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I think we could all use a little extra Disney magic right now, don’t ya’ think?

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Basically no one can get 100% on this!

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NYC pizza is the best, but what is the best pizza in NYC?

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Maine farmers are showing their resilience and leaning in to the COVID-19 crisis.

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Two Baptist churches had sued the state on Thursday.

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As the One World: Together At Home festival created by Lady Gaga with the help of the World Health Organization and Global Citizen took place on almost all platforms Saturday, Babyface and Teddy Riley took to Instagram Live for a battle of their respective catalogs. As part of the Versuz series hosted by Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, battles from some of the music industry’s best have taken place over the past month, with the most recent one happening between RZA and DJ Premier.

Going up to bat against each other Saturday night, Babyface and Riley’s battle was originally supposed to take place on April 12 but was delayed as a result of Babyface’s coronavirus diagnosis. With both parties showing up to the battle as planned Saturday, viewers quickly realized that the only thing that went as planned was the battle itself happening.

With more than 400,000 viewers watching, Babyface and Teddy’s battle was soon riddled by audio issues.

“Doing too much,” as Swizz Beatz later said, compared to other Versuz battles. Teddy opted for an elaborate concert-like set up in his home. Unfortunately, the set up brought nothing but bothersome echoing among other issues. Through failed attempts at troubleshooting, the battle was eventually called off after an hour, hopefully to be rescheduled a second time.

Initial excitement for the battle from fans turned into sheer frustration at the absolute mess. Those who watched the battle fall apart right before their eyes shared their comical reactions on Twitter. Check out some reaction to the battle below.

A new date for the battle has not been revealed yet, but hopefully, the beauty of simplicity will be understood next time around.

One day we’re all going to look back at 2020 as that curious year where a lot of television took place via the video-conference platform, Zoom, and it’s all going to feel very strange and out of place to our future selves. In the present, however, we are all beginning to adjust to watching celebrities talk to other celebrities from their living rooms for the entertainment of non-celebrities, who are also stuck in their own living rooms.

From this very bizarre time comes Friday Night In with the Morgans, a charming little AMC show that seeks to provide some comfort and familiarity to viewers, at least among those of us who are fans of two of the longest running shows on television, The Walking Dead and Supernatural. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is obviously a star of both shows, and on the first episode of Friday Night in with the Morgans, Morgan and his wife, Hilarie Burton, shared screens with Supernatural‘s Jensen Ackles and his wife, Danneel Ackles, as well as Christian Serratos, who plays Rosita on The Walking Dead (and was halfway through production on the first season of her Netflix series about Selena when the pandemic led to a pause). The Morgans also brought in their own personal physician, Dr. Sheragim Kemp.

It’s a comforting half-hour of television, if only because it allows us all to see some beloved celebrities from a different perspective: In their living rooms, as bored as many of the rest of us. They have more money, nicer houses, and a lot more land and little fear about their future financial security, but day-to-day, they battle the same issues trying to keep their kids preoccupied and keep themselves from going crazy. Morgan can at least tend to their farm, while Hilarie Burton is making masks for healthcare workers to keep busy. Serratos seems to be enjoying some great alcoholic beverages, but that’s probably true of most of us.

It’s a cozy series, highlighted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton’s meet-cute story. In fact, it was JDM’s Supernatural co-star, Jensen Ackles, who introduced the two. Burton was staying with Ackles and his wife, and they all decided to go out to an Irish Pub for the night. “There we were, sitting, the three of us,” Ackles says. “And then I convinced [JDM] to come down the street and meet us for a drink.”

“[He] did, and [he] pulled up in his Harley, and we were sitting there in this front window,” Ackles continues. “And Hilarie sees this guy get off the bike in slow motion, take his helmet off and throw his hair. It was all very surreal, and [he] walked in, and [Hilarie and JDM] locked eyes, and that was pretty much the rest of the evening. And then Jeff, very smoothly says, ‘Why don’t you guys come over and check out my brand new pad.”

Ackles and his wife, Daneel, in fact, made a diorama of their first night together, which features JDM and Burton making out on top of a car. The art project, however, had to be blurred out for television.

Meanwhile, Christian Serratos and her husband, David Boyd, singer for the alt-rock band New Politics, are using their quarantine time to do couples therapy, and the two have gotten a lot out of it, according to Serratos.

Friday Night In with the Morgans airs Friday nights on AMC, at least for the time being. Returns dates for The Walking Dead and the final two episodes of Supernatural have not yet been announced.

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.

The number of new releases on the home digital market is beginning to slow now. As theatrical releases have dried up, there are far fewer of them to release to home viewers. The next few months, however, may be interesting, as most summer blockbusters have been delayed until later this year or next year, which could give a lot of smaller films a chance to find bigger VOD viewers among audiences who are starved for new content.

It’s clear that VOD movies can be hugely successful, too. We have not been given exact figures, but Universal said last weekend that Trolls World Tour posted the highest opening day and opening weekend totals ever for a film released digitally. Again, those figures were not provided, but some estimate that it earned $50 million on its opening weekend, which is slightly better than the $46 million opening of the original Trolls in theaters. I don’t anticipate a lot of hits of that size on VOD, but I suspect a film like The King of Staten Island — the Judd Apatow film starring Pete Davidson based on Davidson’s life — could do very well this summer on VOD. If theaters remain closed, what else are we going to watch?

Indeed, at this point, Trolls World Tour, Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog have combined with Invisible Man to dominate the charts for the last few weeks, while other films are sampled heavily on their digital opening weekends but soon thereafter drop. Tiffany Haddish’s Like a Boss for instance, jumped into the top five last week but it’s already fallen to 15th this week, while two more films that will probably only be sampled — Kristen Stewart’s sci-fi clunker, Underwater and Jason Blum’s woefully reviewed Fantasy Island reboot — have debuted at four and five, respectively, on the VOD charts.

On the other hand, there are a lot of films that haven’t reached the top five, but are sticking around longer than they might otherwise due to an overall lack of options, like Ben Affleck’s The Way Back, Harrison Ford’s The Call of the Wild, and even Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Dolittle, because after watching everything else on Disney+, some parents are clearly breaking down and renting it, because it’s still at number eight on the VOD charts, right behind Birds of Prey, another film that hasn’t done flashy numbers but is clearly accumulating a lot of rentals over the long term.

Meanwhile, over on Hulu, it’s almost like the streaming service listened last week and updated their Most Popular section to actually reflect the movies that are most popular, like Best Picture winner Parasite, which has been a monster hit for the streaming service. It is apparently the second-most watched title ever on Hulu among its current library of films, as well as the most-watched foreign-indie film ever on the service. It’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic for it to happen, but it’s great that Parasite is getting a lot of exposure, even if some are complaining about the subtitles.

Otherwise, family fare is doing very well on Hulu right now with The LEGO Movie 2, Storks, Small Foot, and Dreamworks Abominable, the latter of which I highly recommend. My family loved it.

Elsewhere, on Netflix, there were a lot of new offerings this weekend, including two new films, but Despicable Me has taken the top spot. In fact, it has finally knocked Tiger King out of the top spot overall on Netflix, a spot it’s held for weeks.

The number two film on Netflix is the Canadian sci-fi flick Code 8 starring Robbie and Stephen Amell. It “is set in a world where 4% of the population is born with varying supernatural abilities, but instead of being billionaires or superheroes, they face discrimination and live in poverty, often resorting to crime.” It looks intriguing, and 75 percent of its small sampling of reviews on RT view it positively. Meanwhile, a French film called Earth and Blood is number three on the streaming network, and while there are no reviews for it yet available on Rotten Tomatoes, it sounds like a French, arthouse Rambo, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Last week’s top film, Angel Has Fallen has dropped to number four, while Seth Rogen’s The Green Lantern has inexplicably jumped into the top five this weekend. Maybe it’s because a new Green Hornet movie is on the way.

Next weekend will see the kind of new release that can do well in this environment. True History of the Kelly Gang is an IFC films release with a hell of a cast — Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam, and Russell Crowe, among others — that will debut digitally. It premiered to positive reviews at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Source: Netflix, Hulu, Fandango

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