Tag: HollywoodReporter

Alan Ritchson went there.

The Reacher and War Machine action star seemingly blasted President Trump over the Epstein files during an eye-opening f-bomb filled rant on Happy Sad Confused podcast this week.

“I think people are a little bit afraid of me because they’re like, ‘He’s a loose cannon,’ and I’m not,” Ritchson began, a bit ironically. “I’m just saying the shit that everybody should say if they give a shit about humanity. Everybody else should feel like I feel.”

“The world is on fire,” encouraged host Josh Horowitz.

“Yeah, about the way things are and the abuses that are happening — the Epstein files, the fucking Epstein files!” Ritchson continued, angrily but with a smile. “Goddamn it! Where are they? It’s a fucking law, bitch. Show it. You fucking pedophiles! I shouldn’t say ‘fuck’ because I’m a Christian, and people are gonna be like, ‘How can you say fuck?’ Because that is something that should make you want to say ‘fuck.’”

“Sorry, God, I’m sweating now,” he continued. “This is my fucking politics, dude. I would fucking railroad these fuckers. I would get those Epstein files out in two seconds. Fucking move out of the way. I don’t care what room they’re in, bitch move. Give me the fucking manila envelope. I will get you the Epstein files.”

“You got my vote,” Horowitz said. “Whatever you want to run for, you got it.”

“Don’t you want to see what’s in there so that we can hold people accountable?” Ritchson asked. “These fucking rapists. We’re just cool with it. That bitch has the keys to the nuclear codes. He’s like all up into 13-year-olds. Like dude, what? Go to jail.”

The Trump administration has released 3.5 million pages related to the late disgraced Jeffrey Epstein, though whether more files exist remains under scrutiny. Trump was directly mentioned roughly 1,000 times in the files released so far, though references in themselves do not equate to wrongdoing. The Epstein files contain an allegation that Trump sexually assaulted a minor, but the releases do not establish that the allegation was true, and Trump has not been criminally charged or found civilly liable for any Epstein-related abuse. Trump was separately found civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.

While Ritchson has become one of the hottest action stars in Hollywood and has two major releases coming this year — the action thriller Runner, which is released Sept. 11, and the holiday film The Man With the Bag, co-starring with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Awards have always been a bedrock of our coverage at The Hollywood Reporter. We devote an enormous amount of time, energy and ink to the Oscars, the Emmys and the many other statuettes that crowd the Hollywood calendar each year.

When I first arrived at THR a few years ago, fresh to the trades, I was struck by the money, manpower and near-religious fervor Hollywood devotes to awards. Was this simply another symptom of an industry endlessly fascinated with itself?

I’m no longer so sure.

At a moment of profound uncertainty — for Hollywood and for journalism — recognition from your readers and your peers can mean more than another trophy for the shelf. It can be a sign that the work is connecting, that it matters and that somebody out there is still paying attention.

Over the past few years, we’ve worked to make THR newsier, sharper and more ambitious: breaking the daily news of Hollywood while going deeper on the people and institutions reshaping it. We’ve launched popular newsletters devoted to style and the London entertainment industry, opened our pages to provocative new columnists and brought rigor, wit and urgency to everything from boardroom upheavals to the Taylor Swift nuptials.

The work is paying off. While AI and the collapse of social and search referrals have battered digital media, THR has bucked the trend, posting year-over-year audience growth in six months this year and replacing fleeting traffic from Google, Facebook and Instagram with something far more valuable: readers who seek us out and come to us directly.

Our peers have noticed, too. THR won the Webby People’s Voice Award for best website and an ASME for our “Stuck” cover. And just last month, we enjoyed a record night at the Los Angeles Press Club’s Southern California Journalism Awards, taking home 44 prizes — including 20 first-place honors, more than any other publication.

The honors reflected the remarkable range of the newsroom. Gary Baum was named print journalist of the year, Seth Abramovitch entertainment journalist of the year, David Rooney best film critic and Scott Feinberg best audio host. THR was also named best website, while creative director Ada Guerin took first place for cover art. Our video team won for both its Actresses Roundtable and a feature on the video-store owner defying the streaming era — and, just recently, Off Script With The Hollywood Reporter received a Daytime Emmy nomination.

And we’re not done. New video franchises, a provocative slate of podcasts and newsletters devoted to Canada, AI and music are all coming soon. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the extraordinary staff pictured here: journalists who are curious, experienced, fiercely competitive and, despite everything, still excited by the work. None of this happens without them.

After decades as a journalist, I still think there’s nothing more fun and rewarding than being first on a story, scoring that impossible interview, producing the cover that everyone’s talking about. But posing with 20 first-place prizes at the Biltmore ain’t so bad, either. It’s the kind of fun you can brag about to your mom or (tastefully!) show off in your office. And even a staff full of skeptics will find it hard to be blasé about that.

This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Bon Jovi abruptly ended their sold out Madison Square Garden concert 90 minutes in Thursday night, as frontman Jon Bon Jovi has been dealing with a sinus infection.

The rocker indicated he was OK and would try to reschedule the show.

“Don’t throw away your ticket stubs I’m going to figure something out, OK? Don’t [fear],” Bon Jovi told the audience, according to People and fan videos from the show. “Just hang onto it, I’m going to figure out how to reschedule.”

“I’m gonna have to cool it for a night,” he added, before exiting the stage, People reported. “I feel great, I’ll see you again soon, bye bye.” He had previously brought out Train singer Pat Monahan to join him on “Livin’ on a Prayer,” which was the last song of the shortened show.

A rep for Bon Jovi said in a statement, “Jon Bon Jovi spoke from stage and told fans he has been battling a sinus infection which led to the show’s early ending. As part of the Bon Jovi residency at Madison Square Garden, Jon has said numerous times that it has been a joy to return to live shows for the band. Updated information will be available shortly.”

Bon Jovi is in the midst of their Forever Tour, which kicked off with a nine-show run at Madison Square Garden. The group is slated to play their final MSG show of the tour on Sunday night before heading to the U.K. and Ireland at the end of August.

The tour, on which the eponymous frontman is joined by original members Tico Torres and David Bryan as well as Hugh McDonald, John Shanks, Phil X and Everett Bradley, is the first for Bon Jovi since the singer had surgery in 2022 to repair a damaged vocal cord, which was documented in the Hulu docuseries Thank You, Goodnight.

Though in 2024 he had expressed some concern about whether his voice was up to the rigor of performing live night after night, before the tour he told People he was “fully recovered.”

“It was longer than I’d ever expected, but it had to be right,” he added of his recovery. “We never lost faith.”

He told People that a doctor had told him the cord was “atrophying.”

Mary Kate Golding, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel set decorator, has died after being found stabbed. She was 34.

Golding was found dead on Tuesday in her apartment in Astoria, Queens, having suffered a stab wound on her back, an NYPD spokesperson told People.

Police were called to her residence after midnight and at roughly 6:39 a.m. they responded to a call of “an unconscious person in the vicinity of Astoria Park South and Shore Boulevard.” That person was Golding’s husband, Joseph Azzaretto, with the police telling People they believe the deaths were a “possible murder-suicide.”

Golding and Azzaretto’s 11-month old son was found at their residence unharmed.

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to the NYPD for comment.

Golding is credited as the set decorator for the first six season-one episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. According to her Facebook, she graduated from New York University in 2015.

She has worked on a plethora of other television shows, including Gotham (2019); The Undoing (2020); The Flight Attendant (2020); season one of Harlem; the 2021 Marvel series Hawkeye; two 2024 episodes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith; Goosebumps (2025); and the Netflix documentary Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer.

On the film side, she served as a member of the art department on the 2022 rom-com Marry Me, which starred Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. She is also credited as an assistant set director on Sean Durkin’s forthcoming feature Deep Cuts, starring Drew Starkey and Cailee Spaeny.

Years ago, Azzaretto’s younger brother, Nicholas Azzaretto, shot and killed his father at their Pennsylvania family home when he was 20. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in November 2021 and was sentenced to 10 years of probation.

Following much anticipation, Charli XCX is officially back with Music, Fashion, Film, her seventh album overall and her first since her seminal Brat took over the world in 2024.

While she hasn’t technically released a solo album since then, pop’s most trendsetting auteur has been certifiably, emphatically, Not On A Break.

“The second people are getting sick of you, that’s when you have to go even harder,” Kylie Jenner, playing a fictionalized version of herself, told Charli in one of the most-memorable parts of her mockumentary film The Moment, which came out back in January. Whether that was meant to be delivered with sincerity or irony, it certainly carries some level of poignancy of how Charli has operated since Brat summer started.

She released Brat’s deluxe version three days after the original album drop, then the Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat remix album in October. She embarked on two headlining arena tours — the Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan, and her eponymous Brat Tour. She’s had roles in seven different feature films: The Moment, where she starred and produced, as well as 100 Nights of Hero, Sacrifice, Erupcja, I Want Your Sex, The Gallerist and Faces of Death. She also created the soundtrack for Wuthering Heights and co-wrote the soundtrack for the Anne Hathaway-starring Mother Mary with Jack Antonoff.

That exhaustive resume alone certainly puts Charli firmly in contention as one of Hollywood’s hardest working stars, and with Music, Fashion, Film officially here, that’s not stopping any time soon. Charli is ramping up for another extensive tour, with festival headlining dates at Lollapalooza, Outside Lands and Reading and Leeds over the next month, then more arena dates starting in the fall.

“I was really, really ready to peace out and take a break and not make music,” she told Rolling Stone in the magazine’s June cover story. “I felt very creatively drained and not inspired to write anything new. Then suddenly, inspiration came.” 

Charli started the Music, Fashion, Film era seeking to distance herself from the dance floors where Brat held court, declaring that “the dance floor is dead” on the more polarizing lead single “Rock Music.” She followed that with the vibey, synth-y “SS26,” the equally summery, cheekier “Wink Wink,” and most-recent single “Camera,” which featured a music video starring Vincent Cassel.

With Music, Fashion, Film firmly in focus, the next few months present an interesting chapter into how Charli enters her most-anticipated era to date. Brat turned Charli XCX from niche iconoclast to mainstream icon. It’d be tempting to milk that well dry — it’s hard to imagine any artist replicating the moment Charli created with Brat anytime soon — but she’s never been one to dwell too long on the past with her work.

As she told Rolling Stone in June: “I knew when I was making it that I was never going to make that record again. It’s not creatively rewarding for me to make the same thing twice.”

Chris Anne Affleck, the mother of Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck, died June 2, her family announced. She was 83 and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December.

Christine Anne Boldt was born in New York City in December 1942. She was a graduate of Harvard University and spent 35 years as a public school teacher. She retired in 2008 and was a fierce civil rights advocate throughout her life, having served as one of the original freedom riders who went into the Deep South during the 1960s.

Chris and her ex-husband Timothy Affleck welcomed their first child, Ben, in 1972. Ben’s brother, Casey, was born in 1975, around the time their family relocated to Massachusetts, where she continued her teaching career.

“My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master’s there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school,” Ben told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn’t go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.”

By the time Ben was 12, his parents divorced. As his passion for entertainment grew during his adolescence, Chris played a hand in his early industry beginnings, connecting her son with her former Harvard roommate, casting director Patty Collins, who helped him audition for commercials and TV movies.

She was an avid supporter of her sons’ acting careers and attended the 1998 Oscars alongside Ben and Matt Damon, who also brought his mother as his date, after the pair were nominated for best original screenplay for Good Will Hunting — a film the duo also starred in alongside Casey. Ben and Damon would go on to win the Oscar, and the film has become a classic.

“We were sitting next to our moms and we won, and we kind of hugged our moms. I remember how everyone had made such a big thing out of it as if this was such a novelty,” Ben told Vanity Fair of the moment. “I remember thinking, being insecure, like, ‘Why? Why is it weird that we’re bringing our moms?’ Who else do you think we would bring?”

Ben would go on to win his second Oscar, for best picture, for Argo in 2012. Casey would win the best actor Oscar in 2017 for his performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea.

Chris was given six months to live in December, and her greatest wish after her diagnosis was seeing grandson Atticus graduate high school, her family said. She attended the event with her family on May 31 and died peacefully in her sleep two days later.

In addition to her sons, survivors include her five grandchildren: Casey’s kids, Atticus and Indiana, and Ben’s kids, Violet, Fin and Sam.

There’s an amusing, insightful movie to be made about the culture clash that would inevitably result between a 40-year-old Millennial and several Gen Z twenty-somethings. But that’s not the new Netflix comedy directed by Tim Story (Barbershop, Ride Along) and starring Kevin Hart.

Instead, as might have been predicted, 72 Hours aims for the lowest common denominator, with a wildly farcical plotline in which Hart’s character is mistaken at various times for a human trafficker, a cop and a Cuban drug lord. He also gets into a brawl with several women in a moving limousine and finds himself in a smuggler’s boat carrying an illegal contraband haul of “whale dicks.” Add to that Hart’s face swollen to monstrous proportions after being stung by a jellyfish, and if all of this sounds hilarious, then this is the movie for you.

The script crafted by a quartet of screenwriters features a reasonably clever premise. Hart plays Joe, a marketing executive whose pitch for a new vodka line falls flat. “You don’t seem to get youth culture anymore,” his boss (Kevin Dunn, doing his usual exasperated thing) tells him, adding that if Joe doesn’t get with the times he’ll be passed over for a promotion.

It’s fortuitous, then, that Joe finds himself accidentally included in a group chat with several young men planning a bachelor party in Miami. When he impulsively responds with a cash gift, he’s invited to join the revelers, who have no idea that he could be their dad. Desperate to find out what makes the younger generation tick, Joe decides to go, much to the irritation of his longtime girlfriend (Teyana Taylor), who is impatient for a marriage proposal.

Cue the would-be yucks as Joe meets up with Nick (Marcello Hernández), Hunter (Ben Marshall), Freshman (Kam Patterson) — all three comedians Saturday Night Live recruits — and groom-to-be Mason (Mason Gooding, Heart Eyes, Scream 7) in a palatial Miami mansion. The house turns out to be the former home of a deceased drug kingpin, which leads to dangerous complications as Joe suffers a series of misadventures, including several run-ins with a group of criminals led by the menacing Jaze (Michael Mando, illustrating the dangers of typecasting after his far more serious performance as Nacho Varga in Better Call Saul).  

The film’s unfunny nadir comes when the gangsters force Joe to ingest cocaine, which for some reason transforms him into the heavily accented “Riccardo Montana,” complete with Scarface riffs including “say hello to my little friend.” The gag is repeated later on; Hart and the filmmakers apparently are convinced that his Al Pacino impression is a laugh riot.

Any stabs at cultural satire about, say, Gen Z’s addiction to documenting their lives on social media, are subsumed by the crazy action-comedy shenanigans, with the younger cast, all of whom have proven themselves funny on prior occasions, unable to elevate the pedestrian material. Hart tries hard (he always tries hard), throwing himself into the slapstick with his usual determination. The fact that he’s able to wrest a few laughs is a testament to his comic chops and professionalism.

There are some semi-amusing cameos along the way, including a brief appearance by Mike Epps as a cop, and another performer whose identity has been deemed a spoiler by Netflix. But both are outshone by a hilarious Andy Garcia, who demonstrates that, under the right circumstances, sometimes serious actors can be the funniest of all. It’s a shame, though, to see Taylor, fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn as a fierce revolutionary in One Battle After Another, reduced to playing the disapproving girlfriend. It feels less a departure than a regression. 

And, of course there are the obligatory outtakes during the end credits, apparently intended to prove that the actors, at least, found the proceedings hilarious.

Zach Cregger is ready to work his magic with the prequel to Weapons that will focus on breakout character Gladys.

During Collider’s Directors on Directing panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, the filmmaker shared a status update on the planned feature follow-up to his 2025 horror hit that won Amy Madigan the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Aunt Gladys. The Hollywood Reporter previously reported that Cregger and Zach Shields are penning the script for the project that is in development at New Line Cinema with the working title Gladys.

“First of all, I’m really excited about the Gladys movie, and I loved working with Amy,” Cregger told the crowd. “I loved that character. For the movie Weapons, it really made a lot of sense not to dive into her backstory because the device of Weapons was to keep her very mysterious.”

He added, “However, there’s an amazing story to be told about where Gladys comes from and how she became what we know her as. It’s got a lot of twists and turns and mysteries and crazy things, like Weapons does. I think it’s going to be great. The script is in progress now, but we’re taking that super seriously, and it’s moving in the right direction. So yeah, it’s being written, is the short answer.”

Centering on a group of children who go missing in the middle of the night, Weapons hit theaters last August from Warner Bros. and collected $270 million at the global box office. In addition to Madigan, the cast included Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams and Benedict Wong.

At Thursday’s panel, Cregger screened the latest trailer and additional exclusive footage from his forthcoming video game adaptation Resident Evil, which Sony releases in September. Cregger noted that his next feature will be The Flood, a sci-fi film that he wrote for New Line.

Also participating in the panel were Mayday directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who teased the progress on the new Star Trek feature that the pair are writing and directing.

“It won’t be the characters you’ve seen previously,” Goldstein said from the stage. “It will be a little further into the future than what you’ve seen.”

Mary Kate Golding, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel set decorator, has died after being found fatally stabbed. She was 34.

Golding was found dead on Tuesday in her Astoria, Queens, apartment, having suffered a fatal stab wound on her back, an NYPD spokesperson told People.

Police were called to her residence after midnight, and hours later at roughly 6:39 a.m., the police responded to a call of “an unconscious person in the vicinity of Astoria Park South and Shore Boulevard.” That person was Golding’s husband, Joseph Azzaretto, with the police telling People they believe the deaths were a “possible murder-suicide.”

Golding and Azzaretto’s 11-month old son was found at their residence unharmed.

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to the NYPD for comment.

Golding is credited as the set decorator for the first six season one episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. According to her Facebook, she graduated from New York University in 2015.

She has worked on a plethora of other television shows, including Gotham (2019); The Undoing (2020); The Flight Attendant (2020); season one of Harlem; the 2021 Marvel series Hawkeye; two 2024 episodes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith; Goosebumps (2025); and the Netflix documentary Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer.

On the film side, she served as part of the art department on the 2022 rom-com Marry Me, which starred Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. She is also credited as an assistant set director on Sean Durkin’s forthcoming feature Deep Cuts, starring Drew Starkey and Cailee Spaeny.

Years ago, Azzaretto’s younger brother, Nicholas Azzaretto, shot and killed his father at their Pennsylvania family home when he was 20. Nicholas pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter in November 2021, and was sentenced to 10 years of probatin.

Sony is bringing the story of the Ramayana to the world, with the studio landing global rights to the adaptation of the epic poem. That excludes India, where Ramayana producer Prime Focus Studios will release the film telling one of humanity’s oldest stories.

The news, and the film’s trailer, were revealed Thursday at San Diego Comic-Con. The epic poem centers on Rama, a prince who spends years in exile and whose wife, Sita, is kidnapped by the demon king Ravana.

Nitesh Tiwari directs the project, which stars Ranbir Kapoor, Yash and Sai Pallavi.

Prime Focus Studios’ Namit Malhotra produces and is known as the founder of the visual effects company DNEG, which has worked on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Interstellar and Tenet as well as all three of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies.

The Ramayana will be released in multiple languages across the world, including an English-language version, with the producers saying the intention since conception has been for it to reach a global audience.

The film boasts music from Oscar winners Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman; action choreography by Terry Notary and Guy Norris and production design by Ramsey Avery and Ravi Bansal.

“For generations, the Ramayana has inspired people through its timeless humanity and enduring values. Our ambition has always been to honor that legacy while creating a cinematic experience worthy of audiences everywhere,” said Malhotra in a statement.

Notably, the news comes as Nolan’s The Odyssey, a retelling of the greek epic, has been tearing up the global box office, marking Nolan’s biggest global debut and passing $300 million worldwide since its release a week ago.