Having followed technology for as long as I can remember, one of the relationships I always admired was Bill & Melinda Gates. Those two met at Microsoft, married and have done great things with all that Microsoft cheddar. Didn’t think they were anything but lifelong mates.
Just saw the news that after 27 years of marriage, less than Kara and I have been married, the Gates’ are splitting.
“Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives. We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
This was sad news at a time we don’t receive much in the way of good news. The only good news remaining is Bill and Melinda will continue working on their foundation philanthropic work together. Some might wonder how that’s going to work with them not romantically involved any longer (maybe better, maybe worse, who knows?)?
You might ask how this has anything to do with movies or TVs? Eventually there will be a movie about this couple, as biopics are all the rage. Certainly way too premature, but this doesn’t seem to have a happy ending. That is yet to be written. Maybe the happy ending is they fund the cure for cancer through their foundation? I wouldn’t put anything past Bill Gates — and I mean that complimentary.
The most current contract renewal conflict involves YouTube TV.
YouTube is mounting its own public relations campaign in its dispute with Roku, telling YouTube TV subscribers that it has offered the same “reasonable” terms under the current agreement for renewal to the OTT company and wants to continue the agreement. Customers are advised to cast YouTube from another device to their Roku box should Roku pull the app. The company is also urging them to pressure Roku by calling customer service or complaining via Twitter to keep YouTube TV.
Just for clarity, this isn’t the normal YouTube app, because that contract is up in December. Is it possible Google pulls all their support from Roku, including the normal YouTube app? Yes. The only losers in this battle are Roku users that use YouTube TV, and possibly YouTube.
Workarounds? Sure, they exist. Let’s hope these two companies come to some kind of agreement that doesn’t result in YouTube being pulled from Roku.
F-yes, Jonah Hill is #1 for using the most profanity used in film. Superbad star gets all the profane dialogue, it seems. F-word master Samuel L. Jackson? Third place.
Jonah Hill lands at the top, achieving a grand total of 376 swear words used throughout his career. Leonardo DiCaprio followed with a total count of 361. Interestingly, both actors had lead roles in the film with the most cussing: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street that has 715 swear words. Finally, Samuel L. Jackson comes in third place with 301 swear words.
Yeah, it sounds timely, at the least. Obviously, it’s going a more horrific, dramatic direction than what the world is currently going through, but it will be interesting to see a movie that has this central theme and idea during the current time.
I remember following 9/11 there was a lot of concern about being able to cover anything involving buildings coming down, terrorists in planes and the like. This isn’t quite the same thing, of course, but it’s vaguely reminiscent.
The trailer:
We will be watching this week, perhaps tonight, as tickets haven’t been reserved yet, but we’re talking it over. What about you? Anybody else seeing this movie this weekend in theaters?
In The Earth opens wide in United States theaters on April 16, 2021.
Sylvester Stallone is restating that his iconic character, Rocky, won’t be in the third Creed movie. I don’t know if this means Rocky is being killed off, sent off screen for retirement or whatever, but Stallone isn’t going to be in the next Creed movie. I mean, he’s publicly stating that, anyway. Maybe he’s still in as a cameo, archival footage, part of the training montage, something.
“Yeah, I think that Sly let it be known that he wasn’t coming back for this one but I think, you know, his essence and his spirit… there’s always going to be a little bit of Rocky within Adonis,” Jordan said. “But this is a Creed franchise, and we really want to build this story and this world around him moving forward. So, it’s always respect and always a shit-ton of love for what he’s built, but we really want to push and navigate Adonis forward and the family that he created. So, hopefully you guys will love what I’m thinking… what we’re cooking up. I think it’s going to be something special.”
This all makes me wonder if Creed will be a Rocky movie any longer without Rocky in it? It sounds like they are making this a Creed franchise now. Stallone is no spring chicken so sooner or later he had to retire the role, but not sure I’m looking as forward to a Rocky franchise movie without Rocky. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones without Indy.
That’s not saying they can’t expand on Creed and maybe severing ties with Stallone while he is still alive and able to appear as Rocky is the right move to move on, but it feels like the project will be missing something.
Then there was this nonsense from Stallone about working on a Rocky prequel movie last year, see: Rocky in an immigration issue movie? Please, no. Believe that idea has morphed into a TV series on one of the streaming channels now, but not sure if it’s been picked up or not. Hmm, will have to wait and see. Probably one of those TV series I watch the first episode and decide whether to stay or bail.
Will have to wait and see what Creed 3 delivers. Sounds like they don’t have a script fully fleshed out yet, so this is all just guesswork at the moment. Maybe Stallone swoops in at the studio’s request and appears one more time. I mean if they are going to do a story with Mr. T and/or Clubber Lang, how can Rocky not be in the story? Could be Clubber’s child, as was Drago’s in the last Creed film but neither Mr. T or Stallone around to revisit their character
All the movies I grew up with are changing, and although inevitable due to Hollywood’s dubious flirtation with sequels, it’s sad. Would be nice to see them leave alone these franchises until 50+ years or so have gone by (wait, Rocky was in the 70s, so it has been almost 50 years!)
Do you want to see a Creed sequel without Rocky (Stallone) in it? Do you think it’s the right time for Stallone to move on?
This LIMITED release movie missed our opening week post on April 2, 2021. We’ve noticed since starting this site that this happens with movies, particularly the [LIMITED] release ones. They just sort of show up, sometimes without any advance preview trailers.
The Unholy follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister.
This means he doesn’t think Roku will ever be a major streamer, because they are ad-supported. It’s a bit ironic, considering HBO Max is going to be releasing an ad-supported version of their service, similar to what Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock all currently offer.
What defines a “major” streaming service? The CEO of HBO Max, Jason Kilar says “hundreds of millions of paying subscribers.”
Speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media and Telecom virtual conference Thursday morning, Kilar said that there’s only a handful of major streaming services “that I think can ultimately get to scale, defined by hundreds of millions of paying subscribers around the world.”
How many is a handful?
“Less than six,” the former Hulu CEO said.
Amazon Prime Video isn’t 100% paid subscribers, because they include their streaming service as a perk for joining their Amazon Prime service. Yes, they also sell subscription separately, but the vast majority of their 150+ million subscribers are not paying to only subscribe to Prime video, they’re getting it as an included benefit. Their service would have dramatically fewer paid subscribers if it was only the streaming service. We’ll probably never know these numbers but if we could guess, we’d say it was less than 10 million subscribers, maybe way less.
This leaves the elephant in the room, the king of the hill, Netflix as the only “major” streaming service currently with hundreds of millions of paid subscribers. That’s all. One streaming channel. Disney+ is paid subscribers only, but it’s nowhere near 200+ million paid subscribers.
What Kilar is trying to do here is position HBO Max as one of the three or four primary paid subscription streaming services so when households start budgeting and cutting, they keep his service. Although HBO Max have been targeted as being too expensive — after all, they are the second most expensive streaming service currently — the reality is their content makes them one of the major streaming providers.
Then there’s Disney, the second elephant in the room. They don’t have as many paid subscribers yet, but they are climbing — fast. Don’t count them out by any means, not with such lucrative IP as Star Wars and Marvel, not to mention their own animated kingdom of family films. Disney, if they don’t screw it all up by failing to produce more movies and TV shows based on their IPs that fans are clamoring for, has the potential to one day rival Netflix. They are crippled at the moment by a variety of factors, but counting them out is ill-advised.
We don’t need Kilar to predict the streaming future. There are currently three major streaming services: Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ — and then everybody else. I could argue that Disney+ isn’t as good as HBO Max (especially with movies), because they aren’t putting out anywhere close to as much new original content, but that doesn’t matter. Disney is working on changing that. Heck, they have like a dozen Star Wars projects in the hopper alone, not to mention the Marvel stuff. If even a quarter of these projects are as successful as The Mandalorian, they can ride this to hundreds of millions of subscribers.
None of the services, even Amazon, compete with Netflix on quantity of new content released. Netflix has been working that corner market for several years and their pipeline is bursting with new content. Everybody else is playing catch-up. Once other streaming channels catch up, though, who’s on top could change. Netflix might be all about quantity but they have some quality control problems. So will everybody else. Not everything created is a smash hit.
Bottom line: Kilar isn’t wrong with what he said. He just focused on “paid” subscribers which is more than misleading considering the many ad-supported “FREE” streaming channel options. Many people will suffer through ads to watch their favorite movies and TV shows, just as has been the case with traditional TV that is fading for streaming..
What Kilar should have pondered is how many will switch to HBO Max ad-supported version to save $5-10/month? That answer depends on how invasive the ads will be.
The movies opening in theaters are trickling in each week, but some flow has been better than none and the schedule is looking brighter as the spring works its way into summer.
“My plan was to die before the money ran out,” says 60-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer), but things didn’t go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for 12 years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris, accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) and a cat named Small Frank—who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances’s dead husband.
Gwyneth Paltrow certainly has some great holistic resources to share with her readers and consumers about COVID-19 but, at the end of the day, she 1) does run a business and 2) is not a medical professional. The CDC has yet to completely understand the significance of the effects of how COVID-19 affects our bodies long-term, but physicians do absolutely recommend a healthy diet, exercise and therapy during this time along with safety precautions such as wearing masks.
Then again, maybe she’s not doing anything wrong and people are just misinterpreting her sales pitches as medical advice.
The title of this post is pretty clear. Don’t take medical advice from social influencers that are actors. There are people who have studied in the medical field, have actual medical experience. I don’t think Gwyneth Paltrow fits this category. I don’t even know if she’s ever had a role playing a doctor on a movie or TV show? (anyone, has she?).
Whatever the case, some of this should be common sense. It shouldn’t need people to go, wow, Gwyneth Paltrow says I should fast to help recover from long COVID, I better start doing this!
Then again, maybe this is only a very small percentage of people doing this. We don’t expense any medical advice here. We don’t know anything about how to survive long COVID. We both feel extremely blessed that we haven’t gotten COVID, despite working this whole time in public.
Movies, Movies, Movies 