Tag: Entertainment – Variety

Hayden Panettiere, known for her roles on “Heroes,” “Nashville” and in “Scream 4” and “Scream VI,” died on Sunday. Her rep confirmed her death to ABC News. A cause of death was not immediately known.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her — and to the millions who watched her onscreen,” her rep told ABC.

Panettiere had been on screen since 1994, at age 5, starting on soap operas “One Life to Live” — appearing on 27 episodes — and later, “Guiding Light,” starring on 45. In 2000, she landed a breakout role in “Remember the Titans,” and in 2006, she joined the cast of “Heroes” as Claire Bennett, portraying the cheerleader in 73 episodes of the NBC drama.

Panettiere later earned two Golden Globe nominations for playing Juliette Barnes on “Nashville.” She starred in 128 episodes from 2012 to 2018.

On the film side, she is most known for her role as Kirby in 2011’s “Scream 4.” She became such a fan favorite that she was then asked to return for 2023’s “Scream VI.” She also co-starred with Michelle Trachtenberg in “Ice Princess” and appeared in “Bring It On: All or Nothing.”

Raised in Palisades, N.Y., her mother was a soap opera actress and her father was a fire captain. As a child, she appeared on shows including “Ally McBeal” and “Malcolm in the Middle.”

Panettiere published her first book, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” in May of this year. In it, she shared many stories from her life in the limelight, including details of her troubled relationship with her mother and abuse she endured through her life in Hollywood.

She had also been open through the years about her struggle with alcohol and drugs. In 2020, she spent time at a rehab facility and got sober. In 2023, her younger brother Jansen died unexpectedly of a heart condition at 28. “When something that massive has happened to you, you really learn to pick your fights and just not let the little things upset you,” she told People magazine in 2024 about the death. “Because once something so horrific, so deep, so catastrophic happens in your life, there’s not much that can really rock you.”

She made headlines following the People interview, when fans voiced concerns over her slurred speech, something she later spoke about via an Instagram post. “I hadn’t slept for two days prior to the shoot due to one of my dogs who was recovering from an emergency surgical procedure,” she shared at the time, also responding to claims about medication she may be on. “I was exhausted. My rep stopped the interview early as it became obvious that I was fading — especially as the subject matter became heavier… Grief looks different on everyone. Whether or not I am on medication is none of anyone’s business and is between me and my doctor.”

She continued, “Mental health is so important, and I hope those reading this now understand that what you say hiding behind a computer screen can have a detrimental impact on someone.”

She had a daughter, Kaya, with boxer Wladimir Klitschko, who retained custody due to Panettiere’s struggles with addiction and postpartum depression.

“My name is Noah Kahan and I am here to make you fucking miserable!” the biggest male rock star on the charts right now announced almost at the outset of his sold-out show Saturday night at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Stadium. In this, he was unsuccessful, but to Kahan’s credit, he did not really try very hard to turn the 57,000-strong crowd into a miserablists’ convention. There was some truth ungirding Kahan’s introductory joke, given how much of the song catalog that has made him a superstar is devoted to what he would call “intrusive thoughts” about disconnection, loneliness and unworthiness. But the celebrative spirit of the two-and-a-half-hour show kept all of those undercurrents at bay, to maybe be better experienced when you’re back home, just the records and you and your neurodivergence. In concert, Kahan’s about nothing but putting on a pure jubilee — as good a time as you’re likely to have in any concert venue, large or small, in 2026.

L.A. locals will remember that he was easily selling out two nights at the Hollywood Bowl in mid-2024, so his instantaneous sellout of the Rose Bowl isn’t that much further of a leap. (He probably could have sold out two here, too, if the tour planners had left room for multi-nighters in his schedule.) But this wave of Kahan-mania hasn’t been going on for so long that we can’t still be impressed and maybe even puzzled by the sheer unlikeliness of it. Humble singer-songwriter comes along singing about bare trees, cold morning drives, dead friends, divorced parents and all the uncertainties anyone in his twenties in the most forlorn parts of the Northeast could face, and suddenly he’s as big as BTS? Go figure. You get the sense from Kahan that he hasn’t completely figured out himself what went so right in singing so much feel-wrong music: “I remember playing at the Troubadour and being happy if that was the rest of my career,” he told the massive crowd. “I’m grateful as fuck to be here with y’all.” That’s a common sentiment from a touring superstar, but there’s a sense that Kahan really might be as happily bewildered as the rest of us about how songs this personal and cloudy came to captivate even sunny California.  

Anyway, he’s good — really, really, really good – so that’s a gift horse we won’t look in the mouth. As far as pop stars who happen to also be thoughtful and excellent songwriters go, Kahan is in the upper ranks. If anything, he’s underrated, at least by some of the cognoscenti, who tend not to know how to think about it when something that falls loosely under the rubrick of Americana makes it big, other than to mark it down as some sort of curious throwback to Mumford & Sons’ stomp-and-holler folk-rock mini-revolution. It is partially that, but Kahan is also really a contemporary to Taylor Swift, in the way that he fills his songs with peculiarly personal details that leave fans hanging on every lyric, on the way to doing satisfying stadium romps where the faithful will shout back every long-memorized random aside. (Not right in your ear, if you’re lucky.) He’d probably get more credit for just how strong the writing is if he’d stayed in a proper niche, but some overnight sensations can’t be helped.

His most recent album, “The Great Divide,” is one of the year’s most commercially sturdy records, not having been out of the top 10 since it debuted in April and not likely to leave any time soon. The 20-track (in its deluxe version) set might be even stronger in its storytelling than the star-making “Stick Season,” so it was not to the Rose Bowl set’s detriment at all that he performed 14 of its tracks. One of those songs, “Orbiter,” is about his experience at the 2024 Grammys, feeling like a loser when he lost the best new artist category to Victoria Monet. (Remarkably, that’s one of just two Grammy categories Kahan has even been up for, the other being as a featured artist on someone else’s country song. ) Being back in the greater L.A. area for this show, he used the Rose Bowl as his confessional.

“This is not gonna endear me to the crowd,” Kahan said, gearing up to explain why this is not his favorite city. “L.A. has been home to some of the worst days of my life and my music career. I’m sorry, it’s not your guys’ fault, but I’ve always felt a little out of place here… I always felt like when I came here I was auditioning for something, even though I wasn’t. I never felt like I fit… I got my feelings so hurt by losing awards and losing things and feeling like I was entitled to shit that I wasn’t entitled to. None of us are entitled to anything in this business, or in our lives, really. Um, and I thought about why I wanted to keep going, and it was for my wife, my mom, and it was for you all. So this is a song about you three — my three best friends.”

In the fairy-tale version of this story, his team would submit his song about losing a Grammy, and it would win a Grammy. That won’t happen, not least of all because there are more obvious focus tracks than “Orbiter” to put in for possible nominations. Even then, who knows if Recording Academy voters will be yet ready to give him his due? If “The Great Divide” doesn’t get much Grammy love, it might only help further drive his art. Kahan seems to thrive, on this latest album, on exploring some of the vagaries that come with getting a lot of attention, and how it affects relationships with family and old friends and even (maybe) especially his own self-image. And it’s pretty interesting stuff. There have been a number of albums this year that go into the side effects of fame — Ariana Grande’s in a big way, Phoebe Bridgers’ to a lesser extent — but no one is quite so humble or conflicted about it as Kahan. He projects himself onto old acquaintances or family members, laying into him in ways it’s unlikely very many of them have in real life. One song that was a big hit Saturday night, “Dashboard,” is a song in which, effectively, he inhabits the role of someone who is calling Noah Kahan an asshole for four minutes. It’s endearing and very catchy, even if perhaps the asshole in question doth protest too much.

In reality, Kahan’s ascent strikes people as a case of good guys finishing first… as they always do, right? I was struck by how Chappell Roan characterized him when he brought her out to duet at the Rose Bowl. Her surprise appearance late in the set was so that they could trade verses and harmonize on the choruses of her song “California,” a ballad that shares some themes of dislocation and dissociation that are common to Kahan’s own geographically specific songs. As recognition of her red tresses turned into a roar, Kahan sang Roan’s praises, describing “California” as “the first song I ever heard of Kayleigh’s, and the reason I fell in love with her music. And I’m just really proud of her.”

Roan returned the appreciation, saying, “Noah always stands up for me, seriously.” (Fans likely understood this to reference how, in March, Kahan publicly had her back when Roan was taking some flack for protesting the aggressiveness of professional autograph scalpers.) Roan doubled down on Kahan’s virtue: “He’s a good person — for real.” Now, “good person” may not be as reliable a way to trump up a rock star as something, like, say, “bad-ass,” but we have the feeling his career will survive the rumors of his virtue.

A few things have changed since Kahan headlined the Bowl two years ago, besides the major infusion of “Great Divide” songs. For one thing, there were fewer extended comic monologues, which I missed, though I wouldn’t argue that any of the 27 songs in the set should be tossed out for the sake of a funny story. Kahan may be figuring that he gets to exercise that muscle enough on social media, or that his fans have already heard plenty abut his family dynamics, whether in past tour patter or in his excellent recent Netflix documentary, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” which went in a lot deeper than a moment’s anecdote could. Anyway, he was witty enough, and telling enough, in passing. In “All My Love,” a new song where he catches an old friend or lover up on recent developments in his life, he sings of his amicably divorced parents, “My folks still talk, but they speak in these two-word sentences.” In concert, he found time before the next line to quickly add: “And now they’re up to seven-word sentences!”

Kahan’s voice is one of the things about him that may be underrated. He sounds like he’s constantly on the verge of breaking into a falsetto, but not quite needing to go there, although if he does, it’s as sweet and expressive as you’d hope. As with a lot of singers we take for granted, you don’t really think about how strong he is until something goes amiss. There was just such a moment in Saturday’s show, when he went to sing “Pain Is Cold Water” — a touching acoustic song that he only does occasionally, acoustically, on the C-stage — and his voice cracked in the very first line. “Oh my God!” he blurted, stopping it and starting again to give it a fighting chance. It proceeded flawlessly from there, with Kahan almost apologizing for how slick it turned out. “Sorry to go all Christina Aguilera on you after sounding like a 13-year-old boy,” he joked.

The biggest difference from his “Stick Season” touring, anyhow, is — surprise — production values. This tour has a nifty conceit: a physical rooftop that cyclically fell and rose to provide the roofline for different structures that changed as a result of digital projections combined with pillars and/or porches that stagehands would bring out. At first it was a cabin he and his six-piece band would perform in front of, with an old beater of a Volvo parked outside. Later on, the cabin became a general store, and the car turned into a Vermont police cruiser — just in time, inevitably, for one of his signature songs, “Dial Drunk.” This presumably fictional tale of a DUI arrest was dramatized (or comedicized) with a trooper actually slamming Kahan against the hood, followed by cameras catching just the right angle on him inside the vehicle as he lamented the girlfriend who would not pick up. Aside from a few agreeable band poses, “Dial Drunk” was the only time of the night there was anything that might be considered schtick… and in a stadium setting, it’s hard to begrudge that crowd-pleasing of a moment.

By contrast, when the braided star went up onto the hovering rooftop to sing a single number atop the prop with his acoustic guitar, “Willing and Able,” he seemed to be having a genuinely emotional moment, which much of the quieted crowd definitely observed. If he was just acting his way through that number, no harm done. Either way, it says a lot that Kahan would take one of the quietest numbers from the sprawling “Great Divide” and make a somber, solitary place for it in his big rock show, trusting that the subtle storytelling about two old friends uneasily dancing around their resentments and suspicions will be intutively understood or embraced by a crowd of tens of thousands. Violin player Nina de Vitry provided an especially tasteful complement on this ballad, making one fiddle sound like a whole string section.

Kahan also made sure to give solo spots to the rest of his accomplished ensemble — Zubin Thakkar, Dylan Jones, Alex Bachari, Marcos Valles and Mike Harris. The six-piece backing crew turned into a nine-piece when they were joined for the three encore numbers by a three-person horn section, allowing the music to take on a Springsteenian/”Wrecking Ball” quality for the extended finale.

The way Kahan was able to choreograph this fiddle- and banjo-laden group across different parts of the stage to visually elongate the party was reminiscent of what another player in the superstar-Americana space, Zach Bryan, has done with the players at his stadium shows. But any thinking about similarities along those lines inevitably leads to thinking about how fundamentally different Bryan’s and Kahan’s personalities are. Bryan is sympathetic but still surly… or at least his offstage shenanigans lead you to feel he could pop off without a lot of provocation. Kahan, on the other hand, is absolutely your BFF… and the worst thing he is going to do is ghost you, and then come back to town and apologize for ghosting you, and then write a song about how he knows you resent him for patronizing you, because he’s empathetic that way. Very important distinction there.

Kahan is one of the good guys not least of all because of the honest ways in which he talks about substance abuse recovery and mental health, with songs that do such a bravura job of exploring what it is like to, as he says, have a busy head. We probably shouldn’t judge artists by the signs that fans bring to their performances, but I had to take some amusement when the cameras at the Rose Bowl began showing glimpses of the fans down front during some of the final songs of Saturday’s show. Instead of asking for a request or a hug or a birthday shout-out, the camera caught a young woman holding up a big, wordy sign that read, in part: “Thank you for breaking the chain of generational trauma!”

A different kind of artist calls for a different kind of fandom… a therapeutized one that knows manic elation when they see it.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 premiere of “Lanterns,” now streaming on HBO Max.

What kind of superhero show has the guts to kill off its lead character in the first episode?

Of course, just because Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is found dead in the bleachers by John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and town sheriff Kerry (Kelly MacDonald) in the middle of a brutal 2026 winter doesn’t mean audiences won’t get to see Green Lantern in action in future episodes — the show sets up a non-linear structure that jumps among different storylines from the very opening scene, which begins in 1996 and sets up a young John’s connection to taking the Green Lantern mantle.

But clueing audiences in on the fact that the show’s protagonist’s days are numbered is bold for the comic book genre. And it makes for one hell of a cliffhanger for the series premiere.

“Whether it’s the right cliffhanger or not is basically in the hands of the audience now,” “Lanterns” co-creator Damon Lindelof tells Variety. “But one of the very first things that was part of the premise was that this is a murder mystery with Green Lantern solving it, and then you sort of start at, ‘Well, who gets murdered and why are we supposed to care about them?’ The more that we talked about it, the more that it kept coming back to the idea of, ‘What if it was one of them?’”

“Lanterns,” the latest show under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s newly expanded DCU, follows Hal as he is forced to take John under his wing. As the Green Lantern, Hal has the power to create material items through his ring, and acts as an intergalactic space officer protecting humanity from extraterrestrial threats. Things take a dark turn, however, after a series of unexplainable deaths draw Hal and John to a small town in Nebraska.

When Chandler first read the ending of the episode, he “cheered” at Hal’s demise.

“Not just for the storyline and all that, but what a way great way to end the first episode of this show,” Chandler says.

MacDonald, who says Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning performance in “Fargo” informed the way she played the sheriff just trying to keep her small town from falling apart, dreaded filming the scene when she discovers Hal’s dead body. “Just the thought of what was going to happen, I did not look forward to it. It was quite emotional, seeing him like that,” she says.

Lindelof, who created HBO’s Emmy-winning “Watchmen” TV series that released in 2019 — bringing a grounded approach to it — recognizes the opportunity to subvert audience expectations from what they’ve come to expect in the genre.

“That you basically watched eight episodes and everybody had an adventure, and then at the end of the adventure, it’s just time for the next adventure,” Lindelof says. “So the idea that it would have real emotional stakes [was important]. But most importantly, this is a story about a guy who doesn’t want to give up the ring — and a guy who wants the ring. And it was important for us to message to the audience that we weren’t gonna try to have our cake and eat it too.”

The episode sets up Hal and John’s budding mentor-mentee dynamic in a 2016 timeline, with Hal being a reluctant teacher. The tension between them comes to a head after the two arrive in Nebraska and begin investigating a school shooting that Hal believes is a front for aliens.

“There’s a moment where we’re in the stands and we were literally this close. And it was a moment very early in their dynamic. Everything in John wants to just rumble in that moment, but he can’t and Hal knows he can’t,” Pierre says. “It was just so fun.”

“It’s like making fun of the animals at the zoo behind the plate of glass,” Chandler adds with a laugh. “He’s can’t touch me, but I can do what I want!”

Chandler says Hal has a deep respect for John from the beginning, even if it’s unspoken. “I knew that he could literally grab my neck and snap it,” he says.

Seeing Chandler sit up on a pair of bleachers overlooking a football field may give viewers who were introduced to the Emmy-winning actor with “Friday Night Lights” a feeling of déjà vu. Chandler felt those memories for the series that turns 20 this fall.

“There’s no doubt when I walked out there, it was a lot of different thoughts and emotions going through me,” Chandler says — although he never asked the writers if the callback was intentional.

Overall, Pierre commends the “Lanterns” writers’ room, and is excited to see how the show’s weekly release model will play into the conversations fans have online.

“They leave you — ‘want’ doesn’t even feel like a strong enough word. It’s needing to know what happens next,” Pierre says, teasingly. “I imagine there are going to be a few weeks where audiences are, in the healthiest, most excitable way, furious that they don’t know what is coming next.”

Dwayne Johnson has been officially crowned a legend — a Disney Legend that is.

On Sunday at D23, Johnson was honored with the hall-of-fame-style award from the Walt Disney Company. From “Jungle Cruise” to the “Moana” franchise and “Race to Witch Mountain,” Johnson is no stranger to the world of Disney. But as he took the stage to receive the honor, Johnson emphasized that his most important role is that of father.

During his off-the-cuff speech, Johnson recalled the first time he took his eldest daughter Simone to Disneyland. She was five years old, and they had breakfast with the princesses.

“I was in my 20s … I was trying to figure that stuff out at that time: how I was going to be a father, how I was going to be a husband, man, etc,” he recalled. “But I remember one of the princesses said, ‘Close your eyes and make a wish.’ And I’ll never forget, [Simone] closed her eyes and she made a wish.”

Johnson continued, getting a little emotional at the memory: “I just remember that moment on my daughter’s face. I had never seen that before. She was just so into making a wish. … I said, ‘God, I wonder what was going through the little mind.’ And it’s just experiences like that that we create that I know she’ll never forget. I’ll never forget. That’s the beauty of Disney. That’s the beauty also of being a Disney Legend.”

As it turns out, the Disney Legends ceremony took place just after Simone’s 25th birthday, so he led the full arena in a “Happy Birthday” tribute to her.

During his emotional remarks, Johnson also shouted out his younger daughters, Jasmine and Tiana, who were watching at home. “They asked me, ‘What does it mean to be a Disney Legend?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Well, it means we get free tickets.’”

Johnson was presented with his Disney Legends award by his “Jungle Cruise” and “The Smashing Machine” co-star Emily Blunt, who made a surprise appearance at the award to wax poetic about her friend.

“When I first met Dwayne Johnson, I had assumed wrongly that he would have the energy of a man who was a sort of walking suplex,” Blunt said. “But the bravado of ‘The Rock’ was actually nowhere to be seen.” Johnson’s persona as “The Rock” is just a performance, she explained. “It’s the performance of a lifetime

“What I was met with was someone who was so disarmingly wise, gentle, curious, totally unpretentious,” Blunt continued. “And not to say this one’s an angel, all right, because he’s not. He’s a non-conforming, rule-breaking, mold-breaking rebel.”

Emily Blunt calls Dwayne Johnson “disarmingly wise, gentle, curious and totally unpretentious” while honoring him as a Disney Legend at #D23:

“And that’s not to say this one’s an angel, all right, because he’s not. He’s a non-conforming, rule-breaking, mold-breaking rebel.” pic.twitter.com/fBwRhIyFq6

— Variety (@Variety) August 16, 2026

This summer, Johnson brought “Moana” back to the big screen for a live-action voyage and reprised his role as the demi-god Maui. In the lead-up to the movie’s debut, Johnson spoke about bringing Pacific Islander culture to the masses, and why the “Moana” cinematic universe matters for representation and visibility. Johnson, who also produced the movie, said he didn’t see himself represented in media when he was growing up: “‘Indiana Jones’ inspired me. When I was 8 years old watching Harrison Ford, I was like, ‘I want to be that guy,’ but that guy didn’t look like me.”

As mentioned, the “Moana” movies are just part of Johnson’s legacy with the company. In 2024, Seven Bucks Productions, the film and TV content label founded by Johnson and Dany Garcia, signed a first-look deal with The Walt Disney Company to develop films for theatrical and streaming. Last year, 20th Television closed a first-look TV deal with the company.

The Disney Legends Awards program is a 39-year tradition of The Walt Disney Company, which began when Fred MacMurray (“The Shaggy Dog,” “The Absent-Minded Professor,” “The Happiest Millionaire”) was honored in 1987. Including this year’s honorees, a total of 329 Disney Legends have been named.

The 2026 Disney Legends honorees include former Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger, Anne Hathaway, Susan Egan and Alan Tudyk, for bringing “unforgettable characters to life on-screen and on-stage.” The Jonas brothers are being honored for “shaping a generation of Disney music,” Lin‑Manuel Miranda for “groundbreaking songwriting for modern Disney favorites” and Eric Goldberg for his “artistry and animation.”

Past Disney Legends include Tim Allen, Dame Julie Andrews, Angela Bassett, Tony Baxter, Kristen Bell, James Cameron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Miley Cyrus, Marc Davis, Robert Downey Jr., Harrison Ford, Annette Funicello, Josh Gad, Whoopi Goldberg, Jonathan Groff, Steve Jobs, Sir Elton John, Dame Angela Lansbury, Stan Lee, George Lucas, Steve Martin, Burny Mattinson, Alan Menken, Idina Menzel, Hayley Mills, Fess Parker, Ellen Pompeo, Robin Roberts, the Sherman Brothers, Marty Sklar, Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Walters, Betty White, John Williams, Robin Williams and Oprah Winfrey.

Yesterday’s punk, grunge, and rebel-outsider upstarts have an uncanny way of evolving into today’s elder statesmen of respectable infamy. (Hello, John Waters, Patti Smith, John Lydon, Henry Rollins, and Robin Byrd.) But it’s doubtful that Tom Six will ever be in the mix of latter-day prestige. His desire to stand apart from it is too great.

In case he’s not on your radar, Tom Six is the Dutch director of the “Human Centipede” trilogy, a series of horror films so grotesque that the idea of sitting through them would be a deal-breaker for 97 percent of moviegoers. Six was after the other three percent: the kind who feed off shock and transgression, and who recognize that a horror movie that makes hardened veterans of the genre feel like they have to watch parts of it peeking between their fingers is either a movie that has gone too far…or one that’s the definition of what true horror is. The “Human Centipede” films — especially “The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence),” a hellacious “Götterdämmerung” of torture porn — were both.

Released in 2009, 2011, and 2015 (and watched mostly on VOD), the “Human Centipede” films carved out an extreme niche on the edge of global movie culture. Yet they also found a perverse mainstream foothold, becoming a cheeky meme (sorry! pun intended) referenced on “South Park,” “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Deadpool 2,” “Beavis and Butt-Head,” and the Childish Gambino video for “Bonfire.” Tom Mix wasn’t aiming for respectability; he was going as far as possible in the opposite direction. But he was courting notoriety and fame, and he did it by working in the carny-barker freak-show tradition of exploitation-world self-marketers like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, Ted V. Mikels, and (of course) John Waters. These were filmmakers who specialized in selling a vibe of on-the-fringe danger, creating an underground mystique that was part of what made them successful. (By the time Waters was done peddling “Pink Flamingos” on the midnight-movie circuit, he had made a fortune, which became the basis of his trash-art empire.)

“The End of Tom Six” is about how Tom Six made and sold his films in the same spirit. But it’s also about how his dark dream came crashing down. The movie, which premieres this weekend on YouTube, is a DIY schlock- umentary that’s also a real documentary, one that captures how Six’s life became his own private horror film, after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

He first learned that he had the condition 14 years ago, and for a long time he was able to manage its symptoms comfortably (and in secret). But MS is incurable and progressive. For the last six years, Six has lived as a recluse in Amsterdam, lying in bed and going out twice a day for decaf coffee (the regular brew is too hard on his shattered nerves). “The End of Tom Six” is a self-styled confessional memoir in which Six fuses his life and career and illness into a kind of parable. He’s asking: Is there room anymore for movies like his, that stray over the line? And if not, what does that mean?

Shot in black-and-white, “The End of Tom Six” opens with noirish images of an Amsterdam canal, lined with street lanterns that look right out of the London of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The images are accompanied by a doomy romantic Hollywood/classical score, and then, in old-fashioned letters, the words “The End” appear (with the added words “…of Tom Six”). So this will be the story of the end of Tom Six’s life. But it’s really the story of how he made his movies, and sold his image, and is still doing it, to the point that you may wonder at moments if his battle with MS is actually an Andy Kaufman stunt. (I don’t think it is; but one wouldn’t put it past him.)

The film moves inside Six’s home, where he’s lying in a paisley silk bathrobe on an antique Chinese opium bed, wearing a dandified mustache and Panama hat and dark aviator shades, smoking a Havana cigar, looking like Hunter Thompson’s hip Euro brother crossed with Michael O’Donoghue crossed with a svelte version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mix is surrounded by a small crew and entourage: his paramour, Marci (Maartje Willems), who beams and insinuates like Morticia Addams; the film’s megaphone-wielding director, also played by Six; the camera man, boom operator, and butler, all played by the dwarf actor Edwin Alofs; a uniformed Nazi (Servaes Nelissen) who’s on hand to gloweringly comb the proceedings for trigger warnings and ideas worthy of censorship; and a first assistant director (Demian Kurosa) who looks like a circus tattooed man and talks with a post-operative vocoder.

Six keeps cutting between himself and this kitsch gallery of jokers, tossing in B-movie “All About Eve” exchanges (“Alcohol is killing you slowly, baby.” “That’s okay, I’m not in a hurry”), which keeps the tone light. It also purges the movie of self-pity and helps to break up what is basically an amusing and irascibly witty Tom Six monologue of self-justification. Is “The End of Tom Six” for fans only? No question. But I count myself among the three percent who watched “The Human Centipede 2” and found it to contain a hint of the awesome within its awfulness, the same way I felt when I read the Marquis de Sade’s “The 120 Days of Sodom.” These are not works you recommend to people. But they’re works that, in their sick way, might be said to expand one’s vision of human evil.

I was interested, after 15 years, to discover what sort of dude Tom Six is, and to hear him explain to his audience why he made these movies, and about how it shaped his experience (“To this day, I get marriage proposals and death threats”), and to listen to his diary of debilitating illness. “The End of Tom Six” is not a work of true-life body horror. Six describes his symptoms, and drug regimen (Oxycodone for the chronic pain), with tough understatement. At one point, though, he does admit, “I’m a fucking living X-ray. I’ve got massive brain fog from all the medications. My thoughts are like scrambled eggs.”

What he wants to talk about is the movie he made after the “Human Centipede” trilogy. It’s called “The Onania Club,” and it’s the story of a group of chic women in Los Angeles (Chloë Sevigny is one of the stars) who get aroused by the misery and suffering of others. It is, as Six describes it, a story about the opposite of empathy. But in that sense, it’s about the loss of empathy, and maybe the end of it.

Tom Six made “The Onania Club” in 2019, and though he had struggled to find a distributor for “The Human Centipede” and its sequels, he eventually did. With those films having crossed over into the pop consciousness, he figured he’d have no problem nailing down a distributor for a movie less grotesque and more serious. But no distributor would touch it. What he kept hearing was “The marketplace has changed.” In other words, no one wanted to deal with the controversy that might rear its head in an increasingly censorious environment. Six claims that the stress of all this exacerbated his illness. The way he portrays it, his health disaster was the crucifixion a clampdown society helped to reinforce. We’ll have to take his word on that. But while I haven’t seen “The Onania Club” (it remains unreleased), and therefore can’t comment on it, I will say this much. “The End of Tom Six,” an underground-cinephile-on-acid curio, is worth seeing for the question it raises: Do we want the arena of cinema to be a place where anything can happen, or do we want it to be a safe space?

Alex Cooper seems intent on unraveling some of the current relationships that have helped underpin her production company, Unwell.

The star podcaster and media entrepreneur has left hertalent agency, UTA, according to three people familiar with the matter, as she focuses on a larger suite of business operations beyond the podcast for which she is best known, and is frustrated in part by its continuing relationships with Alix Earle and Dave Portnoy, two prominent influencers and podcasters who have feuded with her. UTA had been pressed to part ways with Earle, according to one of these people. Last week, Cooper shut down a beverage venture, Unwell Beverage Co., which was launched last year with Nestle SA as a partner, according to a report from Bloomberg.

A representative for Unwell confirmed the company ended its relationship with UTA on July 27.

UTA has helped Cooper build and scale her presence over the years, and has helped broker deals that had her host interviews for Peacock during NBCUniversal’s coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics. A person familiar with Unwell says the company has in recent months focused on ways to expand across podcasts, TV and film, live events and its creative agency work, among other operations, following a substantial investment from Patrick Whitesell, co-founder of WME and former executive chairman of successor company Endeavor. Unwell also plans to offer services to traditional media and advertising organizations. As the company devised its strategy, this person says, it believed a rethink of traditional talent representation was warranted.  

In recent months, Unwell has unveiled a reality-competition series, “Unwell Winter Games,” that brings together 16 contestants at “a luxury chalet in Park City, Utah” to compete in a series of “mental and physical challenges over four days and named veteran marketing executive Joanne Bradford as the company’s president. Unwell serves as the producer on “Icebreaker,” a series that has been greenlit by Netflix and will adapt the novel by Hannah Grace.

UTA declined to make executives available for comment. She is said to be in discussions about working with CAA, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

Whitesell’s WTSL, an investment firm focused on media, entertainment and sports he launched after exiting Endeavor and WME last year, has invested an undisclosed sum in Unwell that values the business at $500 million, according to information released August 12 by Unwell. Cooper and her husband, Matt Kaplan, who self-funded the company targeting Gen Z women audiences, retain a majority ownership stake. Formed in 2023, Unwell says it has been profitable from day one and sees the WTSL investment as growth capital. The entrepreneur believes the work Unwell does with brands could be worth as much as the podcasting business by next year.

Unwell said that in addition to the funding, WTSL would bring “deep strategic expertise, industry relationships and a proven track record of supporting some of the most innovative companies and storytellers in media,” including Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.

Whitesell’s funding followed a pair of recent exposés alleging behind-the-scenes chaos at Unwell. According to a Vanity Fair story in June, one Unwell freelancer alleged that Kaplan “creates the most toxic work environment that I’ve ever seen”; anonymous sources also said Kaplan had questioned employees about their sex lives and commented on their physical appearance. In April, Bloomberg reported that Kaplan “has earned a reputation for frequently yelling at staff members” and said Unwell’s employees were “looking for the exit.”

Cooper, in an interview at Cannes Lions this June with the Wall Street Journal, was asked about the allegations. “I will just kind of leave it at ‘Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet’ — but I think everyone knows that at this point,” she said. Cooper also said, “I think that we have done a really incredible job at Unwell, and I think if you walk the halls, there are so many people that are so happy to work at this company. … I think, unfortunately, being a woman in this industry is extremely difficult because you’re held to a completely different standard. Whether it’s a smear campaign being created for someone’s narrative, whatever it be.”

Earle, a podcaster and influencer, gained some her greatest fame while hosting the podcast “Hot Mess,” which was produced by Unwell. Still, Cooper stayed with UTA for a year after the pair ended their relationship. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, alleged in a memoir that Cooper and her former co-host, Sofia Franklyn, planned to say they were harassed in order to get out of a previous contract with Barstool, which helped launch “Call Her Daddy.”

Todd Spangler contributed to this story.