When Scarlett Johansson sued The Walt Disney Company for giving Black Widow a day-and-date release on Disney+, which weakened the Marvel star’s back-end deal on theatrical profits, it became one of those hotly watched showdowns in the entertainment industry. Regardless of the outcome, the lawsuit has already become a sticking point in negotiations as studios navigate the tricky waters of streaming releases that upend distribution models and directly impact how much talent will get paid. (Warner Bros. decision to put its entire 2021 film slate on HBO Max has already cost the studio its relationship with Christopher Nolan.)
Despite not having a dog in this particular, specific fight, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos couldn’t help but chime in on the Black Widow lawsuit during Tuesday’s Code Conference in Beverly Hills, and he not so subtly let filmmakers and actors know which streaming service has their back. Via Deadline:
At one point, pressed by Swisher, Sarandos ventured a glimpse of his take on the big-bucks legal battle between Disney and Black Widow’s Scarlett Johansson over hybrid release windows and profit participation. “I watch these things as a spectator — I would have said this or said that,” he admitted. “I’m fortunate that we have not been in those shoes.”
Throwing out another bit of red meat for the business and tech crowd in the ballroom and watching online, Sarandos added: “Talent has to be respected and compensated.”
As studios struggle with shrinking theatrical windows and attempt to launch their own in-house streaming services with varying levels of success, Netflix has been poaching top talent like Johansson’s Marvel cohorts, the Russo Brothers, who launched the successful Extraction franchise with Thor star Chris Hemsworth.
As for Netflix’s strategy, it seems pretty simple, and Sarandos isn’t exactly being shy about it: Show them the money.
Hailing from the sparsely populated UK island Isle of Wight, indie duo Wet Leg drummed up excitement earlier this year after signing to Domino Records and issuing the buzzing single “Chaise Lounge.” After earning millions of streams and cosigns from the likes of Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Iggy Pop and Florence Welch, Wet Leg now share the playful single “Wet Dream” and unveil dates to their first-ever North American tour.
“Wet Dream” mirrors the tongue-in-cheek lyrics heard on Wet Leg’s previous single. The duo fire-off verses about being the subject of a wet dream as jangly guitars and quick-tempoed percussion give the song a driving beat.
Despite the song’s sultry theme, Wet Leg say the single is actually their version of a break-up song, inspired by one of vocalist Rhian Teasdale’s exes. “‘Wet Dream’ is a breakup song; it came about when one of my ex’s went through a stage of texting me after we’d broken up telling me that ‘he had a dream about me,’” she said.
Watch Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream” video above and check out their 2021 North America tour dates below.
12/08 — Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right
12/14 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Moroccan Lounge
12/15 — San Francisco, CA @ Popscene at Rickshaw Shop
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
During his time in office, Donald Trump became infamous for his ill-controlled temper.
From Twitter rants to shouting matches with the White House press corps and detailed accounts from aides that recounted his worst public meltdowns, Trump had anger issues. But according to a new book coming from former White House press secretary and the First Lady’s Chief of Staff Stephanie Grisham, those within his inner circle developed some strange ways of soothing the overgrown toddler during his worst tantrums.
In I’ll Take Your Questions Now, Grisham reveals that the administration had a designated “Music Man” whose job was to follow Trump around the White House and play show tunes whenever he seemed to be spiraling into a fit of rage. Though Grisham doesn’t name the aide in question, The New York Times reports that her ex-boyfriend, Max Miller, is the unlucky employee charged with serving as Trump’s meditation DJ. Apparently, the former president’s preferred wind-down music was anything Broadway, specifically Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical stylings in Cats.
Trump reportedly required an aide to play the song “Memory” from the musical if staff hoped to stave off a future blow-up which tracks, seeing as he’s been issued cease-and-desist orders by Weber in the past for using some of his Broadway tunes at rallies. (Les Mis producer Cameron Macintosh also objected to the Trump campaign’s intended use of the musical’s revolutionary ballad “Do You Hear The People Sing?” during rallies in 2016.)
This isn’t the strangest revelation from Grisham’s book — that honor belongs to a story she tells about Trump refusing to go under anesthesia for a colonoscopy because he didn’t want to put Vice President Mike Pence in charge for a few hours — but it does raise some interesting questions. Chief among them: Has Trump seen Tom Hooper’s butthole cut?
The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have a sarcastic raccoon; a green girl; a blue guy; a bug lady; shirtless Dave Bautista; and a walking tree voiced by Vin Diesel. What more could you want? If you’re the person who has messaged James Gunn every day for the past two years, a ferret.
“This person has been messaging me on IG multiple times a week for well over two years,” the Guardians and The Suicide Squad writer and director tweeted, adding photographic proof of the fan’s request. It reads, “So will u put a FERRET in GOTG3? (I KNOW YOU SAW THIS) I’m from STL too, do it for the HOMIES!”
Come on, James Gunn, add a ferret to Guardians 3 for the homies in St. Louis!
This person has been messaging me on IG multiple times a week for well over two years. pic.twitter.com/bvadZUEFE1
My Marvel knowledge is rusty, but apparently there’s a detective nicknamed “The Ferret” in the comics. “Dennis Piper eventually changed careers and became a private detective/crime writer under the assumed name Leslie Lenrow. His detective work earned him the nickname ‘Ferret’ for his ability to ‘ferret’ out criminals,” the Marvel Fandom wiki reads. “He often beat the local police in solving crimes, gaining him some notoriety with the police. He adopted a pet Ferret named Nosey who sometimes helped him in his cases.” A crime-solving ferret? Think of all the wacky adventures he and Rocket could go on. In fact, give them a standalone movie. Chris Pratt is busy anyway.
Dave Grohl has a colorful and active past in the music industry, and in a new Rolling Stone interview, he revealed he was once album a member of GWAR. However, GWAR has a different (not so serious) story, claiming that Grohl actually did join the band only to be fired a few minutes later.
As a reminder, Grohl said:
“GWAR were looking for a drummer. And I talked to their guitar player Dewey about it. And he’s like, it’s great, and you get to design your own costume. As drummer, you don’t want something that covers your face fully. You want your arms to be free. So I was like cool. So I started kind of drawing this thing. At the time GWAR was a band that would draw like 700 people, right? Which is huge. And then the more I thought about it, am I really gonna invite my uncle to see me play when there’s like fake blood and cum shooting all over the place?”
In response, GWAR’s Michael Bishop, in character as Blothar The Berserker, told Consequence, “Grohl remembers this ALL wrong! He used to hang around the track with all the other young punks jacked on gak. This is back before he lost all his teeth. We hired him and then called him back immediately and fired him. He was in the band for around 7 and a half minutes. He was holding us back.”
Then, Bishop, as himself, gave a more serious recounting of events, saying, “Our guitar player Dewey (Flattus Maximus) was booking shows in Richmond at the time, and we had all seen Dave play with his bands Dain Bramage and later on in Scream. He was already one of the greatest, hardest hitting drummers I had ever seen. He still is. Dewey called and started the conversation with him about joining GWAR. I was stoked because I played bass at the time, and I would have loved to jam with him. Just think, he could have been working his ass off playing drums in a rubber monster suit all these years. Boy did he make the wrong choice.”
For a company that lives and dies by algorithms, Netflix has never been big on data sharing. But given the company’s growing status as a major entertainment player, what with Hollywood heavyweights like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro in its corner, it seems they’re ready to start shouting their numbers from the rooftops.
On Monday, The Verge reported that the streaming giant shared the viewership numbers of its biggest TV and movie hits—and they’re pretty damn impressive. On the television side, Lady Whistledown hears that the anachronistically steamy Bridgerton brought in 82 million viewers to take the top spot, while Sam Hargrave’s surprisingly good actioner Extraction, featuring Chris Hemsworth, got the attention of 99 million viewers. (No word on how much crossover there was between the two audiences.)
“We’re trying to be more transparent with the market and talent and everybody,” Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos said. “It’s a big black box for everybody.”
It’s certainly an enlightening pile of data, particularly to anyone (cough, this writer, cough) who has ever wondered: Did anyone actually watch Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler in Murder Mystery? And was it really a big enough number to warrant a sequel? (The answer, amazingly, is yes and definitely yes!)
Here’s how the both lists broke down by the numbers…
Most Watched Netflix Movies
Extraction: 99 million
Bird Box: 89 million
Spenser Confidential: 85 million
6 Underground: 83 million
Murder Mystery: 83 million
The Old Guard: 78 million
Enola Holmes: 77 million
Project Power: 75 million
Army of the Dead: 75 million
Fatherhood: 74 million
Most Watched TV Series
Bridgerton: 82 million
Lupin: Part I: 76 million
The Witcher: 76 million
Sex/Life: 67 million
Stranger Things 3: 67 million
Money Heist: Part 4: 65 million
Tiger King: 64 million
The Queen’s Gambit: 62 million
Sweet Tooth: 60 million
Emily in Paris: 58 million
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the best is yet to come: Sarandos claimed that Squid Game, Netflix’s new Korean game show, is shaping up to be the company’s biggest-ever hit.
Is something amiss with former MTV VJ-turned actor, podcaster, and comedian Russell Brand? He’s long been known for left-leaning points of view (including raging against Fox News), but there’s been a telltale shift lately, like when he hopped aboard with Matthew McConaughey’s recent rant about how people shouldn’t ridicule Trump voters over their continued “denial” of Biden’s presidential win. That was a particularly uncomfortable exchange (since McConaughey won’t really air his own political stances, but he’s regularly reminding everyone that he wants to run for office), but there’s no denying that Russell’s prolific (not to mention persuasive) way with words attracts a millions-strong audience on his podcast, Under the Skin, on various social media platforms, and on YouTube.
While we’re talking about that last platform, let’s take a look at what’s going on with Russell over at his YouTube channel. He’s leaning further and further to the right, and that shift is now growing dramatic and (to put it bluntly) conspiratorial. Headlines like “Vaccine APARTHEID: Don Lemon’s Covid BOMBSHELL,” “THIS Is Why You Can’t Trust Big Pharma,” “Vaccine Mandates: An ASSAULT On Your Bodily,” and “SHOCKING Wuhan Evidence: Did Fauci LIE?” do present a certain perspective.
One video (called “So… Trump was RIGHT”) in particular is attracting a lot of attention because Brand, for whatever reason, went on a wild rant about how the 2016 election was all about collusion with Russia. However, he claims that the collusion was on behalf of the Clinton campaign, which Brand believes is a “conspiracy.” Within the video, he declared that all of the news coverage of Russia collusion by the Trump campaign — and the released emails by Don Jr. and Donald Trump’s own words — was part of some “propaganda, a construct, a confection by the Democratic Party.”
Brand continued to argue that he feels that the situation (Biden, a Democrat, holding the U.S. presidency, and Dems holding Congressional majorities), is “kind of beyond disappointing,” as through he believes that nothing went wrong in the Trump presidency (including the botched pandemic response, which has continued to reverberate) to motivate people to vote Democrat. Still, Brand says that his belief that the Clinton campaign colluded with Russia is enough to make him “begin to question and query what other things may not be true.”
Well. This hot mess has led people to wonder what, exactly, is going on with Russell Brand because he’s essentially spreading Kremlin propaganda.
What Russell Brand is saying is Russian disinformation..
From there, the jokes and remarks ran wild. Comparisons to Johnny Depp’s imploding career have been drawn (the two do have a similar aesthetic, and Depp’s recent rant on “cancel culture” went off the rails with similar vibes), and people are wondering whether “Russell Brand has officially lost his mind” or whether he’ll start shilling MyPillow soon.
Good morning to everyone except Russell Brand for believing that Trump was right in calling the Russian collusion a witch-hunt.
I would welcome Russell Brand to the QAnon cult, but let’s be honest: he’s been embodying their extremist mentality for years. It’s just that his narcissism finally overtook his drive to help others and I’m sad about it.
After decades in the music industry, Snoop Dogg is putting his music knowledge to the test once and for all. As the latest guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Snoop Dogg attempted to guess song titles after hearing a short snippet of a track in a game called One Second Rap Song.
Snoop Dogg was very skeptical about the game at first but unsurprisingly went on to absolutely kill it. When Fallon first explained the game’s premise, Snoop said: “Who thought of this damn show? When you do what I do, one second just may not be enough.” But sure enough, Snoop Dogg was able to successfully guess the title of each hip-hop tune, even when he was played a quarter of a second of a song.
Elsewhere in the segment, Snoop Dogg reveals he has secured a new gig at Def Jam Records: Executive Creative and Strategic Consultant. “I was a fan of Def Jam Records as a kid, and knowing the talent that they have over there and the opportunity that was waiting on me, I wanted to go over there and give a lot of opportunity to the artists over there to get some information, some wisdom and some guidance from me and then also develop some new acts and give some opportunity,” he told Fallon. “So Def Jam was the perfect place for me, considering how much I love it and how much it means to hip-hop and how it really needed somebody like me to change the energy of the building. I’m over there for one reason: to get the music back poppin’ and to make the people feel the way they’re supposed to.”
Watch Snoop Dogg play One Second Rap Song on The Tonight Show above.
A few days ago marked one year since Idles released their latest album, 2020’s Ultra Mono. The band apparently got back into the studio quickly after dropping the album, because now they have a new LP ready to go: Today, Idles announced Crawler, which is set for release on November 12.
Accompanying the announcement is the soulful single “The Beachland Ballroom,” of which Joe Talbot says:
“It’s the most important song on the album, really. There’s so many bands that go through the small rooms and dream of making it into the big rooms. Being able to write a soul tune like this made me go, f*ck — we’re at a place where we’re actually allowed to go to these big rooms and be creative and not just go through the motions and really appreciate what we’ve got. The song is sort of an allegory of feeling lost and getting through it. It’s one that I really love singing.”
Bowen adds, “I didn’t know Joe could sing like that. He’s been trying to write ‘Be My Baby’ since the very beginning, but he didn’t want to be the punk guy wearing the Motown clothes. He wanted it to feel natural, and this song is.”
Press materials also note that on the album, “the group brings to life vivid stories of trauma, addiction and recovery with its most soul-stirring music to date. […] There are also fresh textures and experiments that push Idles into thrilling new territory”
Listen to “The Beachland Ballroom” above, and below, find the Crawler art and tracklist. Their previously announced North American tour also starts soon, so find those dates here.
Partisan
1. “MTT 420 RR”
2. “The Wheel”
3. “When the Lights Come On”
4. “Car Crash”
5. “The New Sensation”
6. “Stockholm Syndrome”
7. “The Beachland Ballroom”
8. “Crawl!”
9. “Meds”
10. “Kelechi”
11. “Progress”
12. “Wizz”
13. “King Snake”
14. “The End”
Crawler is out 11/12 via Partisan Records. Pre-order it here.
Here are six facts from the video above by The Story of Stuff Project that I’ll definitely remember next time I’m tempted to buy bottled water.
1. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water (and not just a little).
A Business Insider column noted that two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States is in individual 16.9-ounce bottles, which comes out to roughly $7.50 per gallon. That’s about 2,000 times higher than the cost of a gallon of tap water.
And in an article in 20 Something Finance, G.E. Miller investigated the cost of bottled versus tap water for himself. He found that he could fill 4,787 20-ounce bottles with tap water for only $2.10! So if he paid $1 for a bottled water, he’d be paying 2,279 times the cost of tap.
2. Bottled water could potentially be of lower quality than tap water.
Fiji Water ran an ad campaign that was pretty disparaging about the city of Cleveland. Not a wise move. The city ordered a test of the snooty brand’s water and found that Fiji Water contained levels of arsenic that weren’t seen in the city’s water supply.
” Bottled water manufacturers are not required to disclose as much information as municipal water utilities because of gaps in federal oversight authority. Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA.”
3. The amount of bottled water we buy every week in the U.S. alone could circle the globe five times!
That sounded like it just had to be impossible, so we looked into it. Here’s what our fact-checkers found:
“According to the video, ‘ People in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week.’National Geographic says for 2011, bottled water sales hit 9.1 billion gallons (roughly 34 billion liters).
A ‘typical’ water bottle is a half-liter, so that’s about 68 billion bottles per year. Divided by 52 weeks would be a little over 1 billion bottles of water sold per week in the U.S. Because that’s based on a smaller ‘typical’ bottle size, it seems reasonable that a half billion bottles a week could be accurate.
The Earth is about 131.5 million feet around, so yep, half a billion bottles of varying sizes strung end-to-end could circle the Earth five times.”
4. Paying for bottled water makes us chumps.
Beverage companies have turned bottled water into a multibillion-dollar industry through a concept known as manufactured demand. Bottled water advertisements used a combination of scare tactics (Tap water bad!) and seduction (From the purest mountain streams EVER!) to reel us in.
Well, we now know their claims about the superior quality of bottled water are mostly bogus. And research shows that anywhere from a quarter to 45% of all bottled water comes from the exact same place as your tap water (which, to reiterate, is so cheap it’s almost free).
5. Bottled water is FILTHY.
It takes oil — lots of it — to make plastic bottles. According to the video, the energy in the amount of oil it takes to make the plastic water bottles sold in the U.S. in one year could fuel a million cars. That’s not even counting the oil it takes to ship bottled water around the world.
On top of all that, the process of manufacturing plastic bottles is polluting public water supplies, which makes it easier for bottled water companies to sell us their expensive product.
6. There are 750 million people around the world who don’t have access to clean water.
A child dies every minute from a waterborne disease. And for me, that’s the core of what makes bottled water so evil.
The video wraps by comparing buying bottled water to smoking while pregnant. That may sound extreme, but after learning everything I just did about the bottled water industry, I can’t disagree.
If you’re properly disgusted, here are a few ways you can help destroy the bottled water industry:
Don’t buy bottled water. Get a reusable water bottle. The savings will add up.
Rally your schools, workplaces, and communities to ban bottled water.
Demand that your city, state, and federal governments invest in better water infrastructure.
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I’m from STL too, do it for the HOMIES!”
(@DemVaccinated) 
