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MEGA-SPOILERS for Black Widow and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will be found below.

Ever since Black Widow‘s greenlighting, I wondered if Marvel Studios would take the action back to Budapest. That definitely happened, once Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff answered a call from Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, who was hanging in the apartment of her older “sister.” This provided ample opportunity for the prequel of sorts (which followed the events of Captain America: Civil War) to deliver on all those references between Natasha and Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye/Clint Barton. In effect, those hints amounted to a long-running joke for fans.

Here’s how it began, in 2012’s The Avengers while the assembled O.G. MCU heroes fought The Chitauri. Natasha remarked that the experience is “just like Budapest all over again!” To that, Clint countered, “You and I remember Budapest very differently!”

This, of course, led everyone to wonder (as enthused fans do) what went down in this mysterious operation, or even if there was a romantic component involved. Thankfully for everyone, Clint (whose wife and family were later revealed, and they heartbreakingly disappeared in The Snap) and Natasha were revealed to be the best of platonic friends. During Avengers: Endgame, the two embarked for Vormir in search of the Soul Stone, and Clint remarked, “It’s a long way from Budapest!” Natasha grinned in response, before this more recent mission ended in a very different way.

As even the most casual Marvel watcher knows, Natasha didn’t make it out of Vormir alive. Natasha sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone, beating Hawkeye in a determined scramble to leap to death. At that point, it felt like we might never hear what went down in Budapest (since Hawkeye obviously couldn’t deliver the goods during a rambling speech at a non-existent funeral), but Black Widow filled in those blanks.

After Natasha confronted Yelena in that Budapest apartment, Natasha revealed her belief that Dreykov (the man responsible for running the Red Room) is dead. Yelena attempts to correct her, and then Natasha unloads the history of how she and Hawkeye spent ten days fighting during a shootout with Hungarian forces, and a building blew up, and all of this was her final step to defect to S.H.I.E.L.D. That’s when Yelena breaks the news: Dreykov is still alive, and he’s cranking out Widows in a secret location. Natasha, apparently, killed his daughter instead of Dreykov himself, and Natasha failed to check for his body to confirm death.

Later, we learn that Dreykov resurrected his daughter and transformed her into The Taskmaster (an identity reveal that felt disappointing and runs in a different direction than the comics), but at least we have some Budapest answers: Natasha and Clint’s operation meant to disable the Red Room architect and secure her eventual place in the Avengers. Also, this information goes a long way to emphasize Natasha’s unfinished business, which was even more “unfinished” than she realized. As for Hawkeye’s fate, watch out, Clint Barton. It sure looks like Yelena Belova will be coming for you, even though the motivating factor there is Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine’s lies. In other words, we’re gonna be putting Disney+’s Hawkeye show on the viewing calendar once there’s a release date.

‘Black Widow’ is currently in theaters and streaming on Disney+ via Premier Access.

The writing of Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album Sour was a joint effort between Rodrigo and collaborator Dan Nigro. They’re not the only writers credited on the release, though: Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff are credited on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back,” since the song interpolates (but does not sample) Swift’s “New Year’s Day.”

Now, Swift and Antonoff’s officially credited influence on the album has been expanded, as Rolling Stone notes that on Spotify and Tidal, the credits for “Deja Vu” now list Swift, Antonoff, and Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) as co-writers. That’s because of the strong influence that Swift’s “Cruel Summer” had on the song, which Rodrigo has mentioned before.

Speaking of collaborating, Swift has been doing a lot of that lately. She recently reunited with her Folklore and Evermore collaborators Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon to appear on their Big Red Machine song “Renegade.” There’s also another one, “Birch,” still to come. It’s also rumored that Swift has an Adele link-up in the works, which naturally generated much excitement.

As for Rodrigo, she’s fresh off the release of her Sour Prom concert film and being named Spotify’s most-streamed artist of the year so far.

Listen to both “Deja Vu” and “Cruel Summer” below.

Much like waiting for Alfred Hitchcock to show up and in one of his own movies, anticipating where and when Stan Lee might pop up in a Marvel movie has long been one of the joys of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But since the pop culture giant’s passing in 2018, the use of his image has become a much more contentious thing. While Lee’s posthumous appearance in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame officially marked his final cameo, The Wrap notes that Al Jean, The Simpsons’ longtime showrunner, wanted to resurrect this tradition for “The Good, The Bart, And The Loki,” the animated comedy’s recent Loki crossover short, but was denied permission by Marvel.

After Jean and his team discovered some unused audio files of Lee, they discussed the idea of paying tribute to the Marvel icon in the most Stan Lee way possible: with a cameo.

“We just thought, ‘Oh, we have Stan Lee audio from when he was on our show, could we cameo him in?,” Jean explained to ComicBook.com. “And they said that their policy is he doesn’t cameo now that he’s passed away, which is a completely understandable policy. That was their only note and that was, of course, easily done.”

Jean went on to explain that they faced a similar scenario when they recently made a Star Wars-themed short, but were instructed that they could not feature Grogu, a.k.a. Baby Yoda, in it. “It was like, if you let everybody use Grogu in their stuff that wanted to, it would be all over,” Jean said. “Believe me, I respect that these franchises have a great power beyond ours. I respect it.”

(Via The Wrap)

BTS’ hit single “Butter” is enjoying a tremendous run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart at the moment: It’s currently at six weeks at No. 1. That success is due in part to the various versions and formats of the song they’ve released. Today brings yet another “Butter” release and this one comes with a great bonus: The CD single of the track is out now, and it features an upbeat new song called “Permission To Dance,” which the band wrote with Ed Sheeran.

Sheeran spoke about the single in a June interview, saying, “I’ve actually worked with BTS on their last record, and I’ve just written a song for their new record. And they’re super, super cool guys as well.” The previous collaboration to which Sheeran referred is the Map Of The Soul: 7 song “Make It Right,” which he also co-wrote.

Sheeran isn’t too far removed from his week-long residency on The Late Late Show, joining the program for comedy bits and performances. Now BTS are gearing up for a late-night residency of their own, as they’re set to spend back-to-back nights on The Tonight Show next week, on July 13 and 14.

Watch the “Permission To Dance” video above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Rudy Giuliani had a good run. After decades of making headlines for going head-to-head with New York’s most feared mafia bosses and cleaning up the city’s once-blighted streets, the former New York City mayor became the poster boy for patriotism and American resilience in the wake of 9/11. But ever since Giuliani officially tethered himself to longtime pal and bad luck charm Donald Trump, things have gone, well, not well.

Most recently, Giuliani was stripped of his right to practice law in the state of New York as well as in Washington, D.C. because all the lies he has peddled in the name of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election so that Trump could be declared the winner. Prior to that, he was the subject of an early-morning FBI raid, which is never a good thing. With his legal fees mounting, Rudy’s equally disgraced old pal Bernard Kerik—former New York City police commissioner-turned-felon—decided to make a big show of setting up what he called The Rudy Giuliani Defense Fund, or (more laughably) The Rudy Giuliani Freedom Fund, with the goal of crowdsourcing $5 million to help Giuliani pay his legal fees. As of earlier this week, the “fund” had raised less than .2 percent of that. Now, as the Daily Beast reports, the fund’s page has been shuttered altogether.

The Fundly account, established in Rudy’s name a day before Kerik launched a website for the legal defense fund in late June, raised $9,798 before the page disappeared—far short from its goal of raising $5 million in two months. While the landing page for the Fundly account is gone, the Giuliani account still shows it’s in possession of its nearly $10,000 donor haul, with the website inconspicuously archiving donor names and amounts given. But links to the legal defense fund page they gave to now automatically redirect to Fundly’s general landing page for “politics and public policy” causes.

While Kerik did not respond to Daily Beast’s request for comment, Robert Costello—the man who has the unenviable title of “Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer”—said he had “no knowledge” on the matter.

To say that people have seemed to stop giving a sh*t about what happens to Rudy would be a massive understatement—particularly if we’re basing that opinion on the amount of money his Fundly page raised. Meanwhile, the one person who should be giving Rudy money—not to help with his legal fund, but because he has a pile of unpaid invoices from Giuliani sitting on his desk—is the one who got Giuliani into all this trouble in the first place: Trump. But that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. According to Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Landslide, “Trump is annoyed that [Rudy] tried to get paid for his election challenge work.”

What’s the word for being a persona non grata to someone who is persona non grata?

(Via Daily Beast)

As is tradition, this week’s episode of Indiecast has Steve and Ian taking questions from you: the loyal listeners. Questions were fielded from all around the globe, leading this Mailbag episode to revolve around a provocative conversation about topics like the state of music journalism and which medium is best for learning about an artist in 2021, as well as bands that could have been bigger had they come around at a different time, blog rock, and the songs that Steve and Ian have listened to the most over the years.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Steve is recommending Liam Kazar, whose latest effort, Due North, is set for release in August. Ian, on the other hand, is taking the opportunity to once again plug South Carolina outfit Adjy, who released The Idyll Opus (I-IV) last week.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 47 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. 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.

Jason Momoa is still in Canada wrapping production on the second season of his Apple TV series, See, and when that’s done, he’ll immediately jet to the set of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which has already started filming. But despite his busy schedule, Momoa still found time on Thursday to get a little freaky for a sexy challenge on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

While filling in for Kimmel, guest host Anthony Anderson got Momoa to participate in the show’s patented “Make It Sexy Challenge” where stars are tasked with taking boring, mundane tasks, and well, making it sexy. In this case, things got wild right off the bat, as both Momoa and Anderson stripped off their shirts before Momoa slathered himself with sanitizer. He hadn’t even been given a challenge yet!

“Normally, I like to squirt it all over my chest,” Momoa said as the live audience hooted and hollered. “Sometimes I rub it all over my face because it kills 99.99 percent of things.” And that was only the beginning of rubbing things all over his chest.

Fo the first challenge, Anderson told Momoa to open a can of tuna, but “make that sexy.” After tossing a can opener to the side and saying, “Most children would use this, but I’m Aquaman,” Momoa seemingly cracked the can with his biceps and then immediately got to work slathering tuna fish all over his chest as Anderson cheered him on.

Anderson then asked Momoa to iron a shirt, and once again, the chest rubbing began. Only this time, Momoa coated himself with baby oil before laying down a not very subtle innuendo. “I like to lay down the shirt, and this is about the long-stroke, okay?” Momoa said. “It ain’t about that short sh*t, you need it long.”

Flight attendants are overworked, underpaid, and a report found that “transportation workers have the highest COVID-19 risk score — 75.7 out of an average 30.2 — of 966 non-health jobs assessed.” They’re about as essential as essential workers get, but because they make customers wear masks to prevent catching a virus that is still killing over 8,000 people every day, Tomi Lahren thinks they’re Nazis. I guess she would know.

During a discussion about “unruly behavior” in the skies on Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News program Outnumbered, former-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called on viewers to “be nice to our flight attendants” after a “brutal year” of “being the mask police.” Lahren had a different, less empathetic take. “But I will disagree a little bit with Kayleigh on this. I don’t honestly ever do this, but I will say there are so many good flight attendants out there. But there are some flight attendants that take their job as the mask police to extremes, becoming almost Nazis of the air.”

If McEnany is the voice of reason, something has gone terribly wrong:

Lahren, who once referred to social distancing as “willful slavery,” said the strict enforcement of mask mandates is irritating some airline passengers. Airlines have reported a sharp uptick in bad behavior from passengers this year. “It drops beneath your nose,” Lahren said, referencing a slipping mask, and flight attendants are “constantly getting mad at you.”

Lahren continued her bad takes on Twitter, where she tweeted, “You can be kicked off a plane for having an already useless mask below your nose but you won’t be kicked out of this country for being a criminal illegal alien. Makes sense, in Biden’s America.” She also wrote that Joe Biden’s “vaccine patrol” can “kiss my country ass.” Twitter can be very bad (@TomiLahren) but it can also be very good (people making fun of Tomi Lahren).

There’s something vaguely unsettling about taking a vacation these days. It’s something that I recently did, and it’s a supremely strange (not to mention guilt-inducing) experience to hop on a plane (for leisure) with everything that’s swirling about for humanity. Yet when I really thought about it, there’s frequently something a little bit “off” when one spends more than a few nights at a hotel. Sure, you’re there for rest-and-relaxation and to forget about life’s daily stresses, but the unshakeable stuff can tag along. Relationship friction and resentment don’t miraculously smooth themselves out when one is in proximity to a body of water, after all, nor does the grief associated with the death of a loved one. The urge for some to self-medicate also doesn’t evaporate and, in fact, that temptation can run wild without the structure of daily life to intervene. Even if you’ve had a fairly run-of-the-mill vacation with zero drama, there’s still the make-believe feel of the situation; so when your paradise-buzz evaporates once an airline puts you on a ten-hour delay for your first flight home (true story), the idea of vacation feels even more surreal.

“Surreal” is one way to describe HBO’s The White Lotus, the new limited series created, written, and directed by Mike White (Enlightenment, School of Rock), which happens to organize itself around the lavish getaways of the One Percent while the hotel staffers serve their every whim. That means that this brand of clientele is fairly insufferable and incredibly spoiled and, somehow, mostly miserable, whether they acknowledge it to themselves, or not; and they’re not psyched (as I was) to order French toast from the wonderful brunch waiter whose name popped up in almost every online review of their hotel. Instead, these people often have a (ridiculous) ax to grind while the action almost exclusively goes down at an eponymous, impossibly posh Hawaiian resort. Oh boy, does Mike White enjoys positioning them over a slow-burning flame while they cannot escape themselves while descending into inexplicable misery. This may not sound like fun to watch, but White’s assembled vacationers are brutally awful in many ways.

The series (quite delightfully) skewers the ultra-wealthy in what turns out to be a riveting satire (both sprawling in its breadth and self-contained in its brevity) on how obscene wealth rots everything that it touches. The approach is one that Succession fans will surely enjoy, and while the setup feels like The Love Boat or Fantasy Island had a lovechild with Agatha Christie (there is a murder), rest assured that these absurdly wealthy subjects nail themselves into their own virtual coffins. In The White Lotus, it’s as if the surreal surroundings, the escape from reality, is what exposes these guests’ real selves. It’s like a refined Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls, if the meanest of girls was a tantrum-y Jake Lacy as Shane, who we meet at the beginning of the series. He’s an overgrown, trust-fund brat and a honeymooner whose wife clearly did not think this marriage through. Rest assured, you will enjoy plenty of Alexandra Daddario as Rachel throughout the season, but Jake? He’s a piece of work.

Right from the start with Jake, we realize that something’s not right, which leads to the tee-up of the murder-mystery subplot. Yet White pulls the rug out from under his audience (as he’s known to do) because murder’s not actually the main course in this series, although it sure feels delicious to speculate on who met their early demise (and whodunnit) during this week-in-the-life season. We receive a tapestry of interwoven stories of these well-to-doers, which include not only Shane but also the Massbacher family, which includes Mark (Steve Zahn), who’s clearly nursing an inferiority complex in the face of his wife, Nicole (Connie Britton), who’s all business, even with her family. Their college-aged daughter, Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) has a tagalong friend, Paula (Brittany O’Brady), and they’re a real hoot of a pair, judging the adults with little mercy, even as they don’t seem to have a problem participating in the monetary debauchery.

Recurring appearances by Lukas Gage and Molly Shannon do draw focus, but there are two real stars here:

1. Murray Bartlett: He portrays Armond, the resort manager/presiding master of ceremonies, who sees and hears and knows and observes everything. He is the soul of the show, and I’m here to tell you that this is one conflicted and questionable soul. Bartlett easily straddles a wide spectrum to embrace this role, that of a wheeler and dealer, and a person of marginalized status, who must grit his inner teeth and serve the ultrarich despite hating their behavior as much as anyone else. He’s the person who inherently, for better or worse, understands those who visit the White Lotus, much more than they understand themselves. You’ll root for Murray while, quite possibly, strongly disliking him at times. Long and rambling pieces could one day be written about this character and his intimate knowledge of how power and money corrupt.

2. Jennifer Coolidge: She effortlessly steps into the role of Tanya, and goddamn, I’m not sure why she hasn’t received more recognition for being a great character actress whose list of credits does not stop. I’ve adored her since Legally Blonde, and despite entering the series as a boozy, utter mess, we soon learn that she’s attempting to gain closure from a tragedy. Coolidge gives a deeply funny performance that’s also heartbreaking at times. In short, she’s the woman who one you’d never want to be trapped with on a boat, yet her performance is nothing short of magnetic.

That, in a nutshell, is also how I feel about The White Lotus. It’s full of characters that one would never choose to spend time with, yet as a whole, the story presents a fascinating spectacle. The series is deeply funny and occasionally disturbing while managing to simultaneously repel and enrapture viewers. It’s also possible, strangely enough, to both love and hate this show at the same time and during different moments, but once you’re through the second episode or so, the show’s quite difficult to cease watching. You’ll be glad to have checked into this weird-ass series. It’s a trip.

HBO’s ‘The White Lotus’ premieres on HBO and HBO Max on June 11.

Lil Baby is visiting Paris at the moment, and so far, his trip has been a real up-and-down affair. He went viral after French paparazzi seemingly referred to him as “Le Baby,” but shortly after that fun trending moment, he was arrested for marijuana possession. Now, the rapper has offered an update on his situation and he seems to be doing fine.

On Instagram this morning, he shared a promotional image for a concert in Indianapolis that’s set for tomorrow, July 10. He wrote alongside the post, “Thank You To Everyone Who Checced On Me !! I’m Good I’m Otw To The States To Rock My Show At The Pavilion At Pan Am In Indianapolis!! Let’s Gooooooo.” Similarly, he also tweeted around the same time, “I’m good [raised hands emoji].”

Also this morning, on his Instagram Story, he shared a photo of himself in what appears to be a clothing store and wrote, “back at it [facepalm emoji].”

Meanwhile, ASCAP recently named Lil Baby their songwriter of the year, an honor that makes sense considering that a new report indicates he was one of the most successful songwriters in all of streaming music for 2020. As far as other upcoming concerts, he and Lil Durk have lined up a tour for this fall.