Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.(LOS ANGELES) — Nearly a year after HBO Max announced that Friends cast members Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow had agreed to a Friends reunion, the special finally seems to be back on track.
During an appearance on Rob Lowe’s podcast Literally! With Rob Lowe, on Thursday, Kudrow gave an update on the project, which was delayed after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March.
The 57-year-old actress, who played Phoebe on the series which aired between 1994 and 2004, revealed the special is definitely on and shooting will begin in the “early spring.”
“I pre-shot something for it already,” she added. “So we’re definitely doing it because I already shot a little something.”
Kudrow also offered a few deets on the anticipated reunion, confirming, “It’s not a reboot.”
“We’re not portraying our characters,” she explains. “It’s us getting together, which doesn’t happen a lot and has never happened in front of other people since 2004, when we stopped [filming Friends].”
Perry also took to Twitter back in November to announce that the Friends reunion had been rescheduled for the beginning of March.
“Looks like we have a busy year coming up. And that’s the way I like it!” he wrote.
Disney+(LOS ANGELES) — Disney+’s The Mandalorian has become the first program on a streaming platform other than Netflix to top on Nielsen’s streaming rankings, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The Star Wars series created by Iron Man director Jon Favreau drew 1.34 billion minutes of viewing time in the week of December 14-20, for its finale — its highest weekly total to date.
The Mandalorian also notched its record eighth consecutive week in the top 10, according to Neilsen numbers — moving ahead of last week’s #1 show on streaming, NBC’s The Office, which logged 1.31 billion minutes of viewing. Netflix’s The Crown finished third.
It should be noted that streaming platforms contend that Nielsen’s methodology doesn’t capture the full scope of viewing on devices other than TV sets, and only measures U.S. audiences, not those in other countries.
Netflix(NEW YORK) — Anthony Mackie brought more than his superhero experience when playing Captain Leo, a super powered android, in the new Netflix sci-fi thriller Outside the Wire.
Along with co-star Damson Idris, who plays drone pilot Lt. Thomas Harp, the two developed a natural chemistry that allowed Mackie to ad-lib certain lines like, “I can do this all day” — a very direct tease to another Captain role in a forthcoming project.
“That was me,” Mackie laughs, confirming to ABC Audio that he intentionally added the infamous Captain America phrase. “Once Damson and I got on set, the script evolved massively just because of our relationship and because of our personality. And the two of us being together.”
While Mackie’s inserted line serves as a quick nod to his past work, the actor assures fans that Captain Leo is nothing like his Marvel character Sam Wilson/Falcon.
“With this character and with all the other physical characters I’ve played, the only thing they have in common is the physicality of the role,” he explains. “The way they look at the world… around them is vastly different. Sam would never be able to do those things or look at the world the way Leo does in this movie. So, it’s just a completely different character reacting to the world around him in a completely different way.”
Mackie’s co-star Idris agrees, noting that, with his character of Harp, there wasn’t many connections to his Snowfall character of Franklin Saint, a Los Angeles drug dealer.
“Everything was from a beginning stage,” Idris says. “To go from a crack cocaine dealer to a drone pilot is a big shift. So it was just about reading and understanding the mind state of someone who has that job.”
(SUNSET BEACH, Calif.) — The time that Maybelle Blair played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own, were some of the best years of her life.
So to celebrate her 94th birthday, on Jan. 16, Blair, of Sunset Beach, California, is raising money to help give young girls a shot in baseball, and to commemorate the women in baseball like herself on whose shoulders they stand.
“We want to be able to have a league of our own again, to have a home of our own,” Blair told Good Morning America. “This was my whole dream for years.”
“When the movie came out, my dreams started to come true,” said Blair, who was featured at the end of A League of Their Own when retired players return for a reunion. “And then here we are again.”
Blair set a goal for her 94th birthday to raise $9,400 for the International Women’s Baseball Center, a proposed museum and educational center for girls and women in baseball in Rockford, Illinois, home of the Rockford Peaches made famous in A League of Their Own.
“It means so much to me,” Blair said of the center, which its organizers hope will become as well-known for women’s baseball as Cooperstown, New York, is for men’s. “This is what it’s all about, to be able to create a baseball center where we can have our own baseball memorabilia, our own baseball hall of fame.”
Blair pitched for the Peaches’ competitors, the Peoria Redwings, in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a league created by chewing gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley in the 1940s to fill the void of baseball when many American men were sent off to fight in World War II.
Blair said she got her start in baseball as a 2-year-old. She said she was put on the batting plate to fend balls thrown by her older brother, who was being groomed as a star pitcher. Years later, as her brother fought in the war, Blair had a chance of a lifetime to be a professional baseball player.
“When I got to walking out to the ball diamond and I heard that clickety-click, clickety-click under my spikes, that was no sweeter music in my ears,” she said. “And then I saw that green grass and I said, ‘Oh my God Maybelle, you’re a professional ball player.'”
“It’s unbelievable I had that chance, and there I was,” she said. “That’s what it meant to me my whole life.”
After her baseball career ended, Blair went on to have a long career with Northrup Aircraft, where she made history there, too, as one of the company’s first female managers.
She never left baseball behind, though, staying active in helping get women into the sport and, in 2014, spearheading the effort to launch the International Women’s Baseball Center.
“We’d been talking about this for a long time, that there’s no home for girls and women in baseball, so we set out to create a place,” said Kat Williams, president of the center’s board of directors and a professor of women’s sports history at Marshall University. “It’s a big complex and a big idea, and Maybelle Blair is the driving force.”
Blair threw out the first pitch at a women’s baseball game in Rockford two years ago, at the age of 92, and said it is her life mission to see this project complete, saying, “I’ve got to get this building [done] so I can die happy.”
The center is an $8 million project that will be built in stages as they are able to fundraise money, according to Williams.
They have already broken ground on an outdoor museum but have a long way to go to see their dream fulfilled of making the center not just a cultural spot for women in baseball around the world, but also a place for tournaments and educational events, like training for female umpires, of which Blair notes there are currently none in Major League Baseball.
The MLB only has one female general manager, Kim Ng, of the Miami Marlins, who was just named to the role last November.
“We need to have our own museum and our own recognitions and then we can have our dreams come true,” Blair said of women in the sport. “This is our chance for the girls. Let’s get it done.”
Marvel Studios/Disney+(LOS ANGELES) — The Marvel Cinematic Universe makes its official first foray to the small screen today with the debut of WandaVision. The series stars big screen MCU heroes Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and her onscreen android love interest Vision, played by Paul Bettany, and drops them into classic sitcom settings a la the Dick Van Dyke Show, Betwitched, and The Brady Bunch.
However, there’s something darker afoot to explain why the pair find themselves in the suburban TV bliss that only American TV could create.
Bettany tells ABC News, “Two super powered beings have been dropped into a idyllic black and white 1950s…sitcom…until Vision begins to think, ‘It’s got to be something wrong here.'”
There is indeed, but Marvel Studios is playing those twists very close to the vest.
Bettany adds, “My hope for the show is that it’s going to be incredibly satisfying for…dyed-in-the-wool Marvel fans, because they’re going to get to see the Marvel universe in a whole new light.”
For her part, Olsen tells ABC News that even hardcore fans will be surprised. “I think the DNA through and through in our show is 100% Marvel. I believe the way we are unraveling a story about these two characters is completely unique, and unlike what we’re used to.”
For Olsen, who like Bettany shows off some solid comic chops in the show, she says she adored the sets as the couple finds themselves hurtling from decade to decade. “I mean, I had more wigs in this one show than I have had in all of my Marvel movies combined,” she laughs. “It was the attention to detail in all Marvel movies is just pretty spectacular.”
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.(LOS ANGELES) — Nearly a year after HBO Max announced that Friends cast members Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow had agreed to a Friends reunion, the special finally seems to be back on track.
