Film
Concord Originals, the film and TV division of music company Concord, has acquired storied film studio RKO, giving the Nashville-based music company a wealth of opportunities to promote and capitalize on its publishing and recorded music catalog.
RKO is one of Hollywood’s oldest studios and produced numerous timeless films and TV productions from the ‘20s to ’50s, including King Kong, Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, It’s a Wonderful Life, Suspicion and The Woman in the Window. Legendary industrialist Howard Hughes owned RKO for a brief stretch, buying the company in 1947 and selling it to General Rubber and Tire in 1955.
The acquisition covers derivative rights for remakes, sequels, stage productions and stories — “anything that someone with creative intent and with a little bit of sweat equity could theoretically turn into a project,” Concord CEO Bob Valentine tells Billboard. Concord’s deal for RKO gives it the opportunity “to develop new and interesting projects around that original IP,” Valentine explains. Turner Broadcasting System, now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, acquired the distribution rights to the original RKO library in 1987.
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RKO’s library includes what Valentine calls “some of the most seminal musicals” created in the mid-20th century, many of which have not yet been adapted for live performance. Among RKO’s musicals are films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers such as Top Hat and Swing Time. “I wouldn’t underestimate the potential for theatrical development,” he says.
RKO will continue to operate as a standalone entity within Concord Originals after the transaction. Sophia Dilley, head of Concord Originals, and current RKO president Mary Beth O’Connor will run RKO has co-presidents. RKO chairman and CEO Ted Hartley will stay on as lead producer and chief storyteller of active RKO projects.
Dilley’s six-person team will expand to nine after the acquisition. RKO’s Brian Anderson will work across both companies as director of contract, administration and distribution, according to Dilley. As part of a recent restructuring at Concord Originals, Wesley Adams was upped to vp of production and distribution, Charlie Hopkins was promoted to vp of development and Imogen Lloyd Webber was given the new role of executive vp of marketing and communications of Concord Originals and Theatricals.
“Our plan will be to grow strategically, because a lot of these film companies grow too fast, they have overhead too fast,” says Dilley. “Our mission is to be really frugal and careful about how we put this together so that it’s set up for success long term.”
Concord Originals was founded in 2021 as an outgrowth of Concord’s realization that it could be “a more direct beneficiary” of derivative works that involved the company’s music rights, says Dilley. Among the productions by Concord Originals are Stax: Soulsville USA, a Peabody Award-winning, four-part HBO documentary that was co-produced with Polygram Entertainment and Warner Music Entertainment, and Let the Canary Sing, a documentary about singer Cyndi Lauper produced with Fine Point Films and Sony Music Entertainment. Concord Originals is also working on a biopic on blues legend Robert Johnson, whose publishing catalog is represented by Concord Music Publishing.
In addition, Concord Originals has a partnership with Skydance Entertainment and Jennifer Lopez’s Nuyorican Productions to develop original projects. One such project is a limited series based on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Rogers & Hammerstein’s catalog was acquired by Concord in 2017 through its purchase of Imagem Music Group.
Source: Mike Marsland / Getty / Ryan Coogler
Sinners took a tremendous bite out of the box office, but don’t expect the story of Stack and Mary to continue unless something significant happens to get Ryan Coogler back in the director’s chair.
Speaking with Ebony, Ryan Coogler revealed that he never planned on making a sequel to his period vampire flick, throwing a splash of cold holy water on any speculation that Sinners would become a franchise, like his other projects, Creed and Black Panther.
Even though Coogler secured a historic deal by securing the rights to Sinners, meaning the rights of the film will revert to him after 25 years.
The director told the publication he “never” gave any thought to making a sequel to Sinners.
“I’ve been in a space of making franchise films for a bit, so I wanted to get away from that,” Coogler said. “I was looking forward to working on a film that felt original and personal to me, and had an appetite for delivering something to audiences that was original and unique.”
When watching his film, Coogler explained that he wanted to give audiences a “full meal.”
He continued, “I wanted it to be a holistic and finished thing. That was how I was asked all about it. That was always my intention.”
Coogler’s statement comes after false reports of a Sinners sequel in development flooded both Instagram and X, formerly Twitter, timelines.
‘SINNERS 2’ is rumored to be in development.
(Via: @prodweek) #Sinners pic.twitter.com/WprpwKF9vv
— CriticalOverlord (@CriticalOverlo3) May 29, 2025
Fans Seem To Be Happy A Sequel To Sinners Is Not In The Works
However, now that we know a sequel is unlikely, it seems most moviegoers are fine with the idea that Stack and Mary’s story ended with that post-credits scene.
Normalize not fucking things up with a sequel 🙏 https://t.co/gMVwFOjd5F
— bryo (@falloutbryan) June 2, 2025
We are not opposed to the idea of a Sinners sequel, but we want it to happen on Ryan Coogler’s terms, not the studio’s.
Hit the gallery below for more reactions.
6.
Why does everything have to have a sequel Sinners is brilliant it doesn’t need a cinematic universe.I can’t wait for Mr Cooglers next original film. Let the guy cook https://t.co/6XA1HxLXrb— Rich Brockwell (@richkbrock) June 1, 2025
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For Bono, music has always been an immersive art form. “When I was a teenager and stereo came, it was everything,” the rock legend tells Billboard. “U2 immersed ourselves in our audience — I jumped into the audience, and then our shows were always immersive in their instincts.”
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So when he got an early look at the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset that the company launched in the U.S. last year, Bono says that he “was honored to be a lab rat in in their unusual mix of art and science.” On Friday (May 30), Bono: Stories of Surrender, a new documentary that captures and expands upon his recent one-man stage show, will be released on Apple TV+ as both a standard 2D film and as an immersive experience on the Vision Pro — the first feature-length project to be released in the format.
U2 has a long history of partnering with Apple, and Bono says that he was happy to be the one to break new ground for the company. “A lot of companies, when they get to that scale, they stop innovating,” he says. “And here they are again, ready to do it.
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“And for the first time, I got to see myself onstage, and realized, ‘What a big arse!’” Bono adds with a laugh. “That has gotta go! And by the way, are those nose hairs? I’m like, ‘Wow!’”
Indeed, Stories of Surrender offers plenty of extreme close-ups of the rock star, as the documentary (directed by Andrew Dominik) adds new dimension to a 2023 performance of Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief… The stage show itself was an extension of Bono’s 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and mixed monologues detailing his upbringing, sparse visual props and stripped-down arrangements of some of U2’s biggest hits, all in a theater setting (the doc was filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York City).
“I ended up in the stage play because I didn’t want to do a promotion tour for the book,” Bono notes, “and I thought I’d do something a bit more challenging and a bit more fun — for me, selfishly speaking, and perhaps for the audience.”
The 86-minute documentary flies by with heartfelt anecdotes about Bono’s relationship with his father, the earliest days of U2, run-ins with global celebrities and his legacy as an artist. Although the tasteful presentations of U2 songs like “Beautiful Day,” “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Vertigo” — by a trio of backing musicians, led by veteran producer Jacknife Lee — earn deservedly rousing reactions from the audience in the doc, Bono’s stories also received a reaction that startled him when the stage show launched.
“I went out onstage, and something happened to me that had never happened to me before onstage with U2, at least not in more than 30-seconds intervals: People started laughing!” Bono says. “And I started to [think], ‘Oh, is this funny? Wow, I like the sound of this.’
“And so I had the songs, and I’d found a different way of getting inside the songs to tell the story, and now I could be as silly and as serious as I wanted to be, and indeed, as I am,” he continues. “There’s a reason tragic comedy was a favorite of Shakespeare’s. People’s tears mean more after they’ve been laughing, or the other way around. And all our lives are these absurdities, aren’t they?”
Now that this extended look back — first with the memoir, then with the stage show, and now with the documentary — is wrapping up, Bono says that each project has made him feel closer to his father, Bob, who passed away in 2001. In the doc, Bono re-creates multiple conversations with his dad across time — playing both roles by turning his head from side to side, finding humor and heartache as the camera cuts between the sides of the discussion.
“It is a little opera that I was making, about … my father, and how his son had to go through various different stages before he’d fully appreciate his father,” says Bono. “And one of those stages was playing him onstage, with the turn of my head every night, and realizing that my father was funny. And not just that I loved him, but I started to like him, just by playing him.”
Source: Ethan Miller / Getty
It’s been three decades since us older heads had to endure that train wreck of a video game turned feature film, Street Fighter, and while it basically ended the short but successful career of Jean-Claude Van Damme, it seems like Hollywood will once again attempt to give the classic video game a proper live-action adaptation in the near future.
According to Deadline, a new Street Fighter film is in the works and though the good folks over at Capcom are remaining mum on the project, sources tell Deadline that some pretty big names are being floated around for casting in the upcoming project. Names like WWE superstar Roman Reigns and Hollywood action stars such as Jason Momoa, Andrew Koji, and Noah Centineo are being flown around to star in the feature film though no word on which characters each man would be cast to play as the video game has an illustrious list of fighters who’ve come and gone over the decades throughout the franchise’s numerous installment. Naturally OG characters such as Ryu, Ken, and Guile (whom Van Damme portrayed in the disastrous 1994 film) are expected to be in the film, but we’d really love to see other fan favorites such as Akuma, Vega, and Necro make their big screen debut.
Still, we know little to nothing about the upcoming film as the studio is playing everything close to the chest, but all we can do is hope that they don’t give us another lackluster adaptation as the one we got in the mid 90’s.
Per Deadline:
Reps for the studio declined comment, and the plot of the film remains under wraps. In February, Bad Trip‘s Kitao Sakurai boarded as director, inheriting the project from Talk To Me‘s Danny & Michael Philippou, who attached themselves in April of 2023, following Legendary’s acquisition of exclusive film and TV rights to the Street Fighter IP. The film adaptation is being co-developed and co-produced alongside Capcom, the developer and publisher of the video games. No word has emerged yet on who has written and who specifically will produce the actioner.
We would say it couldn’t be any worse than 1994’s Street Fighter, but truth be told, anything is possible these days.
Who would you like to see get cast in the upcoming Street Fighter film and for which character? Let us know in the comments below.
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So does Mad!, the title of Sparks’ new and 26th studio album, refer to brothers Ron and Russell Mael’s current temperament? Or is it simply a reference to their legendarily idiosyncratic creative comportment that’s made the pair a cult darling for the past 54 years?
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“Maybe a little of each,” Russell Mael tells Billboard as he travels from Philadelphia, where Sparks performed at NON-COMMvention the previous evening, to New York. “There’s the two general meanings of mad, being either angry or being crazy,” he says. “Just the overall ambience of the whole album seemed to lend itself to that title. But then you can exact from it, too, that it also is reflective of the general zeitgeist now, with what’s going on everywhere — in particular here (in the United States).”
The 12-song set, produced by the Maels and recorded with their regular touring band, comes as part of a particularly prolific period in Sparks’ career. It’s the group’s ninth studio album since the turn of the century and its third of the decade, directly following 2023’s The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. It also comes in the wake of Edgar Wright’s acclaimed 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers and the 2021 release of the Maels’ long-gestating film musical Annette, which produced not only a soundtrack album but also last year’s Annette — An Opera by Sparks (The Original 2013 Recordings).
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All of that, along with touring, has kept Sparks’ profile high, and there’s an undeniably triumphant — as well as defiant — message conveyed as Sparks kicks into Mad! with the forceful opening track “Do Things My Own Way.”
“You don’t like to be heavy-handed with a message like that,” Russell explains, “but it is kind of that statement, in a way. It kind of applies to how we think — from day one, even when we did our first album [1971’s Halfnelson, also the band’s name at the time] with Todd Rundgren (producing). He always encouraged us to keep the eccentricities that we just naturally had and to not smooth over the edges, don’t lose your character and personality. Even on that first album, he thought we’d created our own universe he’d never heard before. He said it was something from somewhere else, which is a nice thing to say, especially with a band that was just a new group.”
Sparks was celebrated last year with an outstanding contribution to music honor at the AIM Independent Music Awards. And though the group has only intersected with the pop mainstream on rare occasions — “Cool Places” with Jane Wiedlin hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, and “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” went top 10 on the Dance Club Songs chart in 1995 — the fact Sparks is still with us is proof that being a bit “weird” is not a bad thing.
“Things are on the upswing for Sparks,” Mael says. “I think there’s been this — especially in the last few years, since the Edgar Wright documentary, and since the Annette movie — whole new audience, some of whom didn’t even know the band at all but became aware of it through different channels than just us having our own album out. It’s not the typical career trajectory.”
Mad! was created in standard Sparks methodology, according to Mael, without a great deal of forethought — and, according to the vocalist, nothing held over from previous projects.
“Everything was done specifically for this album,” Mael says. “It’s a process where we’re pretty free to work however we want. Sometimes we’ll have a complete song that’s fully formed…or we come in with nothing at all planned and just sit down and see if something can come up from nothing. Having our own studio, you’re free to experiment in that way. We’ve been working together for so long now that we’re able to read what each other’s thoughts are regarding the songs or the recording process. That certainly makes it easier. It’s not starting off with any questions marks.”
The result on Mad! is unapologetically diverse — to its benefit. Musical and lyrical quirks about; “JanSport Backpack” is about just that, for instance, while “Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab” is a good-humored “mini-movie,” and “I-405 Rules” and “A Long Red Light” show the Maels are well attuned to traffic patterns in their native Los Angeles. The range of sounds, meanwhile, runs from the aggressive attack of “Hit Me, Baby” to the theatrical drama of “Don’t Dog It” to the string-fueled “I-405 Rules,” while a great deal of melodic pop floats through “A Little Bit of Light Banter,” “My Devotion,” “Drowned in a Sea of Tears” and the Mersey-meets-Bacharach majesty of “Lord Have Mercy.”
“I think we both have the same goal in mind… to try to come up with fresh approaches to the universe that Sparks has and has had since the very beginning and try to stretch that, or try to find new angles to be able to do in three-and-a-half-minute songs,” Mael says. “We both really like pop music, and we still feel there are ways to come up with stuff that will hopefully surprise a listener in this day and age. Pop music has been there a long time, so the trick is to see how you can take that form and still come up with something fresh — but not be weird just to be weird, or odd.”
Mad! also finds Sparks with a new label, Transgressive Records, after working with Island on The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. “Sometimes you just have to make moves,” Mael notes. “Transgressive heard the album; even referring back to ‘Do Things My Own Way,’ they told us they thought that was really a kind of manifesto of their label. They’ve all been huge Sparks fans for a long time. They really wanted to be involved not only ’cause they like us as a group, but they responded to this album and really felt a kinship to it. We’ve been lucky enough to work with people like Chris Blackwell at Island in the ‘70s, even Richard Branson at Virgin and of course Albert Grossman with Bearsville Records when we first started. It seems like in today’s musical climate there’s fewer and fewer of those visionary types. Transgressive shares that same kind of spirit, so it’s a good fit.”
Mad! will send Sparks back on the road, beginning June 8 in Japan and followed by an early summer trek through Europe before returning to North America starting Sept. 5 in Atlanta, with dates booked through Sept. 30 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Maels are also working on another movie musical that John Woo (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible 2, Silent Night) is on board to direct.
“We wanted to do another narrative project, ‘cause we really liked the whole process with Annette so much, really working and channeling our music in other ways,” says Mael, who describes the new piece as “really different in its approach than Annette.” The brothers read in an interview with Woo that he’s long wanted to make a musical and invited him to their studio to hear what they had.
“He said, ‘This is amazing, and I want to direct it,’ so we’ve been working with him to refine the story elements. He’s completely sold on the whole approach and all of the music. We have three really great producers now on the project; they’re out there trying to get all the financing together so we can start the production. We think it’s going to be something really amazing.”
Source: YouTube / DC Studios
We’re still months away from finally seeing what James Gunn has been cooking in his DC Studios when Superman: Legacy hits theaters on July 11, and with all kinds of rumors being thrown around as to who’ll be appearing or making cameos, it seems like we’ve gotten confirmation as to which villain will be involved in the film and we aren’t talking about Lex Luthor.
According to Newsweek, it’s been leaked that Superman villain Ultraman will be part of Superman: Legacy and for those that aren’t familiar with the villain, he’s basically an evil version of Superman from an alternate universe. Confirmation came as the action figure for the villain was revealed online and fans were excited to learn that Superman would be going toe-to-toe with an bad version of himself (not like in 1983’s Superman III though. That was just weird).
As for a little backstory on the villain, Newsweek breaks it down.
Newsweek reports:
In the comics, Ultraman is from an alternate universe in which most of people who we know as heroes in DC comics are instead villains. For example, instead of the Justice League of America, Ultraman is part of the Crime Syndicate of America. A villain named Johnny Quick replaces The Flash, Power Ring instead of Green Lantern, Owlman instead of Batman, etc.
So if the Ultraman of “Superman” is – like his comic book counterpart – a Superman variant, the question is exactly how A.R.G.U.S. finds him and gets him to help them out. The Ultraman of the comics would need a whole lot of convincing to help A.R.G.U.S. or anyone else to work for something other than his own selfish designs; not to mention doing it while hiding his identity.
Y’all already know Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) might’ve figured out a way to pull off such a feat. He’s an evil mastermind for Christ’s sake.
The only question is, who’ll be behind the mask of Ultraman? With rumors that Henry Cavill is somehow a part of this film (fingers crossed), imagine the theater reaction to a reveal that Cavill is the evil Superman? Heads would explode. Just sayin.’
What do y’all think about Ultraman being a big baddie in Superman: Legacy? Do you have any expectations for the film? Let us know in the comments section below.
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The following story contains spoilers from Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Four months after The Weeknd released his Billboard 200-topping album Hurry Up Tomorrow, XO fans are finally able to watch the film that inspired its inception in theaters, starting Friday (May 16).
Directed by Trey Edward Shults, Hurry Up Tomorrow follows a fictional version of the superstar (also named Abel) who’s “plagued by insomnia” and “is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence,” according to the official synopsis. But what’s soundtracking his nightmarish journey digs even deeper into The Weeknd’s lore.
“Wake Me Up,” the Justice-featuring synth-pop album opener, also serves as the film’s opening “concert song.” The show The Weeknd performs at a that looks identical to the ones he held in Brazil and Australia last fall, where he wore a black and gold kaba — a hand-embroidered Ethiopian robe historically worn by royals and traditionally worn at weddings — and sang atop a rock-hewn church, resembling Lalibela, in the northern region of his motherland. He debuted “Wake Me Up” at his São Paulo show in September.
“We always wanted a performance song that we can open the film with, and in the vein of a pop record, and ‘Wake Me Up’ was the inspiration,” The Weeknd tells Billboard. He performs the song again at a different concert later in the film, where he ends up losing his voice – mimicking The Weeknd’s real-life experience at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in September 2022, when he had to cut his concert short for the same reason. That incident, as well as The Weeknd’s sleep paralysis diagnosis, are key influences in Hurry Up Tomorrow.
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The film’s Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn says they remixed the first “Wake Me Up” performance in the film “35 times, trying to get the balance of how much crowd sound you would hear, how the music would come across. Are you hearing it from Abel’s perspective? We tried that. Are you hearing it from the audience’s perspective? No. Are you hearing it from a deeply psychological, emotional ride? Yeah, you are.”
Burn, who says he went from “dancing around my kitchen to Abel’s music” as a fan to “dancing around the mixing room” with the man himself, says the process involved everything from asking Mike Dean for “a new synth line that sounds a bit more live” to miking The Weeknd while he recorded new lyrics that better suited the storyline. When The Weeknd was changing up a few lyrics during the cutaways, “I said, ‘Well, you’re probably in quite an adrenaline state when you go out in front of 80,000 people.’ So I made him do push-ups to get kind of worked up,” Burn recalls with a chuckle. “He was like, ‘What, now?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, get down and give me 20.’”
Burn says the song that required the most fine-tuning was the cathartic centerpiece “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which The Weeknd explains was inspired by the titular track from Robert Altman’s 1973 satirical noir film The Long Goodbye, because of how frequently it appears. “You hear it throughout the entire film, different iterations of it. You hear it on the radio, you hear a pop version of it, subjectively in the score, diegetically, a mariachi band will sing it every time he goes to Mexico. And I wanted to do that with ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow,’” he explains.
Abel first plays Anima (played by Jenna Ortega) a stripped-down draft of it off his phone in a hotel room. Moved to tears, Anima admits she relates to its autobiographical lyrics — because her father left when she was a kid, her mother struggled to raise her alone and she abandoned home to forge her own path that’s fraught with inescapable loneliness. The next morning, Abel turns around while sitting on the hotel bed and faintly hears Anima singing some of the first verse in the shower behind closed doors. He later encounters his younger self, who’s swaddled in a gabi, a white handwoven Ethiopian cotton blanket, and singing a few lines in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia. But after Anima douses him and the hotel bed he’s tied to with gasoline — and right as she holds a lighter above him — Abel belts an a cappella version that feels like he is literally singing for his life: “So burn me with your light/ I have no more fights left to win/ Tie me up to face it, I can’t run away, and/ I’ll accept that it’s the end.”
“You’re seeing the making of it, not literally me making it, but the themes and the concept and the melody and the soul of it is being made throughout the film. By the end of it, it’s fully blossomed into this song, which essentially is what the film is saying,” says The Weeknd, who adds that he had “to finish the lyrics the night before I had to perform it at the end.”
Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye as Abel and Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults in ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow.’
Andrew Cooper for Lionsgate
But outside of the Hurry Up Tomorrow tracks, fans will be surprised to hear two earlier songs from The Weeknd’s discography in the film: his 2021 blockbuster hit “Blinding Lights” – which is the top Billboard Hot 100 song of all time – and “Gasoline,” the first track from his 2022 album Dawn FM. Anima analyzes the emptiness and heartache in the songs as she hysterically lip-syncs and dances to them, and she later questions Abel if he’s the true toxic subject behind his music.
“What I am doing by the end of the film is, I’m lighting my persona up on fire. But to tap into that, you need to go into the back catalog a little bit, and take in what I’m saying in some of these lyrics and how they’re masked by pop elements,” he says. “It’s always been a joke that joke with The Weeknd music, where it makes you sing and dance and it feels jolly. And then when you actually get into the themes of it, it’s something much deeper — and maybe a call for help, who knows. That’s how [Anima’s] reading it, and essentially forcing myself to face myself.”
There are other callbacks to his catalog in the sound design. The guttural shrieks heard right after Anima swings a champagne bottle over Abel’s head and knocks him out when he first tries leaving the hotel room sound reminiscent of the title track of his 2013 debut studio album Kiss Land. The “Easter eggs,” as Burn calls them, extend beyond the film — as fans pointed out online that the ending of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which serves as the final track of The Weeknd’s album, seamlessly transitions into the beginning of “High For This,” the first track off his 2011 debut mixtape House of Balloons.
While Hurry Up Tomorrow bids farewell to the character Abel Tesfaye has played for over a decade, it also underscores the long-standing symbiotic relationship between music and film in The Weeknd’s world. “When you hear the screams in the record and you hear all these horror references and you feel scared, listen to the music — because I want you to feel what I’m feeling. Kiss Land is like a horror movie,” The Weeknd told Complex in his first-ever interview back in 2013.
“We wanted to do something we’ve never seen or heard on screen before,” he says now. “We were able to do these big swings, and I think they landed well in the film. I’m really proud of the music, and I’m proud of the sonics of it. It’s much different from the album. It’s like its own experience.”
Source: DC Studios / DC
It’s gotta be tough being Superman—routinely saving the world, and the media, incels and trolls—and supervillains—Monday morning quarterbacking as if he’s actually a danger to good samaritans. This is the treatment Kal-El aka Clark Kent (David Corenswet) is getting from Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) in the latest trailer for James Gunn’s Superman.
“I wasn’t representing anybody except for me…and, and doing good,” says the exasperated Kryptonian when his actions are questioned. While the line of questioning sounds familiar to anyone who pays attention to politics, the action we’re also seeing in this official trailer is all new. Like Lex Luthor rolling up into and wreaking havoc in the Fortress of Solitude and the Man of Steel catching, and delivering, a whole lot of fades.
Gunn also got his money’s worth when it comes to DC IP with more looks at Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan)l, among others. We’re not too sure of Luthor’s buzz saw-handed henchwoman just yet, but she’s superpowered and viewers will definitely be looking forward to her catching a bad one.
And clearly, Krypto is going to be a fan favorite.
Superman is theaters on July 11. Watch the Superman official trailer below.
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The eye-opening documentary about Colombian superstar Karol G, Tomorrow Was Beautiful (on Netflix now), can be summed up in one poignant moment that showcases the complicated dichotomy of fame.
“I remember one particular concert at MetLife Stadium,” said the film’s director Cristina Costantini of a surreal scene that unfolded before both her eyes and lens. “She looked like she was living her best life on stage, performing for 90,000 people. This should be the best day of her life. But when she gets offstage, she cries for like an hour. And that kind of whiplash, of the public Karol and the private Karol, was really fascinating to me, and a real privilege of being able to witness.”
The documentary was filmed in the wake of Mañana Será Bonito, her boundary-breaking fourth studio album which became the first Spanish-language album from a woman to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. During the barrier-bashing tour that followed (where that aforementioned scene occurred), the documentary peels back the curtain on the private life, creative process and fame that turned the former teenage Colombian X Factor contestant into a giant of reggaeton and an icon of her homeland.
When Costantini spoke to Billboard, she was fresh off a plane from attending the film’s world premiere in Medellín, the Colombian metropolis in a mountainous province where Karol was born and raised.
“It was surreal and I think it’s a once in a lifetime thing for a filmmaker to see 3,000 people all come together in great spirits to watch a documentary,” she says, noting she was among everyone from Karol’s childhood friends to music teachers who all showed up to support the global superstar. “It was a very lovely, very special and a very pink event.”
Costantini’s road to getting a front-row seat with a camera in hand during an auspicious time in Karol’s life has its roots in her directing a slate of acclaimed documentaries. Her Emmy-nominated Science Fair turned heads in 2018, and Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, a 2020 portrait of the famed Puerto Rican astrologer, garnered equal acclaim.
“Two years ago I got a call that Karol was interested in making a movie about both her tour and her life and would I be interested,” Costantini remembers. “So I said ‘Yeah, let me talk to my husband first, who is not Latin.’” The problem is, her husband hadn’t heard of the star, so Costantini, who had recently given birth, had him speak to their nanny, Jasmine, to get her perspective.
“Jasmine said to him, ‘Oh my God, if Cristina doesn’t do this movie, I’ll die. My hair is red right now because of Karol.’ She started crying and talked about how Karol meant everything to her and how her music got her through a hard relationship. So he said, ‘Um, okay. I think you have to do this movie.’”
While Karol was no doubt popular at the time, she hadn’t turned into the indomitable global superstar who transcended borders just yet.
“I mean, I’m Latina and I listen to reggaeton, so I’ve been following Karol since she released ‘Tusa’ [her 2019 collab with Nicki Minaj],” notes Costantini. “But what made it interesting to me is that she wasn’t as well known in the Anglo community then, so it felt like a really interesting time to jump on board.”
Costantini and her crew shot 50 days in total with the promise that Karol wasn’t interested in a fluff piece, but rather a warts-and-all mediation on modern celebrity. “At first we had a much bigger footprint, with a lot of gear and people. But she wasn’t quite being herself, so we shrunk it down to these cameras you’d normally not shoot on because we had a sense we’d get way more footage and access, and that wound up being the case.”
“For the last two and a half years, I’ve had cameras around me like I was living in a reality show, trying to ignore, overlook or avoid them,” Karol G told Billboard‘s Isabela Raygoza on the red carpet for the film’s premiere in New York. “It was hard — sometimes I did feel a little frustrated, like I was being watched too much. There were plenty of times when I’d ask for a bit more privacy, to be a little more alone, to spend more time with my family and friends.”
Eventually, she came to trust the process; the end result is Karol splayed on a couch, pouring her heart out into the lens. “This is basically like a mini reality show squeezed into an hour and 48 minutes,” she cracked.
The result are raw scenes where the superstar ruminates on the pros and cons of fame. “Everyone could see I was at the top of my career,” she says at one point in the film in her native Spanish. “But inside, I felt like I was losing who I really was. As much as I’d like to explain how difficult it was, I wouldn’t have enough time.”
“I have so much respect for her ability to really go there and put herself out like she has,” Costantini explains of the superstar’s vulnerability. At one point in the film, Karol talks about being sexually harassed when she was 16 by a former manager, leading her to take a pause from her dreams of pursuing music and move to New York.
Costantini said she didn’t need much prompting to mine her darkest memories. “Like the story about her [former] manager, she’s never gone there before, but we had talked about that and she was clearly very ready to go there,” the director says. “It takes an immense amount of trust and faith to be as vulnerable as Karol has been.”
“I can assure you that no woman who respects herself would allow being harmed in order to achieve something,” an emotional Karol said.
She also touched on her relationship with the Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA, with whom she collaborated on the songs “Follow” and “Secreto.” The two, who met on the set of their collab “Culpables,” became engaged in 2019 before calling it quits in 2021. In the film, she calls the whirlwind love affair and brutal breakup “a nightmare” and “hell,” admitting she “felt worthless as a person.” In its wake, she also is honest about her more positive times with her boyfriend, the Colombian star Feid.
Costantini also had her camera on moments where Karol’s tenacity shines, including a day when she went through a grueling eight hours of tour rehearsals with the famed choreographer Parris Goebel (who most recently was the architect of Lady Gaga’s Coachella set), during the same period she swam in New York’s East River.
The dip in the water “didn’t mean much to Colombians; I don’t think they understood what the East River was,” Costantini says of the notoriously murky New York waterway. “But the American team was like, ‘I don’t know if we should be doing that.’ And then of course she gets sick, so watching her just press on in the face of all of this was incredible.”
In fact, Karol’s hands-on approach made the biggest impression on Costantini, who noted that the singer is involved with even the most granular details of her career. “We know she writes, sings and dances with that pop star skill set, but she also has this incredible business mind which I’ve seen up close. She just opened two restaurants and a nightclub, and she’s overseeing all of the menus. Meanwhile, when she’s on tour she’s asking questions like, ‘Why do the bracelets at the stadium cost this much if they’re only doing these certain functions.’”
For Costantini, she chalks it all up to her “obsession of being perfect.” She explains: “You see that her success is not a mistake. She’s been working at this for years and years and years and it’s the product of really hard work.”
Naturally, that obsession seeped into the production of the documentary itself. “She can (tell you) ‘this is where the camera should be, this is where the lights should be, this is how I wanna look.’ But she can also be very soft, very sweet and very kind, too.”
So what did the perfectionist think of the Costantini film? “I think there are some parts that are really hard for her to watch or tough for her to stomach,” says Costantini of Karol’s impression following the film’s premiere, while conceding that Karol is “also the kind of person who is onto the next thing: ‘What do we do now, what’s next, how I am going to completely flip the script of what I just did?’
“But in the end, what’s great about a documentary is that it lets you stop and think for a moment. She expressed that idea quite a bit: that it forces her to stop and say, ‘Hey, I did that.’”
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We are still a long ways away from seeing what awaits the MCU’s version of Spider-Man following the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home. While there are many unconfirmed rumors on what we can expect, we have gotten some information on who will be cast in the fourth installment to the highly successful Marvel franchise.
According to Deadline, Emmy winner Liza Colón-Zayas has been cast to appear in the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Her role remains a mystery, but we’re low-key hoping that The Bear‘s star actress will have some kind of connection to a certain Black and Puerto Rican superhero who’s become quite popular in the Marvel universe as a friendly neighborhood web slinger himself.
Still, this is just wishful thinking at this point, but regardless, Colón-Zayas is already joining a star-studded cast that has taken the Spider-Man franchise to a whole new level.
Deadline reports:
The Emmy winner joins an ensemble led by Tom Holland, who plays Peter Parker and his superheroic alter ego, with Stranger Things‘ Sadie Sink also on board in a mystery role. Zendaya and Jacob Batalon, who respectively play Peter’s love interest MJ and close friend Ned, are expected to return.
Destin Daniel Cretton will direct, with Amy Pascal producing alongside Marvel president Kevin Feige, when production kicks off later this year. Pic is scheduled to swing into theaters on July 31, 2026.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set to release two months after Avengers: Doomsday. According to numerous rumors, Brand New Day will take place after the events of Doomsday and will place Spidey in a post-Doomsday reality where worlds have collided and characters from numerous Marvel films find themselves in the same space and time.
That being said, rumors have circulated that this may mean that Tom Holland’s Spidey will finally get to meet Tom Hardy’s Venom. Other rumors have Steven Yeun being cast as Mr. Negative as the primary villain for Brand New Day, and as much as we love Yeun, that wouldn’t be too exciting for hardcore Spider-Man fans who’d rather see another classic villain make their film screen debut. Hobogoblin maybe? A better iteration of Carnage? A new Venom who’s actually a villain and not an anti-hero?
What would you like to see go down in Spider-Man: Brand New Day? Let us know in the comments section below.