On Friday, Walt Disney Studios announced that the highly anticipated sequel to Freaky Friday will arrive in theaters on Aug. 8, 2025.
Disney also shared an image from the film of Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Tess and Anna Coleman in what appears to be a scene of them finding out that they’ve switched bodies, as they did in the first film.
The Freaky Friday sequel was announced in June as filming for the project had begun. At the time, Disney released a fun photo of Curtis and Lohan sitting outside each other’s trailers on set.
In August at D23 in Anaheim, California, the duo announced that Freakier Friday would be the official title for the film.
They told Good Morning America in an interview that the sequel is “freakier.”
“The switches, the music, comedy,” Lohan said.
“The emotion,” Curtis added. “You now have a grandparent and a grandchild. We can’t tell you much, but Lindsay has her own 15-year-old in the movie, which makes me, then, the grandma. So there’s just more emotion.”
Curtis also described the film as a “love letter to mommies.”
“It’s a love letter to mommies and daughters and families,” Curtis said. “This is a love letter to them to just being mothers and the beauty of it all.”
In addition to Curtis and Lohan, Chad Michael Murray will return as Jake, who was Anna Coleman’s crush in the first film.
Mark Harmon, Christina Vidal, Haley Hudson, Lucille Soong, Stephen Tobolowsky and Rosalind Chao will also return in the film.
Back in June, Sir Ian McKellen seemed to downplay a fall off a London stage during a performance of the Shakespeare adaptation Player Kings. A statement at the time said he was in good spirits and would make a speedy recovery. But now, several months later, McKellen reveals the whole thing was pretty scary.
“Apparently, I’m told by the company manager who’s holding my head as I lay on the floor, I said to her, ‘I’ve broken my neck. I’m dying,'” McKellen told ABC Audio in an interview from his home in London. “Now, I don’t remember saying that, but I must have felt it.”
He says he’s fine now, after fracturing his wrist and hurting his back, crediting the fat suit he was wearing in order to play rotund Knight John Falstaff with protecting his ribs and hips in the fall. And while physically he’s almost completely back to normal, the mental effects linger.
“I’m left with some disappointment,” McKellen confesses. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t complete — you know, my pride was bruised. How could this happen to me?” he asks with a chuckle. “And I suspect that although physically I’m healing, I wonder whether deep down there’s something mental or emotional that was jolted that needs to be attended to. And I’m attending to it by not working at the moment and resting.”
McKellen appears to be in a reflective mood as he discusses the fall, and his new film The Critic, in which he plays a prominent 1930s London theater critic named Jimmy Erskine, a once feared and respected tastemaker trying to recapture his glory days. Reviews, McKellen reveals, are a necessary evil for actors.
“We are seeking for approval. And we’re probably rather pathetic people who need that approval. We’re not confident enough of ourselves. So if you get a good review — oh, it’s an added pleasure. And if you get a bad review, it can be very hurtful,” McKellen admits.
And although he hasn’t been on the receiving end of a lot of bad reviews, the ones he has had are seared in his brain. Take for instance his turn in a Bernard Shaw revival in London’s West End when he was much younger. He starred in the play alongside a pre-Dame Judi Dench and recalls how he overheard a few fellow actors discussing his performance one night at a restaurant.
“One of them was going on and on and on about how dreadful I’d been. And I was typical of these modern young actors, using my voice in the wrong way and drawing attention to myself. And he just simply hadn’t enjoyed it.” McKellen says he laughed off the criticism, but the next night onstage it crept into his consciousness. “And as I looked into the audience talking away, I suddenly thought, ‘My God, every single person in this audience agrees with that actor that I heard last night. They all think I’m rubbish. I shouldn’t be here.’” He says he froze, forgot his lines and Dench had to rescue him.
Still, he swears if there’s a bad review out there, he’s going to read it. “I like to know. If people haven’t enjoyed the film of Cats I’d like to know about it.” 2019’s film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical Cats was savaged by critics, probably the worst-reviewed film McKellen has ever been in. McKellen didn’t get the blame, though. His portrayal of Gus the Theater Cat was mostly praised. And he may be returning to a role that garnered him some of the most praise of his film career: the mighty wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies.
“There are going to be a couple of more films, I think, with some of the same characters in it. And I’ve been asked to stand by,” McKellen says. “But there’s no script that I read, and no date. All I can say, as far as I’m concerned, they better be quick.”
Quick, because at 85 years old, McKellen isn’t sure how much time he has left. “I’m rather living a year at a time, rather than two or three years at a time,” he says.
Gandalf is a part of his legacy, so if he can, he’s going to go to New Zealand and put on the robes. Legacy is a theme in The Critic, as well. In his downtime, legacy and what’s next are things McKellen has been thinking about a lot. He remembers going to visit a friend in the hospital, a friend who was dying, and asking him what he was thinking about as his life neared the end.
“And he said, ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’ And that’s rather my view,” McKellen says wistfully. He wants to know what’s going to happen. “How is AI going to really take over? I mean, what is life going to be like? When is the world going to settle down? Is the world going to survive? I won’t know. I won’t know. And I suppose I won’t care because I won’t exist.”
Emily In Paris had a magnifique debut on Netflix: According to the streaming service, the show starring Lily Collins and Ashley Park kicked off its fourth season with 19.9 million viewers; the first five episodes of the fourth season topped the streamer’s English language TV list for the week of Aug. 12 through Aug. 15 with 56,500,000 hours viewed.
The remaining five episodes of season 4 drop on Sept. 12.
On the movie side, Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry‘s action flick TheUnion topped the streamer’s English language films chart. The feature, which also stars J.K. Simmons, had more than 33,100,000 views since its debut on Aug.16.
Joey Chestnut beat his longtime nemesis Takeru Kobayashi by gobbling down a record 83 hot dogs and buns to Kobayashi’s 66 on Sunday, during Netflix’s live Las Vegas special Chestnut vs. Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef.
There was also a side of personal drama hanging over the match-up: The co-hosts of the live event were comic actor Rob Riggle and Nikki Garcia — days after the husband of the latter, Dancing with the Stars pro Artem Chigvintsev, was arrested for domestic violence.
There was no mention of the situation on-air, but Garcia wasn’t wearing her wedding ring.
Chestnut and Kobiyashi used to go head-to-head during Nathan’s annual hot dog eating contest every July 4 — with Joey finally beating Kobayashi in 2007.
However, a contract dispute between Kobayashi and Major League Eating saw him banned from the competition since 2010, clearing the way for Chestnut to dominate virtually unchallenged since.
In June, MLE banned Chestnut from the July 4 contest due to his decision to endorse vegan hot dogs instead of Nathan’s.