From Midnight Sun to X Æ A-12, the jokes just keep coming.

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Saturday night, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu graced us with their presence for the latest Instagram battle on Timbaland and Swizz Beatz’s Versuz platform. Sharing their 20 best songs in a peaceful and enlightening battle, fans were overjoyed by the overall experience as it proved to be much smoother and problem-free than previous battles. Following their battle, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz hopped on Instagram Live to announce who would take part in the next ‘Versuz’ battle, and to say the least, fans are very excited.

Nelly and Ludacris will go head-to-head in a battle of their own this Saturday, May 16. Making the proud announcement, Swizz said “We’re not done, we’re just getting started. ATL! St. Louis! Country Grammar vs. Southern Hospitality. I hope you ready.”

While Nelly and Ludacris have stayed out of the music lane in recent years, minus Ludacris’ contribution to Usher’s “SexBeat,” both artists are legends in the hip-hop scene and have plenty of music to showcase all to make for an entertaining battle.

Upon hearing the news, fans took to Twitter to showcase their excitement, many of which found them heading back to the 2000s to emulate the clothing and style in order to appropriately prepare themselves for the battle. Others shared who they believed would come out as the winner at the battle’s conclusion.

Check about the video above to hear Timbaland and Swizz Beatz’s announcement.

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In an interview given several weeks ago but published this week, The Walking Dead executive producer, special effects supervisor, and director Greg Nicotero suggested that the production delay on the series would allow the writers the time to line their ducks up in a row and perhaps even better prepare for the Rick Grimes movie. The delay at this point, however, has extended into its third month, and there is no sign yet of production ramping up again. Meanwhile, the season finale of The Walking Dead is not likely to debut until the fall, along with the spin-off series The World Beyond.

In the meantime, AMC viewers can console themselves with Nicotero’s Creepshow reboot, which launched on Shudder but is currently re-airing on AMC. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nicotero also spoke about the challenges that The Walking Dead, as well as other productions, will confront in a post-pandemic environment. Nicotero says that the changes on season 11 of The Walking Dead — production of which has been delayed indefinitely — will be “dramatic.”

“It’s going to be very interesting in terms of seeing how productions work and how things that we are so accustomed to doing on sets will change, and will change pretty dramatically,” Nicotero said. “The number of people you have on set will probably diminish, which might mean it will take a little bit longer, where instead of having 60 people on set you may have 35 or 40 people on set. I know the industry is working towards some sort of industry-wide guideline in terms of are we going to do box lunches and nobody takes a break and you shoot for 10 hours and that’s it.”

“No one’s really going to know,” he continued, “so it’s going to be a unique situation and definitely a brand-new world.”

Some restrictions have been lifted in Georgia, where The Walking Dead films, but more work obviously needs to be done to protect the cast and crew of a massive show like the AMC series. The Walking Dead will face even more challenges given the nature of the story, which often features literal hordes of zombies, which would complicate social distancing. Thankfully, the next chapter of The Walking Dead will move away from The Whisperers — and their zombie hordes — and toward The Commonwealth, which will feature its own host of problems, since it is meant to be a community with 50,000 people with its own sports stadium and live concerts, two things that are not allowed in our current environment.

Indeed, it’ll be interesting to see how The Walking Dead handles the next arc, or if the writers come up with a different storyline, a bridge until The Commonwealth arc that would be easier to manage under the current restrictions. The writers, after all, do have plenty of time to come up with alternate storylines, and the series has never had a problem separating characters for long stretches of time. Hell, season 11 could simply follow Connie trying to navigate her way out of the caves.

(Via EW)

A month removed from the first At Home edition, Saturday Night Live continues to bring entertaining content to viewers from the comfort of each cast members’ homes. Serving as the third episode of SNL At Home, the late-night show concluded its 45th season with one final separate-but-together episode. With help from Kristen Wiig, Alec Baldwin, and Tiny Fey, SNL closed the chapter on a far-from-normal season, but not with a special Mother’s Day performance.

Taking from their 1997 album Evolution, Boyz II Men delivered an at-home performance of “A Song For Mama” with none other than Babyface, who joined the trio with additional vocals while he playing the guitar. Transitioning from full-screen captures of Babyface and each member of Boyz II Men, the performance also included pictures of some of the SNL cast members, including Pete Davidson, Michael Che, and Kenan Thompson, with their mothers as a warm way to honor the matriarchs in their family on Mother’s Day.

In addition to the performance from Boyz II Men and Babyface, SNL also honored rock’n’roll great, Little Richard, who passed away Saturday morning due to bone cancer. The performance also arrived after Miley Cyrus covered Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” by a campfire with Andrew Watt by her side as he played the guitar for performance.

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.

There are a couple of interesting developments in this week’s VOD/Rental charts. First up, Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot exited the “theatrical window,” where it was being offered for $20, and entered the rental window, where it is being offered for around $5, and it shot to the top spot on the Fandango VOD charts, and it is number two on the iTunes rental chart. Ford vs. Ferrari, likewise, jumped to the top spot on iTunes now that it’s being offered for the rental price.

The more interesting news is that Arkansas — a low-budget noir starring Liam Hemsworth and Vince Vaughn — enters the VOD charts at number three, and the iTunes rental chart at number five. This is significant, because Lionsgate did not do a lot of heavy promotion of the picture. Arkansas is succeeding based on reviews (mixed, though they are) and director Clark Duke (Hot Tub Time Machine) is also making the rounds online. I liked the movie, but more importantly, it’s great to see a movie like this break out on VOD. I don’t know if it’s because there are fewer options, or if it was because of Liam Hemsworth’s social media following, or if a lot of viewers just really wanted to see a Southern-fried noir set in Arkansas, but it’s great to see a film like this break out. Studios may want to revisit some of those films that were supposed to debut at SXSW, like Arkansas, and see if there is some VOD potential in them during the pandemic.

Otherwise on the VOD charts, the romantic drama The Photograph held on and jumped a spot this weekend, Gretel & Hansel jumped to number four, and Justice League Dark: Apokolips War debuted at number five. Trolls World Tour (#6), Sonic the Hedgehog (#10), and Bad Boys for Life (#11) have finally loosened their grip on the top five.

Interestingly, the horror movie The Lodge debuted at number nine this weekend. It got a small, limited release in February, but solid reviews have helped the Sundance hit succeed on the VOD charts, even while it is currently available for streaming on Hulu. The most popular movies over on Hulu, meanwhile, remain about the same: Parasite, Isn’t It Romantic, Lego Movie 2 and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

The most popular movies on Netflix this weekend are an odd assortment. A 2017 Jamie Foxx film, Sleepless, is weirdly enormously popular on Netflix. I don’t really understand it, because it was not well liked by critics (25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) or audiences (37 percent audience score) on its initial release, and it didn’t do much at the box office, either. We live in strange times.

It is not surprising, however, to see Michelle Obama’s feel-good doc Becoming debut this weekend at number two. This is exactly the kind of uplifting documentary that the country needs right now. It’s beloved by critics (92 percent on RT), while I am guessing that the audience score (59 percent) is being manipulated by partisans.

Gerard Butler — king of Netflix — hangs on at number three with Den of Thieves, Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction maintains position in the top five for the third weekend in a row, and Terry Crews’ John Henry, which debuted in theaters in January, has now arrived on Netflix and it sits at number five. The Tomatometer on John Henry is zero percent.

Finally, next weekend will see the release of Scoob!, as Warner Bros. attempts to duplicate the VOD success of Trolls World Tour.

Source: Netflix, Fandango, Hulu, iTunes

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The final episode of SNL At Home on Saturday featured parents at their breaking point. Tina Fey joined Weekend Update to bemoan teaching her children Latin and offering a prayer for mothers, but the rest of the episode featured moments where parents were looking for any sort of relief.

The first of which is above, a music video simply titled ‘Song For The Kids’ that features parents justifying giving their children anywhere from a little bit of booze to somewhere just short of blackout drunk. Billed as a public service announcement, it featured a clearly false claim from Child Services, which could curiously not be reached for comment. Accompanying the singing was images of (presumably) the cast members’ children getting drunk, with bottles of liquor and beer strewn about as they party like they’re old enough to remember 1999.

“We used to give kids whiskey to help them fall asleep,” one line went. “So a teeny tiny White Claw is just a babysitter on the cheap.”

It was all clearly filmed with mocktails and beer bottles filled with water — and it’s actually kind of cute — but it’s some clearly bad advice from desperate people who have been trapped inside teaching and taking care of their children in captivity for more than two months now.

Later on, ‘Brandon’ was the star of a sketch where a lame dad — Mikey Day — got pranked by his son. The sketch started with the boy loading a Nerf gun and shooting his dad, then escalated to putting thumbtacks on his toilet seat and changing all the contacts in his phone to Gigi Hadid.

The funniest bit of the sketch was changing his Zoom background to a picture of his boss’s daughter, if only for the space work from Day and Kenan Thompson’s extremely weirded out boss. The lesson, if anything, from the night was that parents need even more praise on this Mother’s Day weekend, and everyone needs just a little bit more space these days.

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