HBO Max/Warner Bros.(LOS ANGELES) — While studios have been holding back films in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Warner Bros. has actually fast-tracked the premiere Godzilla vs. King Kong, according to Variety.
The film will now drop two months earlier, on March 26, instead of May 21, simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max.
The movie is the third in a trilogy of a WB’s “Montserverse,” following the success of 2014’s Godzilla and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, and again follows the mysterious Monarch corporation’s investigation of the earth-shaking titans, with humanity hanging in the balance as these two legendary creatures go head-to-head.
Godzilla vs. Kong producer, Legendary Entertainment, recently settled a dispute with the Warner Bros. over its surprise decision to release its 2021 movies both in theaters and on HBO Max — after blocking Netflix’s $250 million bid to buy the monster movie. HBO and Legendary have since settled their differences.
The film stars returning Godzilla players Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir.
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 95 million people worldwide and killed over two million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Here’s how the news is developing Monday. All times Eastern:
Jan 18, 8:27 am London to pilot 24/7 vaccination sites before end of January
Before the end of the month, London will begin piloting COVID-19 vaccination sites that will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to Nadhim Zahawi, the United Kingdom’s minister for COVID-19 vaccine deployment.
England’s National Health Service (NHS) will trial the round-the-clock vaccination sites at hospitals in the British capital.
“And we’ll look at how we expand that,” Zahawi told Sky News in an interview Monday.
Zahawi said the key with 24-hour vaccination sites is to ensure vulnerable populations, such as people over 80 and others deemed high-risk, are still being targeted.
“At the moment, the challenge is obviously supply — limited supply vaccine that needs to get into the arms of the most vulnerable four cohorts. So the targeting has to be really, really precise so that we can protect them by mid-February,” he added.
“So if you just want to chase volume, chase speed and not accuracy, 24 hours works really well,” he continued. “If you want to chase both accuracy, protecting the most vulnerable and of course speed, then you want to do what we’re doing which is primary care networks, hospitals, large vaccination centers and of course pharmacies.”
As of Saturday, 3,857,266 people in the U.K. have received the first of two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the latest data published on the U.K. government’s website.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has approved three COVID-19 vaccines for use to date — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, a second developed by England’s University of Oxford and British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and a third developed by American biotechnology firm Moderna.
The U.K. — an island nation of 66 million people made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — has confirmed more than 3.3 million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including over 89,000 deaths. There were 38,598 new cases and 671 additional deaths confirmed over the past 24 hours, according to the latest data.
Jan 18, 7:10 am France expands vaccination campaign to 75 and older, anyone deemed high-risk
People aged 75 and over will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in France starting Monday.
Up until now, only residents of nursing homes and medical staff aged 50 and over were able to be vaccinated against the disease.
France is also expanding its vaccination campaign to include anyone with high-risk conditions, such as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or transplant patients.
The move comes after the country’s death toll from COVID-19 topped 70,000 over the weekend.
France has confirmed more than 2.9 million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including at least 70,283 deaths, according to the latest data from the country’s public health agency. The Western European nation has the sixth-highest tally of diagnosed cases in the world, after the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
So far, the European Medicines Agency has approved two COVID-19 vaccines for use in the European Union — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna.
Jan 18, 6:24 am Oklahoma school district stops basketball games due to ‘super-spreader event’
A public school district in Oklahoma City canceled basketball games on Friday night after witnessing what it called a “super-spreader event.”
Millwood Public Schools said it “made the decision to put kids and families first,” pulling its basketball players off the court during games against Community Christian School in Norman, about 20 miles south of downtown Oklahoma City. The school district posted photos on Facebook showing a crowded gymnasium with no social distancing and few people wearing masks.
“We will NOT subject our kids and families to a super-spreader event just to compete,” Millwood Public Schools wrote in the Facebook post Friday night.
Community Christian School’s athletics director, Mat McIntosh, told Oklahoma City ABC affiliate KOCO-TV that the photos shared on social media showed the home side, which “was three-fourths full.” He said that they “would never put any students at risk.”
“During [Friday] night’s game when the decision was made to pull the players off the court, we were caught off guard,” McIntosh said in a statement. “We hated that. It has been our desire to keep things as normal as possible. We have policies in place for COVID during athletic events. As a school, we have listened to the governor’s statement to stay at 50% capacity. We feel even [Friday] night, our overall capacity was under 50%.”
Jan 18, 5:25 am Germany has vaccinated over one million people
More than one million people have received the first of two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Germany, according to the country’s public health agency.
As of Saturday, 1,048,160 first doses had been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Robert Koch Institute. So far, the European Medicines Agency has approved two COVID-19 vaccines for use in the European Union — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna.
There were 7,141 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Germany on Sunday. An additional 214 deaths from the disease were also registered nationwide. That brings the country’s cumulative totals to 2,040,659 cases with 46,633 deaths, according to the Robert Koch Institute.
Jan 18, 4:19 am US reports under 200,000 new cases for first time in two weeks
There were 174,513 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Sunday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
It’s the first time in two weeks that the country has logged under 200,000 newly confirmed infections in a 24-hour reporting period. Sunday’s tally is far less than the country’s all-time high of 302,506 new cases on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.
An additional 1,723 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Sunday, down from a peak of 4,462 new deaths on Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins data.
COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the holidays followed by a potentially very large backlog.
A total of 23,936,772 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 397,600 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.
Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of the pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up over the summer.
The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before topping 300,000 on Jan. 2.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION New York 105, Boston 75 Chicago 117, Dallas 101 Utah 109, Denver 105 New Orleans 128, Sacramento 123 LA Clippers 129, Indiana 96 Cleveland at Washington (Postponed) Philadelphia at Oklahoma City (Postponed) NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE Pittsburgh 4, Washington 3 (SO) Florida 5, Chicago 2 Dallas at Tampa Bay (Postponed)
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE PLAYOFFS Kansas City 22, Cleveland 17 Tampa Bay 30, New Orleans 20
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL Iowa 96, Northwestern 73 Houston 75 UCF 58 Virginia Tech 64, Wake Forest 60
Capitol NashvilleAs Dierks Bentley works on his tenth studio album, the Arizona native’s been splitting time between Nashville and his home in Colorado.
While not everyone loves that writing sessions via Zoom have become a necessity because of COVID-19, Dierks is embracing the efficiency of it.
“Nobody wants to be on Zoom any longer than they have to be, so I think it forces songwriters to get after it,” he explains. “So I’ve really enjoyed it, been writing a lot of great songs.”
“But as always, when I’m trying to make a record, you know, I just want to pick the best two-by-fours when you’re making a house, whether you made ’em or not,” he adds.
That’s why Dierks decided to go with the outside cut, “Gone,” as the album’s lead single.
“When it came time to go cut some stuff, this song just kind of rose to the top,” he says. “And I gravitate towards it because I love the title. I love [the] good classic country wordplay of ‘ever since you left, I’ve been gone.’ But he actually hasn’t gone anywhere.”
As “Gone” nears the top twenty, it’s clear it’s a sentiment that’s resonating with fans.
“I feel like I’ve been gone,” Dierks reflects. “I feel like we’ve all been gone. So it touches on a little bit of the idea of what’s been going on here with COVID, but it does it in a metaphorical way through a relationship… I don’t think anybody wants to hear anything too directly written about what’s happening right now, it’d be too depressing… But I just love the groove, I love the way it feels.”
So far, Dierks hasn’t revealed the title or release date for his follow-up to 2018’s The Mountain.
ABCMorganWallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album, which boasts a whopping 30 tracks,is the new leader of the Billboard 200.
This is the country singer’s first number one album. His 2018 debut If I Know Me peaked at number 13.
Dangerous, which dropped January 8, moved an impressive 265,000 units in its first week, amounting to the album’s songs being streamed 240.18 million times. In addition, the album moved 74,000 physical copies in stores and was downloaded 50,000 times, reports Billboard.
The album has scored the best reception since Carrie Underwood‘s Cry Pretty, which came out in 2018. Cry Pretty moved 266,000 units in its first week of release.
Dangerous is also the 11th country album in music history to hit number one on the Billboard 200.
Not only is Wallen’s sophomore effort his first chart-topper, it also smashed several streaming records.
By accomplishing over 240 million streams in its first week, Dangerous blows past the previous record held by Luke Combs to become country music’s top streaming album.
Combs’ What You See Is What You Get notched 102.26 million streams in a week, which is less than half of Wallen’s record-breaker.
Billboard acknowledged that Wallen’s 30-track outing helped secure the accomplishment, but found that Dangerous‘s 18 least-listened to tracks racked up 105.08 million streams — still more than what Combs’ What You See had.
In addition, Wallen notches the third-largest streaming week for a non-R&B or hip hop album — following Ariana Grande‘s Thank U, Next and Taylor Swift‘s Folklore.
Overall, Dangerous holds the title for the 22nd largest streaming week ever and boasts the ninth-best week for any album in the past 12 months.
Wallen, 27, previously announced a “little hiatus” to focus on raising his six-month-old son, Indigo Wilder.
HBO Max/Warner Bros.(LOS ANGELES) — While studios have been holding back films in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Warner Bros. has actually fast-tracked the premiere Godzilla vs. King Kong, according to Variety. 
