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Disney has so many live-action remakes of their animated classics that sometimes they just dump them on their streamer. That ain’t happening with their redo of The Little Mermaid, the 1989 favorite that helped save the company’s feature-length animation department after a string of underperformers and outright bombs. In fact, it has a pretty plum release date. But what is it?

The Little Mermaid is set to arrive on May 26 of next year, nabbing the coveted Memorial Day Weekend slot and arriving the weekend after Fast X hits multiplexes. It’s the next Disney live-action remake on the docket, to be followed by Peter Pan & Wendy, due elsewhere in 2023, and the Lion King sequel Mufasa, in 2024. Then there’s that Hercules remake, which original film voice talent Danny DeVito thinks should feature him.

The teaser for The Little Mermaid dropped during the D23 expo last weekend, and it reduced its star, Halle Bailey, to tears. It also drove her not-quite-namesake Halle Berry to once again joke about the innocent confusion the casting has caused.

The 1989 original helped reinvigorate Disney’s feature-length animated films, which had struggled for a voice ever since the death of co-founder Walt Disney in 1966, in the midst of making the original The Jungle Book. Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman wrote the memorable songs and helped create a template that essentially turned Disney feature length cartoons into full-blown musicals, leading to a run of hits, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.

The Little Mermaid 2.0 hits theaters on May 26, 2023. You can watch the teaser in the video above.

Earlier this year, indie rock trio Dehd unveiled their fourth studio album, Blue Skies, after releasing the stunning singles “Empty In My Mind” and “Stars.” They’re back today with a new song called “Eggshells,” which was recorded during the album’s sessions for but didn’t make the cut.

The track is mellow and surfy, with a simple refrain sung by Jason Balla: “Walk along, walk along, eggshells / I’m done, I’m done, yeah / Better off, better off, on my own.” It makes for a catchy melody, which is their strong suit, and it builds into a trance-like, reverberating outro. It comes with a trippy, monotone video shot in Taos, New Mexico by vocalist Emily Kempf, alongside filmmaker Kevin Veselka.

In our 2020 interview with Kempf for the Dehd LP Flower Of Devotion, she discussed her quarter-life crisis during which she briefly stopped playing music. “I’d just given up everything to be a musician and I thought maybe that I f*cked up,” she said. She found herself wondering, “I’m not successful yet. Should I buy a house and get married and have a baby and go to college?’ So I quit.” She persisted for a year in corporate. “I basically tried to conform,” she recalled, “which did not work out because I’m too punk.”

Watch the video for “Eggshells” above.

Mike Pence has stayed remarkably — one could say foolishly — quiet about his experiences during the Jan. 6 riot. Instead, others have had to spill the beans about what happened as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some hellbent on hanging him. Even his own secret service agents thought they were done for. But not Pence, at least if you’re to believe his new memoir.

Axios obtained a copy of the book, entitled So Help Me God, whose final chapters are devoted to the day that ended the one-term Trump presidency in disgrace. It’s here that the former vice president, who’s continued to defend Trump even after Trump defended the people who wanted him strung up on a noose, finally takes a stand. Sort of. Not really.

“I was angry at what I saw, how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else,” he said, trying to separate regular Trump supporters whipped up on lies from the many who took that to extremes. But if you thought chants for his death got to him, think again.

“I was not afraid, but I was angry,” Pence writes.

And so, a man whose own life was threatened by MAGA extremists has once again refused to condemn those who could always do it again. Perhaps he thinks some of them will even vote for him in that far-fetched presidential bid he thinks will get off the ground.

(Via Axios)

Have Grimes and Kyrie Irving started hanging out? It’s very plausible, since the two have no qualms about spewing baseless theories that have been proven otherwise by science.

Irving, of course, thought the Earth was flat after he watched “a whole bunch of Instagram videos” that led him to that conclusion. Grimes — in her latest totally unpredictable topic of discussion on Twitter — seems to think that the world is merely 4,000 years old. Nevermind that basic anthropology, archaeology, and countless other branches of science have facts and data that prove otherwise. But Grimes is getting a rise out of her Twitter followers no less. In fact, she also added she thinks “Dinosaurs were planted by god to confuse us.”

Surely we must all be witnessing what is simply an elaborate ploy to draw attention to her #brand, which might or might not still involve releasing new music, but seems more concerned with finding the right ear and fang prosthetics these days. And typically, these rants by Grimes become juicier and invite more online…errr, discourse, when her ex-boyfriend Elon Musk replies to them. As of press time, Musk has not weighed in on what he thinks of this theory, or what he thinks of the fact that the mother of his child, X Æ A-Xii, believes in it. But writer Miles Klee, who went deep on the breadth of Grimes’ creationist hoopla over at Rolling Stone, was just as effective in his reply to Grimes:

Totally outrageous, you guys.

The Yakuza franchise has always been extremely popular in Japan. SEGA’s crime drama series was popular enough to get six mainline games and multiple spinoffs before it finally started to gain some mainstream popularity in the United States with the release of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. As the game’s popularity grew, so did interest in its many games and one that fans have been asking for forever is the samurai-themed spinoff, Ryū ga Gotoku Ishin!.

On Tuesday, during PlayStation’s State of Play event, longtime fans were shocked when it was announced that not only was Ishin! finally coming to the United States, but it was getting a full-on remake on top of that and being renamed Like a Dragon: Ishin!. Modern graphics, modern controls, and a whole new gameplay system. This is the best case scenario for longtime fans.

It’s hard to understate just how big a deal this is for American fans of Yakuza. This was a franchise that, for over a decade, didn’t have an English dub option because there wasn’t enough American fan support behind it to justify it. Yakuza 5 was a digital-only release and a delayed one at that. Now, it’s a major part of SEGA’s release schedule in both Japan and the United States. That western fans are going to finally get the chance to experience a spinoff that many fans have said is one of the best games in the entire franchise is a huge win for longtime fans.

We can’t wait to play this when it comes out next February. The graphics look incredible and we’re sure it’s going to be just as good as the rest.

ESPN paid a lot of money this offseason to poach Troy Aikman and Joe Buck away from Fox Sports to be their new broadcast team for Monday Night Football, and through one week it’s certainly looking like the four-letter is getting the returns it hoped.

For years, ESPN has been searching for a top Monday Night crew, ever since Jon Gruden left for the Raiders, followed by Mike Tirico’s exit to NBC. In their place they’ve tried a number of combinations of play-by-play voices and analysts, but they just couldn’t create the right grouping to capture the audience and meet the standard most wanted for one of the league’s premier broadcasts. In getting Buck and Aikman from Fox, they achieved that in in their first game on ESPN, they demolished recent ratings, proving the Worldwide Leader right to spend big to bring them on board.

Per ESPN, they pulled in 19.85 million viewers across all networks (ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, ESPN+, and ESPN Deportes) for Russell Wilson’s return to Seattle, which certainly helped increase interest in a Broncos-Seahawks matchup that would otherwise not have a ton of juice. The game being very competitive also helped, as did being simulcast on network television with ABC, but to be the third highest-rated regular season broadcast since ESPN got Monday Night Football, and the highest since 2009, feels like a testament to the Buck and Aikman additions — that 2009 season also happened to be Gruden’s first year in the booth for ESPN. The Manningcast aided those numbers as well, as they pulled in 1.5 million on ESPN2, as their second season got off to a much bigger start than a year ago, as fans have grown to love the chaos and honesty of the Manning’s alternate feed.

There have been other very good Monday Night games in the past and plenty that have also been on ABC’s airwaves, but for those (like myself) who have wondered how much a big-name broadcast team matters to NFL ratings, this offers an indication of that. Buck and Aikman being on a game makes it feel like a big deal and, at least to start, ESPN is receiving a considerable ratings boost with their presence.

God of War: Ragnarök is going to be the conclusion of its norse story arc fans are eagerly anticipating what this means for Kratos and his son Atreus. While it’s only going to be a two game story, the upcoming Ragnarök is sure to be full of incredible and emotional moments as the two characters that everyone fell in love with complete this journey together.

On Tuesday, during a State of Play event, PlayStation unveiled a new story trailer for the new game, and let’s just say it’s an intense one. It features all the character growth we saw from the first game in Atreus, but more excitedly we get to see a different side of Kratos. One that is being forced to rely on his son in ways that he is maybe not ready for yet.

Ragnarök being the conclusion of this story is going to create an odd feeling for fans that have known Kratos ever since his PS2 days. It’s not that those early games didn’t have stories, but they were more well known for their gameplay than for their story arcs. Ragnarök and the previous God of War (2018) on the other hand had us watch Kratos go through an emotional journey. They explore the character and gave him depth in a way that none of the other games attempted to. It’s been a rewarding change though and one we are excited to see the ending of come November.

In May, news broke that Nick Cave’s son Jethro passed away at age 31. This followed the tragic 2015 death of Cave’s son Arthur. Fans, earlier this year, did their best to support Cave with condolences through letters, which Cave thanked them for, writing that they were “a great source of comfort.”

Cave opened up in a new interview with The New York Times about the role his fans’ support plays in his grief, especially at live concerts. “When Arthur died, I was thrust into the darkest place imaginable, where it was almost impossible to be able to see outside of despair,” he said. “Susie and I somehow managed to pull ourselves out of that, and — I know this sounds corny — that did have something to do with the response I started to get from people who kept writing to me and saying, mostly, This happened to me, and this is what’s happening to you, and this is what can happen. This was extremely affecting for me.”

He added, “The concerts that I did following that, too — the care from the audience saved me. I was helped hugely by my audience, and when I play now, I feel like that’s giving something back. What I’m doing artistically is entirely repaying a debt. It’s — my other son has died. It’s difficult to talk about, but the concerts themselves and this act of mutual support saves me. People say, How can you go on tour? But for me it’s the other way around. How could I not?”

There are a lot of really great fighting games out there, but few compare to the craziness that is the Tekken franchise. What other game franchise, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, lets its main character fight a bear in hand-to-hand combat?

During a PlayStation State of Play event on Tuesday, a new trailer for Tekken 8 was shown to everyone featuring main characters Kazuya and Jin fighting it out in a destroyed landscape. The cinematic was gorgeous and the gameplay portions of it looked fast and fun. It’s obviously very scripted and in development, but we still loved getting a small taste of what the final product may look like.

If Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the fighting game versions of mainstream popularity, then Tekken is the alternative to those two that your friend growing up always argued was better. While that is obviously subjective, it’s exciting to see so many great fighting games coming out and Tekken is always going to be a must play of the genre.

Unfortunately, with no release date or anything like that the only thing we can do at this moment is speculate, but there is still plenty here to be excited about for the near future.

This year’s Emmys were a mildly chaotic affair, far as awards shows go. No celebrity hit another celebrity on stage on live television, but one celebrity did pretend to play dead while another delivered an acceptance speech. One of the more low-key out-there bits didn’t really come to light till the day after: Elle Fanning sure seems convinced she looks like Bill Hader.

The star of The Great spoke to Access Hollywood on the red carpet (as caught by Entertainment Weekly), and apart from talking about dresses and whatnot, she also brought up an idea she spotted online.

“There is something on Twitter that I saw that I look like him,” Fanning revealed. “And I love it! And so Nicholas Hoult — who is in the show with me — all we want to do tonight is I have to get a photo.”

She seemed to agree with the claim, exclaiming, “We have the same nose!” She even did her best impersonation of Hader on Barry, staring into the camera with a knowing look, daring people to see the similarities. She then went off in pursuit of Hader. “I would die,” she said. “I’ve gotta reel him in!”

Did they wind up taking a picture together? If so, one has not yet been made public. Had she tracked him down, she would have had to convince him to lower his KN95 mask, as he seemed to be the only celebrity at the ceremony wearing one.

Anyway, is she right? Wrong? You can watch Fanning make her arguably dubious claim below.

(Via Access Hollywood and EW)