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There hasn’t been much news about HBO’s Harry Potter series since it was first announced last year. But this morning, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO (and public enemy number one among Looney Tunes fans) David Zaslav offered an update on the reboot, which unfortunately involves J.K. Rowling.

“We’ve not been shy about our excitement around Harry Potter. The last film was made more than a dozen years ago. I was in London a few weeks ago with Casey [Bloys, CEO of HBO] and Channing [Dungey, chairperson of Warner Bros Television] and we spent some real time with J.K. and her team,” Zaslav said during a fourth quarter earnings call, according to The Wrap. “Both sides just thrilled to be reigniting this franchise. Our conversations were great, and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.”

Zaslav also revealed that the show is expected to premiere in 2026, a year shy of the 30th anniversary of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. “We can’t wait to share a decade of new stories with fans around the world on Max. We’re aiming for a debut in 2026,” he said, adding that every season is expected to cover one book for seven total seasons.

Maybe skip the S.P.E.W. episodes?

(Via The Wrap)

Action Movie Star Tom Cruise is tremendous, but the Tom Cruise who works with auteur filmmakers is even better.

Cruise has collaborated with some of the greatest filmmakers of the last 40 years, including Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money), and Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July), and given terrific performances in all their film. But he’s still searching for his first Academy Award. He’s been nominated three times (Best Actor twice for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire and Best Supporting Actor for Magnolia), but with zero wins.

Cruise just took a big step towards getting his long-overdue Oscar, however.

On Thursday, Deadline reported that “Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment are in negotiations for an untitled Alejandro G. Iñárritu film starring Tom Cruise. The project would mark Iñárritu’s first English-language pic since his 2015 smash The Revenant.”

Not counting Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a movie that no one saw and I’m not sure actually exists, the leads of Iñárritu’s last three movies have all been nominated for Oscars: Javier Bardem for Biutiful; Michael Keaton for Birdman; and Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant. That was Leo’s first Oscar after years of nomination.

Sound familiar? It’s time for Tom to get his Oscar before AI takes over Hollywood and all movies are written by and star the Entity.

(Via Deadline)

Steven and Ian begin this week’s episode with an impromptu Moviecast about the news that Sam Mendes is directing four separate biopics about each member of The Beatles. Steven has often said that he can’t ever have too much Beatles content, but this might finally test that theory. The guys also try to think about music biopics that are actually good, and come up with 24 Hour Party People, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and the immortal made-for-VH1 classic about Def Leppard.

From there, they talk about the latest album from MGMT, Loss Of Life, as well as the band’s career. Shockingly, Ian has never heard Oracular Spectacular in its entirety! They also discuss the buzziest band of early 2024, the British export The Last Dinner Party, and the lineage of heavily hyped English rock bands.

In the mailbag, they are asked to give a yay-or-nay verdict on the Lemonheads and whether band lineup changes have ever helped bands in the long run.

In Recommendation Corner, Ian pays tribute to Complex.com and a reissue of a lost classic by Curling while Steven recommends the latest from the jammy folk-rock outfit Itasca.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 177 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Free Nationals have teamed up with frequent collaborator Anderson .Paak, as well as rapper ASAP Rocky, for a scorching new track. Tonight (February 23), the artists have shared “Gangsta,” which amalgamates the signature components of each act, and results in untouchable musical chemistry.

Over a groovy, hypnotic beat, which comes by way of brilliant production by Free Nationals, Rocky taps into a sense of bravado, remembering his father who taught him his gangster ways. .Paak delivers a soulful chorus, somehow making the life of a gangster sound smooth and sweet.

The song’s accompanying video features younger versions of .Paak and Rocky driving through town looking fly, and getting in trouble along the way

It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten new music from any of the three acts. Neither Free Nationals nor .Paak have released an album since 2019, and Rocky hasn’t dropped one since 2018.

But in an interview with Dazed published last fall, Rocky teased his long-awaited fourth album, teasing a more adventurous sound.

“I want to leave expectations wide and open,” Rocky said. “I don’t want to tell you what to expect. I just want people to experience it how they do naturally.”

You can see the “Gangsta” video above.

Anderson .Paak is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Within the first half hour of Constellation — Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi series — you’ll think you have the show’s premise pegged. It’s a by-the-book space disaster complete with severed limbs, cosmic explosions, and freak accidents that force brilliant minds to make heroic sacrifices. But, in the waning minutes of its premiere, Constellation throws viewers a gravity-assisted curve ball that brings all of those preconceived notions crashing back down to Earth.

The show, created by Doctor Who writer Peter Harness and directed by Breaking Bad visionary Michelle MacLaren, isn’t really about what happens to astronauts in space at all. It’s about everything that goes wrong once they come home. With Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) playing Jo Ericsson – a scientist who survives a mission-ending tragedy aboard the International Space Station only to confront a sinister conspiracy when she re-enters Earth’s atmosphere – Constellation tells a timeline-hopping story about love, loss, and how we define what’s real.

Uproxx spoke with MacLaren about setting her sci-fi head-scratcher of a series apart from the rest of the streaming glut, the mysteries of space travel, and whether TV really is too dark these days.

From your first gig on The X-Files to this, what about the world of sci-fi is interesting to you as a director?

I would say that Constellation is actually a mix of genres, which I like. It’s a character-driven drama, first of all, and a psychological thriller. There’s action, there’s adventure, and there’s horror. It’s fun to mix those genres. In this one specifically, there are so many different elements going into it that I drew on a lot of my different experiences to bring to the table.

I love that, other than Jonathan Banks, there’s a tie-in between the show about a drug-dealing science teacher and the show about a space catastrophe.

On Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I really got to play a lot, be very creative, and think out of the box. That taught me a lot about how to use the camera best to tell the story and where to put it. It’s wonderful to work in different genres and be able to experiment and try different things, and then when you do something like this where there’s a mixture you can draw on those experiences.

This show hits the gas within the first 20 minutes and it doesn’t let up after that. Why did you want to just throw the audience in the chaos from the jump?

Nowadays, you’re competing against so much. You want to grab ahold of your audience, you want to say, ‘Okay, here we go, we’re going to take you on a ride.’

We want to get to the catastrophe and put Jo in that situation where she’s by herself on the ISS, she’s in survival mode, and what she really wants is to get back to her daughter. That’s the core of the setup. So we wanted to get to that, I think, as quickly as possible. And then we wanted to give it time for you to sit with Jo and experience the terrifying survival instincts that she has to go through on the ISS — rebuilding the battery and the ticking clock, for you to feel the angst and her longing to want to be with her child.

This is a space story we don’t see often – what happens when someone comes back down to Earth? Did any of your research answer that question?

Well, one of the things that really fascinated me about this was the idea of what would happen if you woke up one day and your world looked familiar, but it changed. It didn’t seem quite right. It was off. How would you deal with that? Peter Harness, who created the show, did a lot of research and he too was drawn in by the various stories from the people who went to space and had odd experiences like whether they saw angels or light passing through their hands or heard voices, dogs barking, that kind of thing. And then, when they came back to Earth… there have been some astronauts who have been really challenged. Some go on to live wonderful, successful lives, but the ones who have gone awry, is it from traveling in space or is it from reaching the pinnacle of your career? Who knows?

But he talked a lot about the overview when you’re up there and the astronauts look down at this little blue dot and everything they know and love is down below and the kind of effect that it can have on you. Space travel is fascinating and I think that what it does to the mind, who knows when you go up there if you come back the way you left.

If you’ve never helmed a space movie before, it’s probably a bit of a learning curve learning how to shoot zero-gravity – and make it believable. How much of this show was just you, MacGyvering your way through it?

[laughs] Shooting the ISS was very challenging. We had to storyboard every piece of the spacewalk. It’s so expensive to shoot. So we had to create everything and get everything approved ahead of time. And then we still changed things in the execution. So having everything broken down to every specific shot was really important for everybody involved, especially the stunts and the special effects and the visual effects because in every shot the characters are floating — whether they’re miming it or whether they’re on wires or whether they’re on a seat that rolls or a platform that was built for them to be on their stomachs — they’re doing all this while acting. And then we had specific camera rigs that had a float to them, one we called the chicken cam because it had so much flexibility and we could move it in small places. I learned so much, it was all very new to me.

Did you get any input from actual astronauts on how to make those scenes look as authentic as possible?

Scott Kelly was our astronaut consultant and he really helped us with the authenticity. He came to Berlin and he showed us how you move and talked about how it felt and what to be careful of. If you move too fast in space and you hit something, there’s the ricochet effect and it can be deadly, which was in itself a challenge because here we are shooting an action sequence, but you can’t move quickly because you’ll kill yourself. So it’s like, ‘How do we keep that exciting?’ It was really challenging, but we really wanted to make it as grounded and realistic as possible.

There’s an ongoing discussion about the look of TV shows these days – how dark they are. This series is filled with night shots, scenes on frozen lakes, and tons of images that could easily be impossible to actually see. But they’re not. Where do you stand on the issue of too-dark TV shows?

Ah, that’s interesting. Well, first of all, I’ll just say that it was really important to us that we went to practical locations so that we could shoot 360. We did go to the Moroccan Desert, to Kazakhstan, and we did build most of the International Space Station. We were very fortunate that we got to do that because it was really important to me that you understand the scope, the vastness of space, the vastness of the desert, the vastness of the Arctic, and how small we are.

In Finland. The sun never rose. We were there in February, so the sky just glowed. So we were able to shoot in that twilight, which everybody loves shooting in, which you usually only get 15 or 20 minutes of. That was the majority of our day. So I’m glad you felt like you could see it. We wanted you to feel the immenseness of these locations, and of course, you have to see them to do that.

What good is having Jonathan Banks lose it on a large frozen lake if you can’t see him?

Jonathan is amazing. I mean, he’ll go anywhere and do anything. He was absolutely in the north. I’ll tell you a secret that I shouldn’t — Jonathan got sick and he couldn’t make it to Morocco. And Barbara [Sukowa] who plays the head of the Russian Space Station, she broke her ankle. Those actors were never in Morocco. So we actually shot all the wide shots on the runway with doubles, and then we shot their close-ups in a parking lot in Berlin. But those are the types of things that happen when you go to places.

Taylor Swift did it again. She had a series of shows in Melbourne last weekend, and there, she announced “The Bolter,” a bonus track for The Tortured Poets Department. She performed the first of her concerts at Sydney’s Accor Stadium today (February 23) and at opening night, she revealed news of “The Albatross,” another new Tortured Poets bonus track.

Naturally, one of the first things fans wondered about is what the song is about.

What Is Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross” About?

Based on the song’s title and elements of Swift’s life and history, fans are coming up with theories about the lyrics’ thematic elements.

The Swifties at Merriam-Webster came through with some information, tweeting two definitions of the word: “albatross | noun. a: something that causes persistent deep concern or anxiety. b: something that greatly hinders accomplishment : ENCUMBRANCE.”

Those were connections made by a lot of Swiftie tweets, with some pointing out how Swift’s fame might be the albatross she’s referring to. Some have connected the song title with the “Am I allowed to cry?” text Swift shared on Instagram to accompany the song news. One theorized, “‘am I allowed to cry?’ Hits so hard especially with the albatross being the name of the file. The albatross is probably about how fame is always the constant problem in all her relationships which stops her from having a normal life. But she can’t complain because this is the life she always wanted so she can’t cry or express any negative emotions about it even if it’s the albatross in her life. And the constant dehumanisation of her just because of her status she can’t cry she can’t feel sad or angry. To the point she doesn’t know If she is allowed to express any type of negative emotions fearing it might come out as ungrateful.”

Some others looked more into the behaviors of the albatross bird, like how it nests on remote islands and mates for life.

Check out some more reactions below.

Another weekend in Australia, another new song announcement. Taylor Swift had a run of shows in Melbourne last weekend, and while there, she announced “The Bolter,” a bonus track for The Tortured Poets Department. Now, Swift played her first show at Sydney’s Accor Stadium today (February 23) and delivered news of another new bonus track: “The Albatross.”

Shortly after sharing the news on stage, she posted the alternate album cover on Instagram along with a poetic line that reads, “Am I allowed to cry?” The new edition of The Tortured Poets Department featuring “The Albatross” is now available for pre-order on Swift’s website.

Swift also recently reflected on her weekend in Melbourne, sharing photos from the shows and writing, “Melbourne, what do I even say to you after over 288,000 of you came and danced with us in the last 3 nights ??! That was unforgettable. You were on another LEVEL. Thank you for the memories. I’ll revisit the ones from this weekend often.”

Meanwhile, Travis Kelce couldn’t make it to the Melbourne shows, but he was on hand in Sydney. Kelce and Swift visited the Sydney Zoo yesterday, and naturally, he was in the audience for today’s performance.

The Tortured Poets Department is out 4/19 via Republic. Find more information here.

Lil Durk is back with some heat. Tonight (February 23), the Chicago rapper has begun rolling out a new project, sharing his new single, “Old Days.”

On the new single, Durk looks back on his tumultuous journey, which has shaped him into who he is today.

“I miss the old days, the old ways, my history iconic / I was takin’ so many pills, I was so high, I really abused it,” he recalls on one of the song’s verses. Now, in a better place in terms of both his mental and physical health, he finds himself wanting peace, but fears the idea may now be a pipe dream. “I wish I could stop the war, I really wanna live in peace / I wish I could stop the war, but it’s too late for them to speak.”

2024 is gearing up to be a big year for Durk. Earlier this month, Durk won his first Grammy for Best Melodic Rap Performance for his J. Cole collaboration, “All My Life.” He also joined Cole and Drake for their It’s All A Blur — Big As The What? Tour. While celebrating these huge milestones, Durk has been teasing his next project, Love Songs 4 The Streets 3.

You can see the “Old Days” video above.

We are just weeks away from Justin Timberlake‘s new album, Everything I Thought It Was. And during the rollout, the pop hitmaker has been pulling out all the stops. Over the past few weeks, Timberlake has performed two free pop-up shows, performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and shared new songs by way of live performances. Tonight (February 23), Timberlake has shared “Drown,” the latest taste of Everything I Thought It Was.

The new single shows a vulnerable side of Timberlake, as he details feelings of betrayal by a lover.

“You left me alone out in the dark with all of your demons / Got caught up in the tide of all the tears you cried / Yeah, you know I was blinded by my heart, sinking from the start / Should’ve never followed you this far, now I’m in the deep end / And you let me drown / You didn’t even try to save me,” he sings on the song’s chorus.

While the past few years have placed Timberlake in a controversial light, Timberlake seems to be telling his side of the story through music. Though it’s unclear who the song is about, Timberlake’s ability to tell a story through a pop ballad hasn’t dwindled.

You can listen to “Drown” above.

Everything I Thought It Was is out 3/15 via RCA. Find more information here.

Some students choose to live at home while they go to college to save money on living expenses, but that’s generally only an option for families who live in college towns or cities with large universities where a student can easily commute.

For University of British Columbia student Tim Chen, that “easy commute” is more than 400 miles each way.

Twice a week, Chen hops on a flight from his home city of Calgary, flies a little more than an hour to Vancouver to attend his classes, then flies back home the same night. And though it’s hard to believe, this routine actually saves him approximately $1,000 a month.

How does that math work? Well, each round trip flight costs around $150, so twice a week puts him at $1,200 a month for flights. Meanwhile, according to CTV, rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Vancouver is around $2,100 (though according to reporting in the Vancouver Sun, the average 1-bedroom apartment has actually hit a whopping $3,000 a month). Chen had actually been living in Vancouver previously, but gave up his rental when he went on vacation. When he returned, the price on the place he’d been renting had gone up to $2,500.

“I thought, why don’t I just stay at Calgary and then just fly here, it’s like a one-hour flight, that’s like the same as taking a bus,” he told CTV.

Chen lives with his parents in Calgary and only pays a small amount for utilities, so despite the cost of flights, commuting by plane is ultimately far cheaper than living in Vancouver.

Plus, imagine how many frequent flier miles he’s racking up.

— (@)

Chen is not the first student to commute to college by commercial airplane. An engineering student who was accepted to a one-year master’s program at University of California, Berkeley, flew to school from Los Angeles, where he had an affordable place to live and where he planned to return when his program was finished. Once he crunched the numbers, he realized it would actually save him money to commute by plane to the Bay area and take the train from the airport to campus three times a week rather than live in Berkeley.

In all, that student spent $5592.66 over the 10 months it took him to complete his program, which was less than what he would have paid for just two months living in Berkeley.

We’re living in some strange economic times, where people are having to get creative about where and how they live. Some people have discovered that unconventional lifestyles, such as living on a cruise ship, in vacation rentals or at an all-inclusive resort can be less expensive—or just as expensive—as traditional rent or mortgage payments (plus relevant living expenses). And now that more people are able to work remotely—one of the few positives to come out of the pandemic—such alternatives are more doable than ever.

Of course, the “time is money”consideration is real, and the hassle of going to the airport twice a week in the morning and evening like Tim Chen does might not be worth it for some people. But with rent prices nearly 30% higher than they were before the pandemic, more people are in need of creative solutions to cost-of-living conundrums.

Even if that means living at home and hopping a flight to school several hundred miles awaay.