal expands the yearslong relationship between the two companies, which saw UMG push Hook to iron out its product experience to help convince artists why they should allow the platform’s users to modify their work.

“What we made sure is that [for] everything created on Hook, the artists have full control around the security needs that they have,” CEO Gaurav Sharma told Variety. “All the things that we had to do in figuring out streaming back in 2010 is effectively what we spent the last two years working on with UMG. So the idea of like I believe these sorts of licenses are possible through collaboration. It doesn’t need to be artists, labels, tech companies fighting each other.”

The company has spent years since its 2024 launch serving almost as a response to AI generation companies like Suno and Udio, opting against music generation and instead for a fan and social-focused approach to licensed music. Fans can apply filters to songs on the platform and produce “Hooks” to add to their own videos for social media, with the artist retaining ownership of the track and making money off the use of their song.

It has struck deals with labels such as Glassdoor Records and Downtown Music and has brought on songs featuring artists such as Justin Bieber, Teddy Swims, the Weeknd, Ty Dolla $ign, Kendrick Lamar, Charli xcx and more, a roster that the UMG deal will significantly expand. (Both companies declined to share what new artists will be immediately available.)

Michael Nash, UMG’s executive vice president, chief digital officer, said the collaboration stemmed from fans’ focus on social-media platforms as a method for engaging with an artist’s work, as social media platforms were a sector for the industry that has been “significantly under monetized and substantially disrupted by short format.”

“We’re eager to collaborate with innovators that are targeting purpose-built technology to go after some of the predominant use cases that empirically exist right now in the social sphere,” Nash said. “Invoking Oscar Wilde here, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then perhaps co-creation is one of the sincerest forms of fandom.”

Hook is financially backed by by Khosla Ventures, Point72, Imaginary Ventures and former Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s Waverley Capital, among others. Bronfman told Variety he viewed Hook as a unique opportunity to marry technology with an artist’s creative intent.

“That, I think, is very different than what I would call sort of generative AI or AI slop, which is just music’s [that’s] been written, and some AI algorithm changes it up,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a lasting phenomenon. I think people care about artists. They they want to go see artists. They believe in artists, and artists believe in in them.”

Bronfman wouldn’t comment on WMG’s settlement deal with Suno, leaving that for the labels to figure out. UMG and Sony Music are still in active litigation against Suno for alleged copyright infringement.

The deal also reflects UMG’s continued investment in the changing era of music consumption, which includes a legal settlement with Udio and, in May, a deal with Spotify to power the streaming service’s AI remixing and covers tool. Nash said the two deals represented “extremely complementary partnerships” in line with UMG’s “partnership portfolio approach.”

“Hook is enabling the specific, empirically demonstrated, very prominent and popular use cases of fan interaction, and it’s all about social,” Nash said. “It’s just a very specific targeted use case that is unique in our partnership portfolio.”

For Sharma, Spotify’s approach to remixing represented “validation.”

“Hook is focused on social, on community-driven creation and consumption,” he said. “When a user creates on Hook and they share to their TikTok, and these creations also exist within communities on Hook, tied to the activities, the feelings expressed in the larger [user-generated content] that that person made. So when we say social music, it’s not just the music; it’s the larger expression that the person has with the video and everything else around it… I believe that people will go to Spotify to hear how artists express themselves through music, and our hope is Hook can be that destination where people hear how social media expresses through music.”