Category: News

(Spoilers from The Boys first three seasons will be found below.)

It seems like only yesterday and 20 years ago (due to our ongoing global situation) that The Boys first obliterated the superhero realm amid a sea of (arguably) overly buoyant and overly gritty Marvel/Disney and DC/Warner Bros projects, respectively speaking. Soon enough, fans gleefully surrendered to the mayhem wrought by Showrunner Eric Kripke, his crew, and his cast, organized into The Seven (along with the powers that be) and the title vigilante group who’d long since had enough.

A lot has happened since then with The Boys recently delivering a “Herogasm” that actually managed to eclipse what the show had gotten away with already. And The Seven is a largely different group now. Starlight has left the Vought building (although she’s still around) whereas Queen Maeve will go enjoy civilian life. Translucent bit the dust early on, but the dust hasn’t yet settled on Black Noir (who might be back as a different Black Noir next season?). Then there’s Anthony Starr’s Homelander, who’s progressively been losing it even more after jerking off from atop a skyscraper.

Homelander has officially pulled what Trump once “joked” about doing by committing homicide in broad daylight, and now, he’s got his son, Ryan, along for the Compound V-fueled ride. And Starr is now looking back fondly on Season 1 with a throwback photo.

Yep, Season 4 is officially filming, which means that we should see it sometime in late 2023. Before that happens, the college-age spinoff, Gen V will arrive. Stills from that series freaked out Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it sounds like a bloody good time for all involved.

The Little League World Series has become a major event on the ESPN calendar, as games are given primetime spots on big ESPN as well as weekend timeslots on ABC.

For many, the appeal of watching some of the best 12-year-olds in the world play baseball is how pure it all feels, with heartwarming stories about players, touching shows of sportsmanship, and a bunch of kids playing the game they love (at a high level). However, for the kids themselves, this is the most important thing they’ve ever done, and plenty of them are hypercompetitive and are in “win at all costs” mode, which can lead to some unintentionally funny moments.

On Saturday, we saw that when Iowa held a 6-3 lead in the bottom of the sixth inning over Washington, needing just one out to secure the win. A pitch that certainly looked a touch off the plate was called a ball on a 3-2 count to put runners on first and second and bring the tying run to the plate. While it was a borderline pitch, the kids from Iowa thought it was strike three and had begun to trot off the field, standing in disbelief at the ball call.

Their coach brought everyone together to calm them down and help them move on, but the shortstop was not ready to let go just yet and hot mics caught the young man blaming ESPN for rigging the game for ratings.

Listen, I don’t know what the strike zone was in this game prior to that pitch and Little League zones can be pretty wide so that might’ve been a strike all day, but it certainly appeared off the plate. Also, just generally, the umpiring at that level is so uneven (even with the best) that blaming a questionable ball/strike call on ESPN rigging things for ratings is pretty funny.

If nothing else, the Little League World Series joins the NBA Finals (and pretty much every other major sporting event) as being things ESPN has been blamed for rigging, with the Iowa shortstop playing the Ayesha Curry role here.

The good news for Iowa is they got out of the jam with no damage done and won the game 6-3, despite the best efforts of those dastardly ESPN executives pulling the strings in Williamsport.

A little over a week after posters appeared in Brooklyn teasing a new single from The National featuring Bon Iver, “Weird Goodbyes” has officially arrived. Apparently starting out its life as “Bathwater (Mount Auburn),” the song — which the band debuted during the Paris stop on their European tour in May and has been playing ever since — was renamed and released today. It’s a midtempo but reflective head-nodder, which prompted one YouTube commenter to “bring out those sad dance moves.”

While Bon Iver just wrapped up a North American tour in June and is preparing to head to Europe and the UK in October, The National just finished up their own European swing and are now currently crossing the US on their own North American tour — their first since 2019. You can see the remaining dates below.

09/12 — Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre
09/13 — Kansas City, MO @ Grinders KC
09/14 — Minneapolis, MN @ Surly Brewing Festival Field
09/16 — Milwaukee, WI @ Riverside Theater
09/17 — Maryland Heights, MO @ Saint Louis Music Park
09/18 — Indianapolis, IN @ TCU Amphitheater at White River State Park
09/19 — Pittsburgh, PA @ Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts
09/22 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner
09/24 — Harrisburg, PA @ Harrisburg University
09/25 — Bridgeport, CT @ Seaside Park / Sound on Sound Festival

Listen to The National’s “Weird Goodbyes” featuring Bon Iver above.

Earlier this year, The xx’s Oliver Sim went solo, releasing the singles “Romance With A Memory,” “Fruit,” “Hideous,” and “GMT” over the course of the past five months. Today, with the release of Sim’s debut album Hideous Bastard just a few weeks away, Sim reunites with Jamie xx for an expansive remix of his most recent single, “GMT,” which Jamie stretches an extra seven minutes, adding long breakdowns and riding the groove that makes “GMT” such an infectious jam.

Sim previously explained the reasoning behind the song’s Beach Boys sample on Apple Music, telling Zane Lowe, “[Sims and Jamie xx] spent a few weeks in Sydney, did a road trip down to Byron Bay, listening to music, swimming a lot… we were listening to a lot of The Beach Boys at the time. When we arrived in Byron Bay, we started ‘GMT.’ Sampling is such a personal thing. You’re not just sampling because of how beautiful it sounds but because of all of the emotional memories you have locked into it. We had to solidify the moment.”

In addition, he also announced tour dates beginning this autumn.

09/29 — Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
10/01 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
10/02 — San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
10/05 — Chicago, IL @ Metro
10/06 — Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
10/08 — Washington, DC @ Lincoln Theatre
10/09 — Boston, MA @ Royale
10/10 — New York, NY @ Webster Hall
10/11 — Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
10/20 — Copenhagen, DK @ Vega
10/22 — Paris, FR @ Le Cabaret Sauvage
10/23 — Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
10/24 — Brussels, BE @ Cirque Royal
10/26 — Berlin, DE @ Admiralspalast
10/27 — Hamburg, DE @ Uebel & Gefaehrlich
10/29 — Manchester, UK @ New Century Hall
10/30 — London, UK @ KOKO

Hideous Bastard is out 9/9 via Young. Pre-order it here.

After almost three months in theaters, Top Gun: Maverick‘s box-office domination is still firing on all cylinders. The Tom Cruise sequel has been an unstoppable juggernaut with audiences, and now, it’s starting to zip past some Marvel heavy-hitters. According to the latest receipts, Top Gun: Maverick has overtaken Avengers: Infinity War to become the sixth highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office.

As of this writing, Top Gun: Maverick is sitting at a domestic haul of $683 million, which bested Infinity War by $5 million and put Black Panther in the Cruise sequel’s sights. However, that would require Maverick to beat Panther‘s $700.4 million haul, which will be no easy feat, but the Cruise film has done a stellar job at defying odds. Via Variety:

It would require a bit of endurance at this point, but it’s certainly not out of the question. Even though “Top Gun 2” lands on home entertainment on Tuesday, the movie is likely to continue selling tickets in theaters because there’s not a ton of competition on the horizon. It’ll be fairly desolate at the box office until November, when “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” opens in theaters. Then again, Disney is likely to re-release the first “Black Panther” in anticipation of the follow-up, which could propel the original’s grosses even higher. But “Maverick” is no stranger to overcoming the impossible.

As Variety reports, Top Gun: Maverick will hit VOD on Tuesday, but notably, not be freely available for streaming on Paramount+. Audiences could choose to purchase the film at home, but Cruise and the plethora of glowing reviews have done an amazing job of selling the theatrical experience as the best bang for your buck.

It’ll be interesting to see how this showdown between Cruise and Marvel shakes out, but for now, he’s got at least one Thanos-sized notch on his belt.

(Via Variety)

NFL Blitz, for a brief period of time, was among the yearly football game offerings alongside Madden and NCAA Football, but while those two games tried to deliver a simulation experience, Blitz was focused on an arcade one. “Da Bomb”, unnecessarily large player models, and non-realistic physics were a staple of the franchise, but it also wasn’t what Blitz was most known for. That would be the laughably over-the-top slapstick violence. NFL Blitz was notorious for being a game that glorified the cruder parts of football from the violence to the cheerleaders, NFL Blitz embraced it for better and worse. Eventually, the NFL pulled the plug on its license and the series went dormant until an attempted reboot in 2012. While the reboot was a decent attempt at recreating the experience, it lacked a lot of the over-the-top fun that the original arcade games created.

So when Arcade1Up announced that it was going to be bringing NFL Blitz back from the dead, and putting it into an arcade cabinet as NFL Blitz Legends, there was a little bit of skepticism. After all, how were they going to bring back a game that the NFL ended its licensing issues with because of everything it glorified? We talked to Chief Technology and Product Officer of Arcade1Up, Davin Sufer, about what it took to bring Blitz back from the dead.

“This was really really challenging.” Sufer told UPROXX. “It’s another game that everyone really loved. It was really well played, well enjoyed, and there are some aspects of it that just aren’t keeping with today’s reality, and we had to go back and we had to address that right out the gate. So we actually managed to dig up what we need to dig up to be able to rebuild the game and tweak out some of the, you know, more violent aspects of the game that don’t really cater to today’s player health and safety aspects, and sent the wrong message for kids, and we were able to address that without killing the soul of the game.”

Those more “violent aspects” that Sufer is talking about are obviously the extremely late hits that the games were kind of known for. After plays were done the player was free to move around at their leisure and most players would take this time to go cause chaos by jumping on the tackled player’s head or tossing the QB around. It’s all very slapstick and played for laughs, but it’s unsurprising that a league as obsessed with its image as the NFL wanted to move away from the franchise back in the day.

This does not mean the entirety of that slapstick violence is gone forever, however. According to Arcade1Up’s official website, 84% of the game’s original tackle animations are still within the game. We just likely won’t see players spearing into each other head first anymore, or jumping onto someone’s head to dogpile after a play is over. Of course, the games were fun for more than that.

“The gameplay is still what you remember, it’s still very dynamic and fun [like] the way that NBA Jam was too.” Sufer said. “There’s always something happening on the screen, the animations are really fast and fun, and it always seems to come down to the wire whenever I play.”

As stunning as it is to believe, NFL Blitz really has come back from the dead. Who knows, maybe if the arcade machine is popular enough we can get a second try at a modern version. The NFL has been less stingy about handing out its license and it would be fun to see some more arcade-style football games.

Last week, Dr. Oz starred in a hilariously bad campaign video where he pretended to go grocery shopping, and clearly, had no idea what he was doing. Not only did he mispronounce the name of the supermarket, but he awkwardly attempted to buy random ingredients for a “crudités.” Granted, that’s the proper culinary term, but to the vast majority of working class Pennsylvanians, it’s a veggie tray.

Naturally, Oz’s opponent, John Fetterman, went to town on the embarrassing video that only further emphasized that Oz has nothing in common with everyday voters in PA on top of actually being a New Jersey resident. However, it appears that the crudités video did more than just give Fetterman another opportunity to relentlessly troll Oz on social media. It also made for one heck of a fundraiser. Fetterman’s campaign reportedly brought in $500,000 within 24 hours of the Oz video going viral. Via CNBC:

The spike in donations between Monday and Tuesday afternoon was “well above” the campaign’s average rate, Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, told CNBC on Wednesday.

The campaign raked in $11 million in the previous fundraising quarter, Calvello noted. ”$500,000 in one day, it’s a nice bump,” he said.

The fundraising windfall marks a seemingly endless parade of blunders for Oz in the PA senate race. The situation has gotten so bad that Donald Trump is reportedly telling people in private that Oz is going to “f*cking lose.” (It also probably didn’t help that Tucker Carlson tried to show the crudités video on his show and couldn’t stop laughing.) To add insult to injury, Oz started trending over the weekend as Twitter users unearthed his old tweets about poop. Fetterman has yet to capitalize on that recent development, but give him a minute.

(Via CNBC)

Drake’s dominance is disputed but he’s got a compelling new argument in his favor. Shazam, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has confirmed that Drake is the most-searched artist of all time. Fans have Shazamed Drake’s songs or songs on which he’s featured over 350 million times — which, considering he’s only been around for about half of Shazam’s lifespan, is really impressive. His most Shazamed song? “One Dance,” from his 2016 album Views, which has been searched 17 million times since its release. Whether or not Drake’s really got “more slaps than The Beatles,” he’s become one of the most ubiquitous artists in the world.

And that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. During his recent appearance on Nicki Minaj’s Queen Radio, Drake rejected the possibility of retirement. “I’m not at that point where I even consider that being an option,” he said. “One of the best feelings I have in my life is completing a song or project. And, by the way, those things are painful as well. A lot of nerves, a lot of confidence wavering. But I feel like I’m reaching a new level of fun. I’ve reached a new level of comfortability where I want to try things. Like this last album, I put out something I wanted to do to challenge myself.”

It looks like Rod Wave’s recent arrest for battery didn’t cool off his musical hot streak as his latest album, Beautiful Mind, becomes his second to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The Florida crooner last topped the list with his 2021 album, SoulFly. Even more impressively, he’s done all this without the benefit of algorithm-boosting features; the album’s only two guest appearances come from Jack Harlow and December Joy. He racked up 115,000 equivalent album units with 113,000 from streaming.

Meanwhile, Megan Thee Stallion’s new album, Traumazine, bows at No. 4, marking her fifth consecutive top-ten debut and pretty much perfectly highlighting the whole “misogyny in hip-hop” problem (the guy accused of strangling his girlfriend in front of their children outsells one of rap’s most outspoken survivors of domestic violence? You couldn’t write it in a prestige drama on HBO). She accumulated 63,000 equivalent album units with 54,000 streaming units and 8,000 album sales.

Also in the top ten are Bad Bunny, whose Un Verano Sin Ti was finally dethroned (again) after eight weeks at No. 1, although his equivalent album units earned only dropped less than 1%. Beyonce’s Renaissance is No. 3, down 29%. No. 5 is YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s The Last Slimeto (there’s another guy whose treatment of women hasn’t deterred him from success). Morgan Wallen, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Future, and Olivia Rodrigo round out the top 10.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It has been exactly three weeks since the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s golf club and private residence in Palm Beach, Florida. And in the weeks since, we’ve heard a litany of bad, sad, pathetic, and plain laughable excuses for what prompted federal investigators to search the home of a former president for the first time in our country’s history. While many versions of these stories have come from Trump directly, Ohio congressman Mike Turner has now joined in the fun — and might just have come up with the most inane reason for Trump to be in possession of highly classified documents.

On Sunday, Turner appeared on Face the Nation, where he chatted with Ed O’Keefe. While discussing Trump’s tricky situation, O’Keefe asked Turner — who Newsweek notes is “also the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee” — what possible reason a former president might have for keeping top-secret documents when he’s no longer in office, and for bringing them to his home in Florida. Turner’s response?

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, you have to ask him. But certainly, we all know that every former president has access to their documents. It’s how they write their memoirs. They don’t have… great recall of everything that’s occurred in their administration.”

Which only begs the question: Why would Trump be writing about top-secret details of his presidency in a memoir? But we’ll save that answer for another day.

(Via Newsweek)