Category: News

Seeing as live shows haven’t been possible in over a year, fans are eager to once again see their favorite performers take the stage. Because of the excitement, people everywhere are already trying to get their hands on tickets to upcoming shows. That’s why it’s only been a week since Bad Bunny unveiled his 2022 El Último Tour Del Mundo North American tour dates — and its pre-sale has already sold out.

The 35-city tour kicks off in February in Denver and comes to an end in Miami in April. According to a report from Billboard, Bad Bunny’s 2022 tour is the quickest-selling tour since 2018, and one of the fastest-selling in the entirety of Ticketmaster’s history. In less than a week after the Bad Bunny made tickets to his tour available with a pre-sale, 480,000 tickets were sold. His April 15 pre-sale date in particular is now the top sales day for any Ticketmaster tour since Beyonce and Jay-Z’s 2018 On The Run II Tour.

In a statement about the record-breaking sales day, Ticketmaster president Mark Yovich said, “One thing is clear: the world wants to see Bad Bunny live on stage. The demand for his tour has smashed multiple records, with one of the most active on-sale periods in Ticketmaster’s history. Ticketmaster is honored to get fans one step closer to live with tickets to see this global breakthrough artist.”

El Último Tour Del Mundo is out now via Rimas Entertainment. Get it here.

Today is April 20, a day of altered mental states around the world as folks celebrate 4/20 and perhaps engage in some recreational weed usage. That takes today the perfect day for Foo Fighters to release their trippy new visual for Medicine At Midnight standout “Chasing Birds.”

The song, which itself is the closest to trippy Foo Fighters get on their new album, is accompanied by a psychedelic, 3D-animated visual. The clip begins with Dave Grohl waking up in a hot desert, birds circling him overhead. He then finds that his perception is a bit off as he looks at his hand and notices it no longer has a definite shape. The singing cactus was probably a giveaway as well. From there, things proceed in a predictably unpredictable fashion as things only get more and more strange.

Grohl and Foo Fighters have been unstoppable lately. Just this month, Grohl has announced a new autobiography titled The Storyteller, teased a new documentary called What Drives Us, collaborated with Mick Jagger on the song “Eazy Sleazy,” and shared a teaser for the show he and his mother made together, From Cradle To Stage, which is based on her book of the same name.

Watch the “Chasing Birds” video above.

Famed documentary director Alex Gibney’s penchant for scrutiny serves him (and his audience) well. His recent successes include skewering the botched pandemic response (which continues to disastrously reverberate) as well as Elizabeth Holmes and the Church of Scientology. He’s now taking aim at Big Pharma for his newest project, a two-part HBO documentary called Crime of the Century. As the trailer’s YouTube page succinctly puts things, “Big Pharma sold America a lie and made a killing.”

The trailer makes no secret of the documentary’s perspective, which is that corporate greed was nurtured (and, in fact, encouraged) by elected officials, and all of this led Purdue Pharma to aggressively market OxyContin. The highly profitable pill pushed through the FDA approvals for wide use without sufficient studies and evidence, and Justice Department efforts to halt the harm were extinguished by quietly settled lawsuits as opioid distributors and Purdue Pharma continued to build up enormous fortunes due to the pill’s overproduction. Gibney’s project also argues that this OxyContin-paved crisis made it much easier for even more dangerous prescription drugs to achieve the same results. Via an HBO press release:

With the help of whistleblowers, insiders, newly-leaked documents, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes access to investigations, and featuring expert input from medical professionals, journalists, former and current government agents, attorneys and pharmaceutical sales representatives, as well as sobering testimony from victims of opioid addiction, Gibney’s exposé posits that drug companies are in fact largely responsible for manufacturing the very crisis they profit from, to the tune of billions of dollars… and hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Crime Of The Century debuts May 10 on HBO.

With all due respect to whatever’s happening with the European Super League, the only soccer news I care about this week is: TED LASSO SEASON 2 TRAILER.

The Apple TV+ series, about an American football coach (Jason Sudeikis) who’s recruited to lead an English Premier League team, was unexpectedly one of the best shows of 2020. Ted Lasso has a fantastic cast, clever jokes, and a refreshingly cheery tone. There are not enough charming shows about nice people doing nice things for each other. It’s like if Friday Night Lights was a comedy, but much better than that sounds (Ted Lasso and Coach Taylor should share inspiring speech tips).

Ted Lasso was renewed by Apple for a second season last August, and on Tuesday, Apple released a trailer for season two, as well as announced the premiere date: July 23. “I always hear the question: who let the dogs out (who who who who)? With respect to The Baha Men, I prefer WHEN let the dogs out (when when when when)?” the show’s official Twitter account wrote. “‘Cause guess what, Greyhounds? Our 2nd season starts 7/23! Can I get a Bah Amen!? That’s what I used to think they were called.”

You can watch the trailer for Ted Lasso season two above.

Ahead of its theatrical and streaming release this Friday, Warner Bros. has made the first seven minutes of Mortal Kombat available online, and the new footage makes it very clear that the film will not make the PG-13 mistake of its predecessors by skimping on the blood that defines the brutal video game series. Set in feudal Japan, the opening scene sets the stage for a centuries-long conflict between Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Bi-Han (Joe Taslim), who are best known as the fan-favorite characters Scorpion and Sub-Zero, respectively.

From the clip, we learn how Ban-Hi murdered Hanzo’s family to settle a score between their two clans. But Hanzo proves himself to be a deadly force to be reckoned as he effortlessly carves his way through Ban-Hi’s men (and their faces) after quickly fashioning Scorpion’s trademark weapon out of a nearby rope and gardening knife. However, just as the two bitter rivals get ready to go head-to-head, the footage cuts out, leaving viewers with a cliffhanger moment until they catch the film later this week in theaters or on HBO Max.

You can watch the opening scene of Mortal Kombat by following the link below. (Warning: The video is age-restricted due to the aforementioned blood, stabbing, and murder.)

Mortal Kombat fights its way into theaters and on HBO Max on April 23, 2021

Billie Eilish made major waves back in March when she debuted her new blonde hair on Instagram. Her post racked up a million likes in just six minutes and is currently at over 22 million likes, making it the most-liked Instagram post of the year so far and the third most-liked post of all time. Now Eilish and her hair are back to generating attention on Instagram as a new photo is picking up steam.

Eilish’s latest post shows her blonde hair, but this time, she’s sporting a more voluminous, blown-out look. In just the 16 hours since it was posted, the post has racked up over 12.1 million likes, which makes it one of her most-liked posts since her original blonde hair photo. Also of note is Eilish’s caption, in which she wrote, “things are comingggg.”

Finneas recently denied a rumor that Eilish was set to share major news about her next album, but it certainly does seem like she has something on the way soon, both due to her new tease and other things Finneas has been saying. In February, for instance, he told James Corden that her next album is nearly finished, saying, “She’s said it, so I’m not spilling the beans for her, but we are working really hard on her second album. It’s actually almost done, which we’re really excited about. She’s the only person I’ve worked with in-person in the whole year. So everything else has been over Zoom. Someone will send me a vocal of theirs, I’ll produce it and send it back to them. So, it’s all been this virtual world of that. But Billie and I have actually been holed up working together.”

For the first time in 24 years, Mortal Kombat returns to theaters (well, and also HBO Max, which would probably be confusing to try and explain people in 1997) in an all new story that has nothing to do with the previous two movies other than the characters. Ahead, director Simon McQuoid explains how time and resources have given this new movie an advantage, being able to draw on a richer backstory that’s been laid out in the games over the last two plus decades. And that’s true, as the movie is anchored by the battle between Scorpion and Sub-Zero, which takes place over many generations and creates a whole mystical backstory about these two and why all these people have to fight each other in the first place. (In the original 1995 version of Mortal Kombat, these two characters just kind of showed up, looked cool, and fought without much explanation.)

And this Mortal Kombat is very much rated R, so now the signature gory finishing movies from the game will be depicted in the film. But there’s a difference between video game violence and movie violence and McQuoid explains how, if they went too far, then the movie could get into NC-17 territory, which is not what they wanted.

So I was trying to get in your head. I rewatched the movie from ’95 and it’s kind of weird you have to make a movie with the same group of characters with the same abilities, just “a different way.” As in, even with superhero reboots the villain is usually different. These are all the same chess pieces. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, it makes total sense what you’re saying. And I think the thing you’re talking I felt was a really exciting part of the creative process for me: how to make these characters that have had iterations before, how to make them feel really powerful and really believable and give a very elevated version of them that we haven’t really seen before. And that’s also goes to how their powers manifest and we have the benefit of a great deal of advantage in visual effects. So those sorts of things, nothing had been done really to this level on Mortal Kombat, game aside. The game is amazingly well done and incredible…

Yeah, well, Rambo is in it now.

Yeah, exactly. So, that was something that was very exciting. And one of the images I’ve seen where someone put the 1995 version of Sub-Zero next to the 2021 version of Sub-Zero next to each other and kind of what they look like, and that to me was really a visual encapsulation of what I was trying to achieve. To elevate these characters. And I love the process. I thought it was a real privilege for me to be able to take those characters and elevate them to a place where they felt really gutsy and interesting and layered and rich.

One of the big differences are Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Because in the ’95 movie, they’re just kind of cool looking and fight. In your movie there’s a mythology between them.

I also think that we, again, we’ve had 30 years of the guys at NetherRealm building backstory and really adding a dense, rich history to this stuff. So that we’re able to probably draw on more stuff than they would have in the game, in the original film. So we did. We thought that was a really, really important ingredient to the backstory, not only of each of these characters, but also the whole Mortal Kombat canon. We wanted to do that justice by opening the gate and really having that rivalry be the spine of the film, of its structure. So I just think we looked at all ingredients that were given to us and perhaps back in the original film they just didn’t have that. Different world, different time.

What character were you most looking forward to kind of sinking your teeth into?

Well, and this might be a bit of a bland answer to your question, but the actual process of taking each of these characters and elevating them into a space where they haven’t really been presented in this way, that was the most joyous part of it. So, therefore, each character just came with its own set of challenges and fun aspect to it. For instance, Kung Lao, when we got the hat, we got the balance of that hat right. It was a really, really good day in pre-production, because it looks effortless the way Max Huang handles it and it’s all down to the way he goes about handling it and Max is fantastic, but that took a lot of work, that hat. I really loved that aspect of it. I love pre-production. I love designing. I love the visual, how we build and create those things. And how we’re dealing with our costumes, and we didn’t always get them right first time. There was a whole different look for Sub-Zero that just didn’t work…

Oh, how so? Because people have a good idea of what he looks like.

Yeah, absolutely. But what we did in pre-production was we had this giant room, and all around the walls of this huge room we put every single iteration of all our characters up on the wall. So we could see the through line of the essential strands of DNA, through lines, of what was important to each character. Because some of them have very different iterations of looks that bounce around quite a bit over the years. And even Sonia, even though what she’s wearing and what she looks like, it’s very simple and very human and normal, she’s had a few different looks across the years. So, what you can do is you can take these through lines and you can go off in different trajectories. For instance, the Sub-Zero example, it looked like Sub-Zero, but the crucial step, when it goes from concept and illustration and ideas, then to reality, that is a really important and that’s the step where you see whether it succeeded or not. It was that step that didn’t quite land on the first iteration of Sub-Zero. It wasn’t that he didn’t look like him, it was just more like, wow, he doesn’t look powerful. It just lacked that screen presence.

You also expanded on Jax in this movie, especially compared to the first movie.

Yeah. Mehcad [Brooks] did a great job. He’s a fantastic actor and really put a lot of time and effort into thinking about how to give him some substance. And with the arms, again, like I was saying, there are many different iterations of those arms over the years, but we ended up going back to the very early ones. And some of the arms we designed and we built, it doesn’t really look like Jax because there’s been so many mechanical arms and hands and legs and bodies and Iron Mans. And there’s been so much that’s been done that it was very easy just to fall into, oh, it feels like it’s coming out of Iron Man, or that feels like something from that. So we went back to the original: very chrome, if you remember those ones, which just had the lines in them that’s sort of organic and smooth and muscular. And we sort of took that as the blueprint visual and said, “All right. That is Jax there. So now how do we bring it to a modern iteration?” And so that’s why we ended up with a slightly tarnished titanium look because it felt more like Jax. So each of these characters got built through many people bringing their expertise. Obviously the actors and who they were, but then the costume and visual effects and special effects and, yeah, everyone came together. Hair and makeup and that was a great process. Really great team of people.

You’ve mentioned how you wanted to avoid an NC-17 with some of the death scenes? And how a video game can get away with a gory finishing move and a movie can’t as much because we process it differently. So how did you balance that? What’s the trick to prevent this from becoming too grim?

I mean, to be clear, I never said we nearly got an NC-17. What I was saying was it wouldn’t be hard for us to jump into that space, given the material. So two slightly different things. And it’s something we were really careful of because we didn’t want to get there. It was just a constant assessment and calibration and building – and we’d always just look and make sure we weren’t totally getting it wrong, the way the shots were blocked. They go by pretty quick, and that was by design. We felt that if you romanced them and slowed them down and made them too gratuitous in that sense, which is actually an element of the game – and I think in a game you can get away with that – whereas in reality, you can’t do that. It becomes a totally different thing. And so, yeah, it was just a matter of studying and assessing all the time and trying not to take your eye off the ball with that stuff. So, just constant analysis really.

‘Mortal Kombat’ premieres Friday, April 23rd via theaters and HBO Max. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Acclaimed country musician and famous stoner Willie Nelson has his fair share of cannabis stories. He’s not only toked up with legends like Snoop Dogg, but he even smoked a joint on the roof of the White House with Jimmy Carter’s son. Now, Nelson is fighting on behalf of cannabis users everywhere by attempting to make 4/20 a nationally-recognized holiday.

Nelson’s organization, Luck Reunion, officially put forth the petition earlier this month. It calls on the Biden Administration to deem April 20 through 29 the “High Holidays” in honor of Willie Nelson’s birthday, and is currently just a few hundred signatures away from their 2,500 signature goal:

“Dear President Biden and distinguished members of Congress, April 20th, known in these parts as 4/20, has long been celebrated as a holiday in smokey circles throughout this fine country, but in reality for cannabis users, one day just isn’t enough. In fact, for us, the ‘High Holidays’ begin on 4/20 and end on 4/29, the birthday of the legendary Willie Nelson.

The fine people of Luck, Texas, and supporters of the great Willie Nelson, on behalf of cannabis users around the nation, are writing today to ask you to consider declaring the 9 days spanning April 20 to April 29 an official national holiday: the ‘High Holidays.’

We believe that recognition of the ‘High Holidays’ opens the door to much needed dialogue supporting the many benefits of cannabis while helping to remove the unjustified stigmas currently surround this amazing plant.

Please puff, puff, and pass this to your friends in Congress for consideration.”

The petition concludes with a quote from Willie Nelson, which reads, “I think people need to be educated to the fact that marijuana is not a drug. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?”

Sign the official petition here.

Zion Williamson entered the NBA with massive expectations. It was the product of being the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 Draft and also the fact that he had dominated highlight reels for much of his high school and college career with high-flying dunks and a physically dominant style that was NBA ready at the age of 18.

Injuries meant it took a bit for his career to start, but once he got on the court he proved he belonged and quickly showed why he was deserving of the hype. The dunks are what get everyone talking, but he’s become an elite finisher at and below the rim, bullying opponents to get to the restricted area where he has incredible touch to get the ball up and in the hoop over and around defenders. Williamson’s rise to stardom hasn’t been a surprise, and many have looked to him as one the next great superstars in the NBA. One thing that all NBA superstars have in common is a signature sneaker, and on Tuesday Zion officially joined that group as Jordan unveiled the Zion 1.

The four colorways of the Zion 1 unveiled on Tuesday will release beginning on April 23. The Gen Zion, black and white colorway coming first with a limited release in New Orleans, with other colorways coming in the weeks to follow — the blue ZNA colorway on May 5, the Noah colorway designed by his younger brother on May 19, and the Marion colorway coming May 26.

From a performance standpoint, the goal was to create a shoe that could handle all the various pressures Williamson’s unique combination of size, power, speed, and bounce create. The padded tongue relieves pressure from lacing, while the forefoot strap (seen underneath the mesh upper) looks to add stability for cutting and takeoff. For extra cushioning, the sneaker features a full length Zoom Air strobel stacked on top of a Zoom Air unit for maximum bounce and cushion. The base of the shoe also extends outward to provide more stability, with Nike taking inspiration from the “massive tires on Williamson’s truck” to always keep his feet above the platform even as his powerful frame cuts and moves.

From a design perspective, the Zion 1 wanted to embrace his love of superheros and create a look of superhero armor on the tongue, and also adds the Z he gets cut into the side of his hair on the side of the sneaker as well. As for Zion’s pitch for why you should wear his shoe? Well, that’s pretty simple.

Netflix’s new samurai anime Yasuke premieres at the end of the month but today, the show’s executive producer Flying Lotus released two new songs from its soundtrack, including “Black Gold” featuring fellow anime fan Thundercat. FlyLo also shared “Between Memories” featuring Niki Randa today. You can listen to both via the Spotify embeds below.

YasukeThe Boondocks and another Netflix anime, Cannon Busters. Speaking with Apple Music about the new show, Flying Lotus credited the creation process with helping him get through the pandemic:

Honestly, it kept me sane. It was the best thing I could ask for because I had to be home. If I had touring and stuff, it would have been a little bit funky to really engage with the project like I was able to. I got to just really focus on it and just be a samurai for a while. It was really nice to just have that to run to, this universe, especially when all that Trumpy stuff was going on and things were getting all crazy. I was so glad just to shut that off and get to business. I knew when they were starting to deliver visuals and stuff that it was about to get intense. I was like, “Ah,” and I still had to try to figure out what I wanted it all to sound like. So it was a lot of meditating on the vibe, and I found a lot of parallels between the Yasuke story and being part of this thing. Trying to make music in the Japanese anime system, it’s a different experience than scoring something here in America. It’s just their way of doing things is so different to ours. It took a minute to grow and it took them to be willing to accept us, to work with our schedule, and take on our story as well. So it was a lot of love from both sides really on that.

Listen to “Black Gold” and “Between Memories” above.