News

I imagine the champagne corks are popping over at Respawn Entertainment right about now. We already knew that Apex Legends was a huge hit, having picked up a whopping 50 million strong player count one month after release. While that’s obviously good news, Apex is an F2P title, so the real barometer of success comes on how much people are choosing to spend on the game.

These figures are notoriously difficult to discover, generally being in-house secrets and with the companies under no obligations to publicize them. But Super Data thinks it’s got a way around this, and they’re estimating that the game made an exceptional $92 million in February, the best launch month of any F2P release in history.

Now, there are a couple of caveats here. Super Data claims that they arrive at their figures through “proprietary data partnerships [through which] we collect point-of-sale and event data from publishers,...

Hong Kong action superstar Donnie Yen is set to play a cop who mentors Nicholas Tse in director Benny Chan’s Raging Fire, to be produced by Emperor Motion Pictures.

Emperor last year announced the Yen-Benny Chan collaboration Crossfire at Filmart, but that project has been put on hold, and Raging Fire is a new and unrelated project. Yen’s character is a cop too honest for his own good who sees his protégé, played by Tse, rising in the ranks as his own career stalls. But Tse’s unethical behavior lands him in prison, and the embittered man vows to take ...

Hong Kong action superstar Donnie Yen is set to play a cop who mentors Nicholas Tse in director Benny Chan’s Raging Fire, to be produced by Emperor Motion Pictures.

Emperor last year announced the Yen-Benny Chan collaboration Crossfire at Filmart, but that project has been put on hold, and Raging Fire is a new and unrelated project. Yen’s character is a cop too honest for his own good who sees his protégé, played by Tse, rising in the ranks as his own career stalls. But Tse’s unethical behavior lands him in prison, and the embittered man vows to take ...

Fox News primetime star Tucker Carlson publicly thanked his network this week for supporting him through a months long advertiser boycott and a blizzard of bad headlines in recent days, but back in 2003, the host took a very different view, calling his colleagues “a mean sick group of people” with whom he doubted he would ever work for.

As reported by the Washington Post and many others at the time, the storm got going in 2003 when Carlson worked for CNN as co-host of the network’s debating show “Crossfire.” In a playful segment about telemarketers, a viewer asked Carlson if he would give out his own phone number on air. The host obliged — but the number he then recited turned out not to be his, but was instead that of the Fox News Washington bureau.

The network promptly retaliated by posting Carlson’s own phone number to their website. The...

S.E. Cupp, the conservative-leaning host of Hln’s 5 p.m. hour weekdays, will have to start working for the weekend. Her program, “Unflitered,” will air between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturdays on CNN starting August 25th.

The move was announced internally at CNN Thursday morning. Hln is expected to show taped programming in her place during its 5 p.m. hour for the foreseeable future.

Cupp’s “Unfiltered” provides the At&T-owned cable-news network with a right-of-center voice at a time when the White House has cast it as an antagonist. Cupp, who previously was one of the hosts on a CNN revival of “Crossfire,” has not been afraid to wade into debates about politics or pop culture during her Hln tenure. “You won’t always agree with me, but I’ll always be honest and I will ask my guests to be the same,” she told Variety in March...

Character actor William Phipps, who starred in sci fi films of the 1950s and voiced Prince Charming in 1950’s “Cinderella,” died Friday, June 1 at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 96.

Phipps’ friend and entertainment industry author Tom Weaver announced the news, adding that Phipps had been battling lung cancer, which was complicated by pneumonia.

Phipps was born in Vincennes, Ind., on Feb. 4, 1922. In 1939, he enrolled at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill., where he studied accounting and planned to pursue it as a career while continuing what was then an acting hobby on the side.

In 1941, Phipps decided to forgo his Eiu studies and moved to California to pursue his acting dream. He later enlisted in the Navy after his brother Jack was shot down over the South Pacific, serving as a radioman aboard six ships between 1942 and 1945. After his discharge, he returned to Hollywood and used the G.

William Phipps, the voice of Prince Charming in the animated Disney film Cinderella and a prolific actor who appeared in more than 200 film and television productions, has died. Phipps passed Friday at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica at age 96 from lung cancer complications, according to his friend, author Tom Weaver.

Phipps had an interesting career in film, debuting in the Oscar-nominated Crossfire, which was a Best Picture candidate that year. But he was best known for his many roles in 1950s science fiction films, where he was one of the genre’s main players.

Among his appearances were the films Five, The War of the Worlds, Invaders From Mars, Cat Women of the Moon, and The Snow Creature.

Phipps voice-over gig as Prince Charming was a direct hire by Walt Disney himself. It brought Phipps a whopping $100 for an afternoon’s work. He later made a live appearance as...

William Phipps, the prolific character actor who starred in sci-fi movies of the 1950s and provided the voice of Prince Charming in the Disney classic Cinderella, has died. He was 96.

Phipps died Friday night at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica after a battle with lung cancer, his friend, noted showbiz author Tom Weaver, announced.

A contract player at Rko Radio Pictures, Phipps made his big-screen debut in the Oscar best picture nominee Crossfire (1947), Edward Dmytryk's film noir classic that revolves around an investigation into the hate-crime murder of a Jewish man.

Weaver pointed out that as Hollywood began ...

Should disability be a part of the diversity discussion? Nyle Dimarco certainly thinks so.

The model and disability activist has brought attention to Hawkeye’s deafness in certain strains of the comic book and wonders why this hasn’t been incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet. Furthermore, with Avengers 4 now looming on the horizon, is there any chance of getting some disability representation in our comic book movies?

Talking to Mic, the digital news company who champion diverse perspectives, Dimarco explained the following:

“So many times people forget the disability conversation in diversity. They think diversity has to do with race [and] gender, but there’s so much more to it. We are part of diversity as people with disabilities and the danger is that we get excluded.

“There are a couple of issues where specifically Hawkeye is deaf. And so they brought in an actor who can hear instead.

“Racial Tolerance: It’s Good for America And good for Criminals!” Harry Belafonte’s second production is a noir keeper, thanks to a top-flight cast and sharp direction by Robert Wise. The big heist is on, but Robert Ryan’s anger management problem all but assures doom and disaster. It’s Wise’s last gritty action picture before moving up to big-scale audience pleasers; he pulls off some slick images with film sensitive to infra-red light.

Odds Against Tomorrow

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1959 / B&W / 1:77 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date May 29, 2018 / available through the Olive Films website / 24.95

Starring: Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Shelley Winters, Ed Begley, Gloria Grahame, Will Kuluva, Kim Hamilton, Mae Barnes, Richard Bright, Carmen De Lavallade, Lew Gallo, Lois Thorne, Wayne Rogers, Zohra Lampert, Mel Stewart, Cicely Tyson.

Cinematography: Joseph C. Brun

Film Editor: Dede Allen

Original Music: John Lewis

Written by John O. Killens (fronting for Abraham Polonsky), Nelson Gidding,...

The director will return to Hong Kong for one of his new projects following mainland success with Operation Red Sea.

Operation Red Sea director Dante Lam made a surprise appearance at the end of Emperor Motion Pictures (Emp)’s media launch at Filmart today (Mar 19) to give a plug for two 2019 projects.

Standing on stage with his regular producer Candy Leung and the company’s group chairman Albert Yeung, Lam said his next project will be set on the sea again. It will be a mega-budget production co-produced by Emp and China’s state-run China Central Television (CCTV).

After having...