In brief: ‘The Traitors’ season 3 trailer debuts and more
The trailer for Superman will be released on Thursday, but director James Gunn gave fans a tiny snippet of it on Wednesday to tide them over. “… and the countdown begins. The @Superman teaser trailer launches TOMORROW!” Gunn wrote on social media alongside the short clip. The video shows off our first glimpse of Rachel Brosnahan‘s Lois Lane as she looks up at something inside of the Daily Planet newsroom …
Get ready to be ruthless. The season 3 trailer for the Peacock reality series The Traitors dropped on Wednesday. “Come friends, come foe, come one, come all to the Highlands to see who lives and who falls,” the show’s host, Alan Cumming, says in the trailer. The star-studded cast of reality legends includes Big Brother icons Danielle Reyes and Britney Haynes, Vanderpump Rules‘ Tom Sandoval and The Bachelorette‘s Gabby Windey. The first episode of season 3 will be available to stream on Jan. 9 …
Magazine Dreams, the film that premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and stars Jonathan Majors, is going to be released next year. Deadline reports that Briarcliff Entertainment is putting the film out on March 21, 2025. After its buzzy festival premiere almost two years ago, Searchlight dropped the feature due to Majors’ legal battles, in which he was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of assault and harassment against his former girlfriend Grace Jabbari …
Javier Bardem is set to star in a brand-new series, which he’ll be executive producing along with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
Cape Fear, based on Scorsese’s 1991 film and a preceding novel, will come to Apple TV+, the streamer announced on Monday.
“In ‘Cape Fear,’ a storm is coming for happily married attorneys Amanda and Steve Bowden when Max Cady (played by Bardem), a notorious killer from their past, gets out of prison,” reads a synopsis of the show.
The series will run 10 episodes and is described as “an examination of America’s obsession with true crime in the 21st century.”
The story was originally inspired by The Executioners, a 1957 thriller novel that was turned into a Gregory Peck movie in 1962 before being remade in 1991 by Scorsese under the name Cape Fear. Spielberg also produced the 1991 film.
The 1991 Scorsese-directed movie starred Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange.
Blake Lively‘s lawyers have issued a statement amid the ongoing legal feud between her and Justin Baldoni.
In the new statement, released Jan. 7, Lively’s lawyers said, “Ms. Lively’s federal litigation before the Southern District of New York involves serious claims of sexual harassment and retaliation, backed by concrete facts. This is not a ‘feud’ arising from ‘creative differences’ or a ‘he said/she said’ situation. As alleged in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and as we will prove in litigation, Wayfarer and its associates engaged in unlawful, retaliatory astroturfing against Ms. Lively for simply trying to protect herself and others on a film set.”
The statement, issued on Lively’s behalf, also claimed that Baldoni’s response — his lawsuit filed Dec. 31 against The New York Times — was allegedly meant to “launch more attacks against Ms. Lively since her filing.”
The statement continued, “While we go through the legal process, we urge everyone to remember that sexual harassment and retaliation are illegal in every workplace and in every industry. A classic tactic to distract from allegations of this type of misconduct is to ‘blame the victim’ by suggesting that they invited the conduct, brought it on themselves, misunderstood the intentions, or even lied. Another classic tactic is to reverse the victim and offender, and suggest that the offender is actually the victim.”
“These concepts normalize and trivialize allegations of serious misconduct,” the statement concluded. “Most importantly, media statements are not a defense to Ms. Lively’s legal claims. We will continue to prosecute her claims in federal court, where the rule of law determines who prevails, not hyperbole and threats.”
The statement from Lively’s camp comes after Baldoni sued the New York Times for libel and false light invasion of privacy for publishing a story detailing Lively’s initial claims against him, including sexual harassment and orchestrating a smear campaign against Lively during the production of the film It Ends with Us, which Baldoni also directed and starred in with Lively. The lawsuit came after Lively’s initial complaint, filed Dec. 20, and subsequent lawsuit, filed Dec. 31, against Baldoni.
In a statement to Good Morning America addressing Lively’s latest comments, Bryan Freedman, an attorney for Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, said, “It is painfully ironic that Blake Lively is accusing Justin Baldoni of weaponizing the media when her own team orchestrated this vicious attack by sending the New York Times grossly edited documents prior to even filing the complaint. We are releasing all of the evidence which will show a pattern of bullying and threats to take over the movie. None of this will come as a surprise because consistent with her past behavior Blake Lively used other people to communicate those threats and bully her way to get whatever she wanted. We have all the receipts and more.”
Read more about the legal battle between Lively and Baldoni below.
Lively’s initial complaint
Lively first filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department in late December, alleging “severe emotional distress” after she said Baldoni and key stakeholders in the film sexually harassed her and attempted, along with Baldoni’s production company, to orchestrate a smear campaign against her.
The complaint was detailed in a New York Times article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” Included in the report were details surrounding a January 2024 “all hands” meeting — held “prior to resuming filming of It Ends With Us,” according to the complaint — that was held to address Lively’s workplace concerns, adding that it was attended by key stakeholders in the film and Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds.
According to the complaint, Lively said she laid out specific demands at that meeting to ensure a safe and professional working environment.
Lively claimed Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer Studios, which produced It Ends With Us, then engaged in a “social manipulation” campaign to “destroy” Lively’s reputation, according to the complaint. The complaint included alleged texts from Baldoni’s publicist to a Wayfarer publicist, who allegedly wrote that Baldoni “wants to feel like [Ms. Lively] can be buried,” and “We can’t write we will destroy her.”
Freedman, the attorney for Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, denied the allegations.
“These claims are completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media,” Freedman said in a statement to ABC News at the time, in response to Lively’s initial complaint. He claimed Lively’s complaint was “yet another desperate attempt to ‘fix her negative reputation which was garnered from her own remarks and actions during the campaign for the film […].”
Lively was criticized during the It Ends with Us tour for her conduct during press interviews and from some who felt she did not highlight the film’s focus of domestic violence enough.
Baldoni’s lawsuit against The New York Times
On Dec. 31, Baldoni filed a lawsuit against the Times for libel and false light invasion of privacy, after it published the article about Lively’s complaint.
The lawsuit claimed the Times, which included the alleged text messages and email exchanges between Baldoni’s publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, had relied on “cherry-picked” and altered communications, with details “stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced” to “mislead.”
Baldoni is seeking $250 million in damages in his suit against the Times and also listed nine other co-plaintiffs, including Wayfarer Studios LLC and his publicists, Abel and Nathan.
Freedman claimed in a statement to GMA that the Times “cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites, disregarding journalistic practices and ethics once befitting of the revered publication by using doctored and manipulated texts and intentionally omitting texts which dispute their chosen PR narrative.”
A Times spokesperson told GMA that they “plan to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”
“The role of an independent news organization is to follow the facts where they lead. Our story was meticulously and responsibly reported,” the spokesperson continued. “It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article.”
“To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr. Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error,” the spokesperson claimed. “We published their full statement in response to the allegations in the article as well.”
Lively files lawsuit against Baldoni and other defendants for sexual harassment
Also on Dec. 31, Lively formalized her initial California Civil Rights Department complaint into a lawsuit, which reiterated details she previously presented in her complaint.
Attorneys for Lively said in a statement that the actress’s “decision to speak out has resulted in further retaliation and attacks.”
“As alleged in Ms. Lively’s federal Complaint, Wayfarer and its associates have violated federal and California state law by retaliating against her for reporting sexual harassment and workplace safety concerns,” Lively’s attorneys claimed. “Now, the defendants will answer for their conduct in federal court. Ms. Lively has brought this litigation in New York, where much of the relevant activities described in the Complaint took place, but we reserve the right to pursue further action in other venues and jurisdictions as appropriate under the law.”
Both Baldoni and Lively are seeking a jury trial.
GMA has reached out to Baldoni’s rep for comment about Lively’s lawsuit.
Sterling K. Brown has been tapped to star in the upcoming live-action Voltron movie opposite Henry Cavill, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Rita Ora, 9-1-1‘s John Kim and newcomer Daniel Quinn-Toye also star. Voltron is based on the TV franchise that followed the titular giant robot made up of robotic lions, piloted by a team of young heroes. Plot details are being kept under wraps, though director Rawson Marshall Thurber told fans at VoltCon that the film will introduce an entirely new generation of pilots, per THR …
Ryan Reynolds’ production company has signed on to produce the classic cartoon superhero Mighty Mouse for the big screen, according to Variety. Writer Matt Lieberman, who worked with Reynolds on the 2021 fantasy adventure Free Guy, has been hired to write the script. Mighty Mouse made his first appearance in the 1942 short film The Mouse of Tomorrow and went on to appear in dozens more shorts, as well as a Saturday morning TV cartoon …
Netflix has dropped the official trailer for The Six Triple Eight, Tyler Perry‘s WWII drama based on the real-life story of Maj. Charity Adams — played by Kerry Washington — who led the titular battalion of Black female soldiers, deployed to Europe after combat training and tasked with sorting a massive backlog of letters and packages sent between millions of the country’s fighting men and their loved ones back home. Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, Dean Norris and Sam Waterston also star in the film, premiering Dec. 20 …
