The fact that Thomas Massie lost a Republican primary because he wants pedophiles to face justice tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Republican party.
The only guy to truly raise hell about the Epstein files, and a recent critic of Israel, and instantly loses after 14 years of near uncontested elections. Makes you fucking think
When we came into office, we uncovered a $12 billion budget deficit.
Today, I’m proud to say we brought it down to zero.
We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.
We closed it while funding parks, libraries, safer streets and making historic investments in public housing.
Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Democratic Socialism. It's government that delivers for the people who make this city run.
That’s what New Yorkers deserve. And that’s what we will keep fighting for every single day.
EVERYONE FROM VIRGINIA THIS IS THE MOMENT!!! LOCK IN AND GO VOTE YES TOMORROW!!!! WE HAVE TO REMOVE THIS RACIST/FASCIST,RAPIST/BIGOTS POWER!!! TAKE HIM DOWN VIRGINIA DO NOT LET US DOWN LITTLE GIRLS!!!!
THIS IS ULTRA SAVAGE 🔥
Journalist –– Why do you think President Trump posted that photo depicting Jesus?
🇺🇸 Rep Nancy –– "You should ask a psychiatrist. It needs diagnosis, not conversation" 😂
Lionsgate spent $100 million on Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in 2023 and got $349 million back. Lowest opening weekend in franchise history. $44 million domestic debut for a series that used to open north of $150 million.
Their response was to double the cast budget on Sunrise on the Reaping.
Ralph Fiennes. Glenn Close. Kieran Culkin. Jesse Plemons. Elle Fanning. Maya Hawke. Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson returning for the first time since 2015. That's four Oscar nominees and two Emmy winners in a single YA adaptation. The cast page reads like an awards ceremony guest list stapled to a Succession reunion.
And the math behind it is actually rational. The Hunger Games franchise has made $3.3 billion across five films. Catching Fire, the one installment that involved a Quarter Quell (the 75th), is the highest-grossing Lionsgate film ever at $865 million. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes proved the IP still has a floor: $349 million worldwide on a cold-start prequel with zero legacy cast. The floor held.
So Lionsgate is running a calculation. The Second Quarter Quell is the most requested story in the fandom because Haymitch's games were only described in two paragraphs of the original novel. Suzanne Collins turned two paragraphs into a 400-page book. Lionsgate turned the book into a cast sheet that makes you do a double take. Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman is the kind of casting that sells tickets on name recognition alone, before a single frame of footage exists.
The trailer drops tomorrow. Mockingjay statues with flowers showed up in Millennium Park, Chicago. Snake statues covered in ivy appeared in Times Square. The marketing campaign is treating this like an event film, which tells you exactly how Lionsgate sees the stakes. Their entire theatrical slate depends on this franchise producing $600M+ worldwide. Anything less and the prequel strategy dies.
48 tributes. The most stacked cast in franchise history. And a studio betting everything that the one story fans have been asking about for 14 years can bring the audience back.
‘We can’t invest in America because we’re fighting wars’ is literally the opposite of what he ran on.
Biggest scam in modern political history, hands down.
The movie is fantastic and that can't be taken away from them but I am praying it financially crushes it so more studios may take a chance on big budget original sci-fi stories.
Hopefully Rendevous with Rama directed by Villeneuve is up next in this category 🤞
You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real.
The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later.
Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him.
Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman.
Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact.
95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.