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Kevin Smith’s Saturday night Comic-Con panel is a San Diego tradition, even if the event didn’t actually take place in California this year. The Comic-Con@Home event still had An Evening with the director, which featured a livestream with a number of announcements and fun. But it also gave us a trailer for the horror movie Killroy Was Here.

The film, which featured plenty of gore and the usual Smith style, takes the World War II graffiti and makes it a human flesh-hungry killing machine finding victims in an extremely odd American town.

The movie was made with students from Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. Smith spoke there a few years ago and started working with them, though the film did get put on the shelf thanks to a Jay And Silent Bob remake and some health issues for Smith.

Something else the panel revealed was the Netflix animated show Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which is a follow-up to the 1980s cartoon. Smith didn’t reveal a release date for the comic, but did talk about the show and what to expect once it hits the service.

“It’s not us reinventing it, it’s not us going, ‘Hey man, everything you knew about He-Man is wrong,’” Smith said. “It’s literally us telling the next story in that series of stories.”

During the current worldwide pandemic, movie studios are no longer providing box-office figures because theaters have been shut down around the nation and the world. Because we are less interested in the actual figures themselves and more interested in what people are watching over the weekends, each week we will dive into Most Streamed and Bestseller Lists on Fandango, iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu to pinpoint the weekend’s most watched films.

Some movie theaters around the country have re-opened, but they haven’t been met with brisk business, in part because all of the major movies have been delayed again, as the major studios have mostly decided to wait the pandemic out before releasing their blockbusters. However, Dave Franco’s The Rental — from IFC Films — did get a theatrical release this weekend, and though most of its grosses came from drive-in theaters, it is officially the top film at the box office, scoring around $400,000 over three days, according to Deadline. That’s not bad at all for a low-budget horror film, especially when we consider that it is also the most rented film on iTunes this weekend, and for good reason. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but The Rental is a solid little horror film from Franco and co-writer Joe Swanberg, scoring 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Beyond The Rental, the top films on the Fandango and iTunes charts are the same films that have led the way for the last few weeks and months: The Outpost, Trolls World Tour, King of Staten Island, Invisible Man, Scoob, etc. There is, however, one interesting new entry in the upper echelons of both charts, and that is a Lucy Hale movie called A Nice Girl Like You. The film is about a woman who is called “pornophobic” by her ex-boyfriend, so she decides to create a wild sexual bucket list. Reviews have not been kind (14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but this best part about this movie is that it is apparently “based on a true story.”

Before we move on to Netflix, it’s worth mentioning that theaters are now slowly opening with limited seating capacity in China, and over there, they are watching movies released stateside while China was in the throes of the pandemic, which is why Dolittle and Bloodshot are leading the way, although figures are not particularly robust ($3.2 million and $1.7 million, respectively, over two days). It is, however, nice to see real box-office figures. Meanwhile, the Last Train To Busan sequel, Peninsula, has almost earned $20 million now in Korea. That’s a movie I’d like to see released VOD and digital stateside (the movie is expected to get a limited theatrical release in August and stream exclusively on Shudder next year).

Disney+ is reporting on “trending” movies now, and this week, the top film was Hamilton followed by Frozen II and Moana. Last Christmas is the top “featured” movie on HBO Max, Palm Springs is the top film on Hulu, and if I had to guess based on the movie that is most featured on Peacock, it would be Jurassic Park.

Finally, the sequel to a hugely successful original film, The Kissing Booth, is the top film on Netflix. In fact, The Kissing Booth 2 is doing so well that the original, The Kissing Booth is also in the top five at number three. Critics like the sequel marginally more than the original (28 percent on RT instead of 17 percent), but audiences do not. The original scored 59 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, while the sequel sits at only 41 percent with audiences. What happened?!

Meanwhile, the animated film Animal Crackers, which has an impressive voice cast — John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Danny DeVito, Ian McKellen, Sylvester Stallone, Raven-Symoné and Patrick Warburton — finally saw the light of day in the United States. It was released in China two years ago, but its release date was repeatedly pushed here in the States amid financial difficulties. It debuted at number two on Netflix, and reviews are OK: 62 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Not much to speak of yet for next weekend’s releases, beyond a movie I’m really looking forward to on Apple+ called Boys State. Otherwise, season two of Umbrella Academy is the big draw on streaming next weekend.

Source: Fandango, Netflix, iTunes, Deadline

The Minnesota Lynx kicks off a 22-game regular season at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. against the Connecticut Sun on Sunday at noon. The Lynx are lead by head coach and general manager Cheryl Reeve and her all-female coaching staff — former Lynx players Rebbekah Brunson, Plenette Pierson, and Katie Smith are her assistants.

Reeves is the gold standard of coaching and will look to lead her team to a 10th straight playoff appearance. Like last season, Minnesota will be without key players to start the season. Maya Moore is still on sabbatical as she is fighting for criminal justice reform. Seimone Augustus is now a member of the Los Angeles Sparks. Odyssey Sims, who led the Lynx both in points (14.5) and assists (5.4) last season, will probably miss the year — Sims gave birth to her first child in April and is out on maternity leave.

WUBBLE ROSTER
Kayla Alexander
Rachel Banham
Lexie Brown
Bridget Carlton
Karima Christmas-Kelly
Napheesa Collier
Crystal Dangerfield
Damiris Dantas
Sylvia Fowles
Mikiah Herbert Harrigan
Megan Huff
Shenise Johnson

KEY PLAYERS TO WATCH
Napheesa Collier: Great on both ends of the floor, the reigning WNBA Rookie of Year looks to continue her Midas touch. Collier averaged 13.1 points, 6.6 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 1.9 steals ,and 0.9 blocked shots while starting all 34 regular-season games in 2019 while shooting 49 percent from the field, 36.1 percent from three-point range, and 79.2 percent from the free throw line. Collier was named to the All-WNBA second team and the All-Rookie Team for her efforts and earned an All-Star berth. The advanced stats back up the counting stats: Collier ranked second in the league and first among rookies in defensive win shares at 2.4 and boasted a defensive rating of 95.1.

Sylvia Fowles: At 34, Fowles is still a prolific player. However, her numbers were down from two seasons ago. The former league MVP averaged 13.6 points, 8.9 rebounds, and 1.5 assists per game while leading the league in field goal percentages at 58.8 percent. Fowles is one of the leaders on the team and is ready to impart her knowledge and experience to her younger teammates. The Lynx offense should still run through Fowles.

EXPECTATIONS
Despite not having Moore last season, Minnesota finished the season with a record of 18-16 and was eliminated in the first round of the WNBA Playoffs (Cheryl Reeves, it must be said, is the GOAT). Even though the roster might look drastically different, the Lynx are expected to make another playoffs push. The Lynx will need their bench players to perform well because Collier and Fowles can’t carry the load alone. As good as those two players are, they really need others to step up in order for the team to have a successful season.

X-FACTOR
Lexie Brown: She is poised to be the Lynx’s starting point guard. Brown is a solid shooter and averaged 7.6 points and 1.4 assists per game last year. Her assists numbers should improve dramatically since she will be a starter, plus Fowles will have to rely on Brown to get the ball in the post in order for her to feast. Brown is an excellent three-point shooter at nearly 40 percent and the Lynx will need that to continue in the upcoming season.

BIGGEST ON-COURT QUESTION
Will Collier repeat her outstanding play in her sophomore season? How will Reeves bring out the best in this roster to make a playoff push? Can Fowles return to dominance at 34? The Lynx added three-pointer shooters that lead to better floor spacing and may take the pressure off of Fowles. How well will it work? Only time will tell, and the team’s first game against a hungry Sun side should provide a good early test.

The NBA’s Orlando bubble is a genuine experiment in attempting to play professional sports amid a pandemic, and that means a lot of unprecedented decisions will be made over the next few months. The first of those may be what to do with Clippers guard Lou Williams, who left the league’s bubble but made waves on social media when images of him at an Atlanta gentleman’s club leaked earlier this week.

Saturday brought word that the NBA would investigate Williams in order to determine how long he would have to quarantine to re-enter the bubble in Orlando days ahead of a return to live regular season games. And Sunday morning brought word of the punishment, so to speak: 10 days in quarantine before he can rejoin the Clippers.

As Charania notes, the quarantine will make Williams miss at least the first two Clippers games of the resumed season. A 10-day stay alone is not the full two weeks it may take for coronavirus symptoms to develop, but it’s still significantly longer than Zion Williamson will have to quarantine after he left the bubble earlier in the month. As we learned yesterday, the Pelicans rookie will be alone in an Orlando hotel room for just four days. It’s an unfortunate blow for Williams and the Clippers, as teams will need every moment of time together to get back into basketball shape as play gets set to resume after months of inaction. But it also speaks to the seriousness with which the NBA is keeping its bubble safe. No one knows how to pull all this off exactly, but caution seems to be the best way to address any of the unknown issues bound to come up.

Regis Philbin’s death on Saturday caused an outpouring of memories and stories from people about his life in entertainment. But the best one wasn’t a classic clip from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire or Live With Regis And Kelly, but an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman. Several people on Twitter shared a moment from 2009 when Philbin dressed up as the animated character Shrek in full green makeup and prosthetics on his head, apparently appearing as a surprise to Letterman on air.

One popular Millionaire clip that did surface was one of the most baller game show moments of all time, which deserves to be shared here as well.

But the clip of Philbin as Shrek truly brings down the house. It was shared multiple times by different people, and all of them saw wide circulation online.

The segment is nothing short of hilarious, with Letterman and Philbin immediately at odds with each other. The show’s host looks extremely amused, but is trying to hide it. Philbin thinks he’s wasted his time getting ready and keeping it a secret, getting annoying as Letterman plays with his fake ears.

“Are you playing with my horn?” Philbin asks. Letterman is clearly selling it hard, but it’s significantly funnier if he seems nonplussed, which he pulls off here perfectly. As the video circulated social media in various forms, Letterman himself tweeted about Philbin and his many appearances on his show.

Another popular clip that was shared was Katie Nolan and the Crowd Goes Wild crew making Regis compose his first tweet.

It was a gem.

Philbin clearly impacted a lot of people with his work in television, and it was a lovely coda on his life as a performer to have such a wonderfully weird moment get shared by so many.

Lou Williams has found himself in some hot water with the NBA. The Los Angeles Clippers’ high-scoring guard left the NBA’s Orlando bubble earlier this week for an excused absence, but an image of him popped up on social media that appeared to show him at a club with Jack Harlow, with both wearing faces masks.

Questions popped up about what Williams was doing, and on Saturday afternoon, Shams Charania of The Athletic reported that the league has decided to respond to this by opening an investigation into what Williams — who has since returned to the bubble — did while he was away from the team.

The news of the investigation, which is being done to determined how long Williams will need to quarantine now that he’s back, was confirmed by Ramona Shelburne and Bobby Marks of ESPN.

Shelburne reported that as part of the investigation, Williams admitted that he went to Magic City, a gentleman’s club in Atlanta.

The good news for Williams is that he was tested every day that he was away from the Clippers, which means that his quarantine could be as few as four days, as we saw with Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans. The issue, though, is he may be held out for longer based on what is determined.

There is no word on whether there would be any additional punishment from the league or if Williams would just need to quarantine for an extended period. The Clippers begin their bubble schedule on Thursday night against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Baseball is back in the United States, with MLB’s 60-game regular season getting underway in earnest this weekend despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the rising case counts in the United States, the Blue Jays won’t play in Toronto this year and fans will not be allowed in ballparks, causing a problem for broadcasters showing games on TV: will fans get weirded out by empty parks?

For some teams, a lack of fans won’t be very unusual, but a barren Wrigley Field or Fenway Park might look a bit odd. Which is why Fox Sports claimed they had an answer in a video hyping the start of the MLB season: virtual fans.

Awful Announcing caught the Fox broadcast explaining the deal with these fake fans during Saturday’s nationally televised game, showing them turn from Cubs fans to Brewers fans on command and stand up just like, you know, a very unsettling video game.

As The Verge explains, the fans are very much video game-inspired, using the Unreal Engine to generate fans to place in on top of live images of the empty stands.

“We’re not looking to fool anybody, it’s still about the game. But shot-to-shot, when you’re watching a broadcast, it’s not more noticeable that you’re watching what is normally a broadcast with fans in just an empty stadium and having it feel weird — we want to give people a sense of normalcy,” (executive producer and head of production and operations at Fox Sports Brad) Zager says. “And we felt like going down this path and trying to use a virtual crowd will hopefully make it so that blends in, and you can focus on the game more because you’re not thinking about the emptiness of a Major League Baseball stadium during the game.”

The effect, well, certainly doesn’t fool anyone. And for many people it made the fact that baseball was happening during a pandemic that much more apparent.

It really did look very odd to have CGI crowds on things like foul balls.

And, of course, it’s computer technology so there are so many things these virtual fans can do in order to appear somewhat normal.

The alternative is to just keep the stands empty. Or, as some teams did, put cutouts of fans in seats for charity.

At least that goes to a good cause, though.

This weekend’s Comic-Con International proceedings are (unavoidably) taking the form of pre-recorded Zoom conference calls that are going live this weekend. Highlights for upcoming releases included panels for The New Mutants, The Boys, and an enthused Keanu Reeves for both a Constantine anniversary and Bill and Ted Face the Music. Elsewhere, the Justice Con thing happened with multiple panels, including one where Zack Snyder shared a first look at Superman’s black suit in the Justice League Snyder Cut that will be released on HBO Max. Here it is in motion:

This GIF is part of a scene that shows Superman approaching Jeremy Irons’ Alfred while paying a visit to Bruce Wayne. It’s pretty much a blip but (notably) arrives in the wake of Snyder’s own admissions that this cut is “an entirely new thing,” not to mention an installment that won’t affect the DCEU, continuity-wise or otherwise. After this panel previewed the dark Superman suit, Snyder revealed that he pressed hard for the suit to appear in Justice League to no avail. The suit will finally get its moment, and recently, HBO Max also previewed a first look at the cut that teases Darkseid’s arrival.

During an earlier panel, Cyborg actor Ray Fisher doubled down on his previous criticism of theatrical cut director Joss Whedon, who completed the movie when Snyder stepped down due to a family tragedy. As for the full panel mentioned above, you can watch Snyder talk about the dark Superman suit after the 36:00 mark below.

Earlier this week, Kanye West used Twitter to fire off a number of tweets about topics ranging from Lil Baby, Drake, Michael Jackson, and Larsa Pippen. However, the biggest bombshell from the tweets had to do with his wife, Kim Kardashian. In a string of tweets, West revealed that he had been attempting to divorce Kim for a couple of years now, citing an encounter with Meek Mill as the reason.

“They tried to fly in with 2 doctors to 51/50 me. I been trying to get divorced since Kim met with Meek at the Warldolf for ‘prison reform,’” West said. “Meek is my man and was respectful. That’s my dog. Kim was out of line.”

A few days after the tweets were posted and deleted from his Twitter account, West has returned to the platform to offer an apology to his wife for his comments.

“I would like to apologize to my wife Kim for going public with something that was a private matter,” West said.
“I did not cover her like she has covered me. To Kim I want to say I know I hurt you. Please forgive me. Thank you for always being there for me.”

West’s apology comes after Kim begged fans and followers to be more empathetic toward the rapper following his past statements. “We as a society talk about giving grace to the issue of mental health as a whole, however we should also give it to the individuals who are living with it in times when they need it the most.”

Just 11 months removed from her last album, Lover, Taylor Swift surprised her fans with her eighth album, Folklore on Friday. Presenting a much faster turnaround than she did with any album in her career, Taylor credited the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting quarantine, and her instincts for allowing her to craft and release the album in an Instagram post that announced Folklore on Thursday morning.

“Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re living in keep reminding me that nothing is guaranteed,” she said in the Instagram post announcing the album. “My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world.”

Early reaction to the album has clearly made it a success. In under 24 hours, Folklore sold more than 1.3 million copies worldwide according to a press release from her label. The album also broke Spotify’s global record for first-day album streams, with 80.6 million, and became Apple Music’s most-streamed pop album in 24 hours with 35.47 million streams. The album also set the streaming record in the US and worldwide for an Amazon Music Indie/Alternative record.

Coming with 16 tracks, Taylor Swift recruited The National and Big Red Machine’s Aaron Dessner to help write 11 of the album’s songs while William Bowery and Jack Antonoff helped to write the remaining songs. Bon Iver also served as the lone feature on Folklore, appearing on the album’s fourth track “Exile.”