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To give credit where credit is due, it is hard to be a streaming company the same way that it’s hard to do anything these days. But Netflix has really had a tough year. Following their not-so-great first quarter was a pretty bad second quarter where they lost 970,000 subscribers from April 1st to June 30th. But, it’s okay! Netflix isn’t upset, according to Netflix.

The company had projected an almost two million subscriber loss earlier this year, so, in terms of setting themselves up for disappointment, they did pretty well. Or they are bad at predicting things. It can really go either way.

Netflix currently has 220.67 million subscribers worldwide and projects that they are going to gain an additional one million subs in Quarter 3, which ends Sept. 30th. While it won’t have another season of Stranger Things to boost those sub counts, Netflix is probably hoping that cracking down on password-sharing and introducing ad-supported tiers will help to even out their subscriber count once parents kick their college kids off their family accounts.

For some perspective, Disney+ and Hulu have a combined 205.6 million subscribers as of April, while Paramount+ trails behind with 62.4 million. It seems like South Park: The Streaming Wars unfortunately did not help their streaming numbers. It’s tough all around!

(Via Variety)

This past weekend, Post Malone teamed up with Meta for a VR concert of live performances of songs from his new album Twelve Carat Toothache, and to start the week, he shared a pair of the songs from the performance on his YouTube. Culling standouts “Love Hate Letter To Alcohol” and “Wasting Angels” featuring his tiny Australian doppelganger The Kid Laroi, Post gives fans who didn’t catch the original live stream the opportunity to see what they missed out on.

The performances take a lot of inspiration from 17th-century architecture, as he performs in a fog-filled space surrounded by arches and dressed in an ensemble resembling priests’ robes. The stripped-down setting allows Post’s passionate vocal delivery to take center stage as he growls and bleats with that distinctive voice of his.

Twelve Carat Toothache continued Post’s streak of No. 1 debuts on the Billboard 200 and was critically praised. Uproxx’s Alex Gonzalez wrote, “On Twelve Carat Toothache, Malone seeks to make more than quick hits. The album is his most cohesive body of work to date, and his first worth a listen from beginning to end.”

Watch Post Malone’s live performances of “Love Hate Letter To Alcohol” and “Wasting Angels” featuring The Kid Laroi from his Twelve Carat Toothache: A VR Experience concert above.

To commemorate 25 years of the iconic animated series lambasting celebrities and pushing the boundaries of network television, South Park is going on tour for the newly announced “South Park: The 25th Anniversary Experience.” The five-city tour is being touted as “an immersive, traveling exhibit showcasing props, memorabilia, artwork, collectibles and never-before-seen scripts, storyboards concept art & more.”

Via South Park Studios:

Inspired by the real South Park Studios storage unit where many of the items displayed have been held for the past 25 years, the exhibit is housed within a custom fabricated shipping container: giving fans the authentic experience of ‘stepping into the South Park vault for the very first time.’ The shipping container — which features a custom, Cartman inspired paint job — will also serve as an interactive photo opp: giving fans the opportunity to pose alongside their favorite characters against 3 different iconic South Park landscapes.

Here are the official tour dates for the events, which are free to attend (you read that right) and coming up very quickly:

NYC: Saturday, 7/23 at Union Square
Chicago: Saturday, 7/30 at Navy Pier
Red Rocks: Tuesday, 8/9 & Wednesday 8/10 at Red Rocks Trading Post
Denver: Friday, 8/12 & Saturday 8/13 at McGregor Square
Los Angeles: Saturday, 8/20 at Hollywood & Vine

Collider reports that the Red Rocks event will also coincide with a 25th Anniversary Concert featuring Primus and Ween as well as appearances by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. No word if they’ll come bearing Casa Bonita grub, but there will be a tailgate experience, which will be free to attend. You kids have fun.

(Via South Park)

Comedian and Academy Award-winning actress Mo’Nique very famously called out Netflix a few years ago after she was offered significantly less money than her peers, Amy Schumer and Chris Rock, for a stand-up special. The comedian asked her fans to boycott the streamer after she was only offered $500K for a special, while Schumer and Rock were offered $11 million and $20 million, respectively. Obviously, she was not pleased.

Now, it seems like the drama has died down between Mo’Nique and Netflix, as she just landed a new special! Last month, the comedian and the streamer settled for an undisclosed amount. Today, Mo’Nique announced that she has a new special in the works at Netflix.

In addition to her untitled special, Mo’Nique will also reunite with Precious director Lee Daniels for the Netflix film The Deliverance alongside Omar Epps, Glenn Close, and Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin. Daniels and Mo’Noqie have had a long (and somewhat tumultuous) working relationship. Inspired by a true story, The Deliverance follows a mother who discovers her children and her home are being haunted by a demonic presence. Spooky!

Mo’Nique announced the projects with a light-hearted video that seemingly pokes fun at her past beef with Netflix. “Can y’all believe this sh*t? I done came on home to Netflix.” That she did!

We don’t often meet the love of our life in fifth grade. But for Simon Jenkins and Peyton Wynn, romantic destiny struck early.

At the ripe old age of 11 years old, Simon and Peyton met at Johnson Elementary School in Pinson, Alabama, where they sat together in Patti Hathorn’s class. Their relationship continued to grow with each passing year, lasting even after graduation. Simon and Peyton both recently turned 21, and still, they’re each other’s special someone.

A photo of Peyton and Simon, already in love.
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Fitting, then, that 10 years later, Simon and Peyton would celebrate their enduring love by getting engaged where it all began.

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WVTM 13 anchor Rick Karle, who posted the story to his Facebook page, shared that Simon’s mother Traci, “an event planner with a flair for the artistic,” suggested the nostalgic setting for his proposal. Getting Simon’s approval, she quickly laid out handcrafted signs, flowers and candles, making everything look extra special for the sweet moment.

The next part of the surprise would be entirely up to Simon. He told WVTM that the ruse had been getting a call from Traci as the couple made their way to a dinner date in celebration of their 10-year anniversary. She had “forgotten something at her PTA meeting at Johnson Elementary School,” and pleaded for them to go retrieve it. Nice one, mom.

Simon and Peyton made their way to the elementary school and found themselves in the lavish display. “You should have seen Peyton’s face when she walked into that classroom,” Simon told WVTM.

Judging by the photos alone, the proposal seemed to be something out of a Hallmark movie.

For Peyton, it was the surprise of a lifetime. “I finally got to say yes to the love of my life. It was like something out of a dream,” the bride-to-be told People.

To make the moment that much sweeter, their fifth grade teacher was also there. How’s that for a satisfying full circle moment?

Patti Hathorn (now Patti Armstrong Hagwood) made her own endearing Facebook post, which read:

“For any teacher that is asked or wonders ‘Why we do what we do’. My response is this: We get to watch more than just academic growth in our classrooms. We watch laughter. We watch friendships blossom and grow. We watch as these relationships continue to develop, and often we get to witness them last a lifetime. And, in some instances, we are privileged to be a part of this continuance…It was such an honor to be asked to be present as Simon Jenkins proposed to his 5th grade love. It is another moment that reminds me of my ‘why’ as I continue to love ‘my’ children each year.”

Hagwood continues to teach and will welcome another class in the fall. Coincidentally, that’s when Peyton and Simon will officially tie the knot, according to People.

Congratulations to the happy couple who gave us all a wholesome love story to smile about today. I guess the adage is true: when you know, you know.

Avengers: Endgame is the longest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, clocking in at three hours and two minutes. That’s seven minutes longer than The Godfather (but 20 minutes shorter than The Godfather Part II!). To be fair, at least 20 minutes of that 182 minute runtime is credits… which you are legally obligated to sit through in case there’s a post-credits scene.

Endgame is undeniably long, it could have been even longer.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo recently took part in Wired‘s “Web’s Most Searched Questions” series, where they were asked if they were releasing a six-hour cut of Endgame. “I think the longest [cut] we ever had was like 3 hours and 40 minutes, [but] I think those 40 minutes deserve to be on the editing floor,” Joe said. The only way it could have been six hours is “if we did a supercut of Infinity War and Endgame,” Anthony added. “You have the director’s cut. That’s it. There’s nothing else, sorry,” Joe confirmed.

I think I speak for everyone’s butts when I say: thank you for not doing that.

The Russos’ new movie, The Gray Man, hits Netflix on July 22. It’s playing in limited theaters now, but only [gigantic eye roll] “elitists” won’t wait until it’s on streaming.

(Via Wired)

The Chainsmokers have performed pretty much everywhere over their ten years as a duo, but soon (relatively, at least), Drew Taggart and Alex Pall will go where no other artist has gone before: In 2024, space tourism company World View is sticking the pair in a pressurized capsule tethered to a stratospheric balloon about 20 miles above Earth.

Ryan Hartman, World View CEO, tells the Associated Press that this will make The Chainsmokers the first musical artists to perform at the edge of space. (Presumably, recent thematically appropriate single “High” will be on the setlist.)

The duo said in a statement, “We have always dreamed of going to space and are stoked to collaborate with World View to have this adventure and experience. We know the views of both Earth and space are going to be incredible and inspiring and we hope to leverage this flight for creativity on future projects.”

While it’s not easy to point out exactly where Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins, one widely acknowledged definition is the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) above Earth’s mean sea level. The line is above the troposphere (where we live), stratosphere, and mesosphere, located near the bottom of the thermosphere. So, at 20 miles up, the duo will be 30-ish percent of the way to space from the Earth’s surface.

It will certainly look like most people’s idea of space up there, though: Here’s the view from 20 miles up in the sky.

With the release of the first official trailer for Clerks III, writer/director Kevin Smith made it clear that he’s still as meta as ever after all of these years. In the new film, Randall (Jeff Anderson) suffers a heart attack, which gives him the push he needs to finally make his own movie after years complaining about everyone’s else. Unsurprisingly, the movie he sets out to make is awfully similar to the original Clerks that put Smith on the map when it was famously scooped up at Sundance by, um, some guy. Let’s go with that.

However, the real life parallels don’t stop there. As fans of Smith know, he suffered a massive heart attack in 2018, and his wife and daughter were not exactly thrilled to relive that experience. Via Entertainment Weekly:

“My wife and kid don’t enjoy the movie the way I do, at least the first half hour,” says the director. “My wife’s like, ‘Look, what you think is funny now was the worst moment of our f—ing lives.’ And I was like, ‘Well, don’t say that to the critics, for Christ’s sakes! It’s too easy a lay-up for them!’”

As Smith notes, mining his personal life and previous films is his whole schtick, so of course, he’s going to use his health scare for the perpetually self-referential movie universe. “It’s incredibly meta,” Smith said. “The snake really eats its own tail, swallows itself, and s—s itself out, and that is Clerks III. You can put that on the poster!”

Clerks III clocks into theaters on September 13, 2022.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Nicki Minaj’s verse on Kanye West’s 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy hit “Monster” has become an iconic moment in hip-hop history, and a lot has been said about it in the years since. Amber Rose previously said in 2018 that Ye nearly cut Minaj’s contributions from the song, and Minaj also has her own version of how she almost didn’t make it onto the track. Now, Rose has spoken more about it, claiming that after Minaj recorded her verse, West said something along the lines of, “How the f*ck did you bring in a b*tch that killed me on my own song?”

Speaking about her upcoming album in a new interview on Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay’s Higher Learning podcast, Rose said, “Just know that this was not an overnight thing. I’ve been quiet, on purpose. I sat in the studio day and night. I have a good ear. I’ve A&R’d a bunch of amazing projects.”

That latter point piqued Lathan’s interest, so he asked for examples. Rose replied, “All my boyfriends, all of ’em.” Lathan asked, “You A&R’d for Ye?” Rose responded, “Absolutely! I put Nicki on ‘Monster.’ I put Nicki on ‘Monster.’ I put Nicki on ‘Monster,’ he didn’t know who Nicki was back then. I had Nicki pull up to the studio and I put her on ‘Monster.’

Rose continued, “She was still coming up, and I saw her in the studio and I said, ‘Oh my god, this b*tch is f*cking talented as hell.’ And then I went back to Kanye and I was like, ‘You need to get this girl Nicki on ‘Monster.’ And he was like, ‘Who? What? No. I’m not…” And I said, ‘Just let her pull up, what’s it going to hurt?’ […] She heard the song and then she came back the next day with the verse.”

Lathan then pointed out that West nearly didn’t include the verse on the song, which Rose said was “because it was too good.” She continued, “He told me that the same day. He’s like, ‘How the f*ck did you bring in a b*tch that killed me on my own song?’”

Check out the full interview above, with the West conversation starting at 54:12 into the video.

Weeks after joining the 2022 XXL Freshman Class, Florida rapper Nardo Wick has announced the release date for the follow-up to his breakthrough project, Who Is Nardo Wick? The sequel, Who Is Nardo Wick? 2, is due on Friday, July 22, according to Nardo’s Instagram.

The announcement came as something of a surprise, given Nardo has only released two new tracks since his debut. In April, he dropped the video for “Krazy Krazy,” following up in June with “Riot.” However, he didn’t exactly give any indication that either track was part of a new compilation, only hinting that Who Is Nardo Wick? 2 was in the works earlier this year. Despite their relative lack of promotion, both songs performed well enough — “Krazy Krazy” has crossed the 3 million views threshold on YouTube, while its successor is rapidly approaching that benchmark itself.

As for features and the like, Nardo is remaining pretty tight-lipped. Fans can probably look forward to high-profile names, though; his debut featured appearances from the likes of Future and Lil Baby on “Me Or Sum,” and the remix of his breakthrough single “Who Want Smoke??” featured 21 Savage, G Herbo, and Lil Durk, despite Nardo being relatively unknown when the songs dropped. All we have for now is the album cover, which Nardo shared on Instagram and features a remake of the first album’s cover photo with a different pose in front of the same building. You can check that out below and stay tuned for more info.