Mel Owens and Peg Munson were able to step into the spotlight with their relationship just in time for the 2025 holiday season. The couple confirmed that they’re an item following The Golden Bachelor finale on November 12.
Now, they have a very busy few weeks coming up, and they dished to Swooon all about their plans. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, and lots of fun weekends in between, Owens and Munson have a lot to look forward to.
Christopher Nolan has tackled superheroes, sci-fi, noir, and historical drama in his films, but for “The Odyssey,” his first film since winning the Best Picture Oscar for “Oppenheimer,” Nolan said he wanted to take on a story that has “a bit of everything in it.”
“I mean, it truly contains all stories,” Nolan told Empire magazine in his first interview well before the release of “The Odyssey” next summer. “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with — Ray Harryhausen movies and other things — I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”
Along with a few first-look images of “The Odyssey,” Nolan described to the British film magazine the feeling of being out on the sea for the last four months, aiming to bring his practical effect style of filmmaking to Homer’s epic. Nolan said he shot 2 million feet of film to capture the epic, and he called the whole experience of being out on the sea “pretty primal.”
“It’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift. We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people. And the leap of faith that was being made in an unmapped, uncharted world,” he said. “By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways…because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”
Matt Damon is starring as Odysseus in Nolan’s film, his third with Nolan after both “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer.” It also features a staggering cast that includes Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, and Mia Goth as Melantho. The film also stars Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Benny Safdie, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, and Elliot Page in currently undisclosed roles (though Jennifer Lawrence joked to us that Pattinson is playing one of the sirens).
Universal is releasing “The Odyssey” in theaters on July 17, 2026.
Lionsgate is going with a smart awards strategy in hopes of becoming a dark horse Oscar contender.
Francis Lawrence’s “The Long Walk” will campaign its entire principal cast of boys — including Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson — in the supporting acting categories across all major awards bodies, Variety has learned exclusively.
The Lionsgate dystopian drama, adapted by JT Mollner from Stephen King’s early novel, hinges on the emotional dynamics among a group of teenage competitors forced to walk until only one remains. The filmmakers believe the film’s power lies not in traditional leads but in the collective experience — a choice they think is best reflected by submitting the ensemble together.
Though Hoffman’s Raymond Garraty (No. 47) and Jonsson’s Peter McVries (No. 23) may appear to anchor the narrative, the film will place all nine boys in supporting categories across the Oscars, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTA and the Independent Spirit Awards. Judy Greer, who plays a pivotal adult figure in the story, will also be campaigned in supporting actress races.
Submitting the entire cast together highlights the filmmakers’ confidence in casting director Rich Delia, whose work stitching together a cohesive ensemble of emerging talent is expected to be a focal point of the campaign. The young actors deliver varied responses to the story’s brutal marathon.
With its ensemble-driven structure and bold category placements, “The Long Walk” joins the growing trend of awards hopefuls challenging traditional definitions of lead and supporting roles.
Along with the ensemble campaign, “The Long Walk” will compete in all major craft and above-the-line categories, including:
Best Picture: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Francis Lawrence, Cameron MacConomy
Best Director: Francis Lawrence
Adapted Screenplay: Screenplay by JT Mollner
Supporting Actor: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang
Supporting Actress: Judy Greer
Best Casting: Rich Delia
Cinematography: Jo Willems
Costume Design: Heather Neale
Film Editing: Mark Yoshikawa
Makeup and Hairstyling: Doug Morrow, Zinka Tuminski
Production Design: Nicolas Lepage; Set Decoration by Scott Rossell
Sound: Supervising sound editors Jeremy Perison, Thomas Jones; production sound mixer Jeffrey Murias; re-recording mixers Jeremy Perison, Carlos Sanches
Original Score: Jeremiah Fraites
Rami Malek admits that while the subject matter of his latest film Nuremberg is sobering and grim, the story and characters were so compelling that he and his castmates couldn’t help but feel giddy when diving into the work.
“What’s odd is the juxtaposition of the word ‘fun’ in Nuremberg,” Malek mused during Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles panel Saturday alongside writer-director James Vanderbilt. The Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar winner described the whipsaw between the tension being generated on set and the actors’ joy of creating indelible characters and soaking in the lighter moments that added humanity to the story of prosecuting top Nazi officer Hermann Göring, played by Russell Crowe.
“There are moments where you’re laughing, and that’s what James has done so brilliantly in the script, that’s what drew me to it,” he said. “I love stories that take us back into history and allow us to retell the story that we think we know – and I promise you when you see this, if you haven’t, there’s so many surprises and twists and just a part of history that really will shock you.”
Malek said he and his fellow actors “were salivating as we were watching or taking part in it. And I know Michael [Shannon] and Russell just enjoyed every second of that to be able to go through these takes.”
The sense of place added to the gravitas of the story, Malek added. “We were shooting in Hungary, and at the end of each take there was a standing ovation,” he explained, noting that the locals “kept applauding because there’s so many links in that part of the world to what happened – very, very closely. And so you could feel that. You could feel the tension in that courtroom scene. It was palpable every day. You hold that with you and yeah, there’s something uniquely special about that.
“I just threw myself into the nature of what this guy was going through,” he added about his role as an Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Göring at a critical turning point in post-war world, matching wits with Nazis who had committed or ordered some of the most heinous atrocities in history.
RELATED: ‘Nuremberg’ Wows TIFF: Why It Took 13 Years To Stage The Post-WWII Trial And Tribulations Of Hitler Henchman Hermann Göring
“You have to come in there with a sense of charm and a sense of being as engaging and smart,” he said. “And I think being able to play that psychological chess match well enough to be in the room, pulling that off with all, not just [Göring], but 21 other Nazis as well. So there was a sense that I had to bring every level of humanity into that room — whether it was wit, charm, being able to be disarming, being able to be incredibly intelligent and being as powerful and having as much steeliness as I could at moments going toe-to-toe in that room.”
As he continues to add to his acting résumé, Malek also made it clear he wouldn’t be going backward in any sort of Mr. Robot reboot or spinoff with that 2015-19 series’ creator Sam Esmail. “No,” he affirmed definitively, though he said a collaboration on an unrelated project might arise. “Sam and I just talked about working together again, but that’s it.”
The top of the network ratings charts for the 2025-26 season so far don’t look much different from how they did last season — which is to say that CBS’ Tracker and ABC’s High Potential are still racking up big audiences.
As it has for each of its first two seasons, Tracker is on pace to be the most-watched network entertainment show (i.e., excluding sports and news programming) of the current season. Through Oct. 26 (the most current available figures), the show has averaged just under 14 million cross-platform viewers over seven days. That’s more than 1.5 million viewers than the second-ranked series … which is High Potential at 12.38 million. The two also ranked first and second for the 2024-25 season (in Nielsen’s longer-tail, 35-day ratings).
High Potential, meanwhile, has a sizable lead among all non-sports and news shows in the key ad sales demographic of adults 18-49. It averages a 2.42 rating over seven days of viewing (equivalent to about 3.29 million people in that age range), with almost three quarters of its total coming via streaming. ABC also notes that High Potential’s Sept. 16 season premiere has grown to 17.23 million viewers and a 3.9 rating among adults 18-49 over five weeks of viewing.
CBS’ Matlock (10.31 million viewers) and NCIS (8.86 million) and NBC’s Chicago Fire (8.62 million) complete the top five shows in total viewers. If sports and news were included, NBC’s Sunday Night Football (21.77 million same-day viewers, not including streaming, from Sept. 22-Oct. 26), ABC’s portion of Monday Night Football (12.11 million) and CBS’ 60 Minutes (8.93 million) would all be in the top five.
Three ABC shows — the resurgent Dancing With the Stars (2.0 rating), Abbott Elementary (1.96) and 911 (1.48) — follow High Potential in the 18-49 rankings, with Tracker in fifth at 1.39.
Viewing patterns look to be fairly consistent with recent years: On average, the top 20 shows are drawing about 22 percent of their seven-day viewer totals from streaming, and a much higher proportion (54 percent) of their adults 18-49 ratings.
The top 20 network entertainment series for the first five weeks of the 2025-26 season are below.
Rory McIlroy and Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen are currently tied at the top of the leaderboard for the DP World Tour Championship 2025, with just one final round left to play.
If McIlroy wins, it will be his fourth consecutive Road to Dubai title, and seventh in total, at the final tournament of the 2025 European Tour season.
A 767-point lead at the top of the season-long rankings means McIlroy headed into the DP World Tour Championship in the driving seat and, bar a disaster, will once again finish the year top of the pile.
The Masters champion will have fond memories of the Earth Course, having won this event by two shots last year, and is looking to cap off a remarkable year in fitting style.
A $10 million total prize fund, the biggest of the season on the European Tour, and the opportunity to surge up the Road for Dubai standings at the season-ending tournament means the whole of the field have plenty to play for.
RadioTimes.com brings you all the details about how to watch the DP World Tour Championship 2025.
You can watch the DP World Tour Championship 2025 live on Sky Sports from Thursday 13th November 2025 until the final round on Sunday 16th November 2025.
Coverage of play begins at around 7am UK time on all four days.
Sky Sports can be added to any Sky TV package for just £22 per month for all nine sports channels, or you can pick up the complete sports package plus Netflix for £35 per month.
Sky Sports customers can live stream the tournament via the Sky Go app on a variety of devices including most smartphones and tablets as part of their subscription.
You can also watch the action via NOW with a day membership (£14.99) or month membership (£34.99).
NOW can be streamed through a computer or apps found on most smart TVs, phones and consoles. NOW is also available via TNT Sports.
All UK time. Live on Sky Sports+, Sky Sports Golf and NOW
Thursday 13th November
Friday 14th November
Saturday 15th November
Sunday 16th November
Round 4
Check out more of our Sport coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Soap opera fans are accustomed to outlandish plot twists, but some storylines are beyond the pale.
Quentin Tarantino once defined the “hangout” film as “movies that you hangout with the characters so much that they actually become your friends,” and he declared his friend Richard Linklater its master.
While a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, we asked Linklater what he thought of the subgenre Tarantino had tagged his films with. “Maybe he got that from me,” chuckled Linklater. “I often describe my own films as ‘Hey, ‘I’m going drop a camera on 1976 or wherever I am, and just kind of hang out.”
He continued: “It’s not inaccurate. That is the tone, I want the viewer to feel like they’re transported to a place and that they are participating in some way, and that there is a relation with the character.”
Linklater, like many cinephiles, has long held a reverence for the French New Wave — that time when cinema felt young, new, and full of possibilities. And the idea of transporting back to what it felt like to be in that moment was something he found appealing. But to accomplish that, he had to throw his reverence for that moment in history, and the great filmmakers in it, out the window. According to Linklater, that’s where most period films fail.
“I’ve always just rolled my eyes at most ‘important’ historical films,” said Linklater. “They’re stepping out of a painting or a sculpture or something. I just keep coming back to the word self-important. And I am like, ‘No, life’s never been like that,’ life is going on all around you. The greatest moments in history were preceded by someone just having a sandwich.”
The director wanted to invite the audience to just come “hang out while they were making ‘Breathless,” which was only possible if the attitude of his camera, like the characters, is oblivious to the fact it is witnessing the making of what would become a groundbreaking film that would change film history and launch Jean-Luc Godard’s career.
In particular, Linklater needed to knock his Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) off his pedestal, instructing his ensemble that their characters were dismissive of the young director. “‘This guy is nobody. He’s an obscure film writer. You can’t even make your way through his writing for ‘Cahiers du Cinéma.’” And to those playing the “Breathless” crew he instructed, “‘He probably doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the film probably won’t work. But you’re her, and hey, you need a job, it’s only 20 days, he has some charisma, and who knows, it might be good, Jean Seberg’s in it, and she’s known.’”
Linklater believes films about historical figures can suffer from their star power. He acknowledges and rattles off the great performances given by A-list stars in biopics but admits that for him, there’s always something distracting about the layering of icon on icon.
“I always remember the feeling I got watching ‘Gandhi’ 42 years ago now, and if you didn’t know London theater, you didn’t really know who Ben Kingsley was. I was a kid in Texas and I knew a lot about Gandhi at that time, and watching it just going, ‘Oh, that’s Gandhi,’ because I didn’t know who the actor was,’” said Linklater. “ I heard Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Gandhi. And he probably would’ve been pretty good, but I was transported.”
It was that feeling the director wanted for “Nouvelle Vague.” Linklater was very conscious of the cinephile audience who would be drawn to his film — people like himself who think of Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) as these iconic figures in cinema — which is why he believes his ensemble of fresh-faced French actors was the most important ingredient.
“There’s the physical resemblance, but that’s the obvious part. The much more important part is their personalities and who they are,” said Linklater. “Aubry, who plays Belmondo, he had this light, airy [quality], quick smile, happy — he struck me as Belmondo, like, ‘I don’t care much. I’m here, but I’m floating through. I’m a boxer. I’ve got all these things, ladies love me.’”
Linklater auditioned Belmondo’s real-life grandson, who he said is a good actor and would have been fine, but Dullin embodied the spirit and just “felt right.” Linklater said it often came down to what the actors felt like in the room during auditions, and he could really tell he had caught lightning in a bottle when he got them in the room together.
“I remember sitting down with the actors who would play Godard, Truffaut, and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest). Once I had the right actors, we were sitting there reading a scene, and I videotaped it and showed it to [my producer] and said, ‘See how special this is?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I see what you’re talking about. It’s them, it’s them!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s them. This is what we’re going for.’ [You] just feel like you’re there with them.”
To hear Richard Linklater’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
The “Now You See Me” franchise’s reappearing act is landing on the top of box office charts, debuting ahead of the weekend’s other new releases “The Running Man” and “Keeper.”
Lionsgate’s “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” heisted $8.4 million across Friday and preview screenings from 3,403 locations. The PG-13-rated threequel is looking at a three-day opening between $21 million and $24 million — about in line with pre-weekend projections and in the ballpark of the prior 2016 entry, which opened to $22 million.
Critics turned in mediocre marks for “Now You Don’t,” but it is the best-reviewed of the trilogy. Meanwhile, audiences lean positive at a “B+” grade from moviegoer pollster Cinema Score (though lower than the “A-” grades for both prior entries). Lionsgate shelled out north of $90 million to revive the franchise, which is directed by Ruben Fleischer and sees Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco return as a quartet of Robin Hood-like illusionists. Both prior entries scored a majority of their grosses overseas and, notably, Lionsgate typically sells off international rights to limit its financial exposure, at the cost of capping upside.
Meanwhile, Paramount’s “The Running Man” starring Glen Powell will have to vie for second place against the sophomore weekend of “Predator: Badlands” (funnily, another stab at resurrecting a property that was first introduced to moviegoers via an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle in the ’80s.) The R-rated “Running Man” racked up $6.4 million across Friday and preview screenings from 3,534 locations. That puts the film on track to land behind projections for a debut north of $20 million, now forecast for the $17 million to $19 million range.
It’s an inauspicious kick-off for the Stephen King adaptation, which carries a hefty $110 million production budget co-financed by Domain Entertainment. Reviews have been lukewarm, though audiences are kinder at a B+ grade from Cinema Score. But with a crowded November slate ahead, including “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2,” “The Running Man” likely could’ve used some much stronger initial buzz to propel it through the coming weeks.
Also opening this weekend, Neon’s “Keeper,” the latest indie horror effort from writer-director Osgood Perkins, earned about $1 million from 1,950 locations across Friday and previews. It’s headed for a fifth-place debut. The opening doesn’t compare to the last two Perkins efforts — last year’s summer breakout “Longlegs” ($22 million) and this past spring’s “The Monkey” ($14 million). Reviews are worse than those last two movies too, and Cinema Score turned in a dismal “D+” grade.
Disney’s “Predator: Badlands” earned $3.5 million on its second Friday, down 68% from its opening day total a week ago. The science-fiction sequel’s domestic gross is now at $56 million and looks to go north of $66 million through Sunday. It’s gunning to pass “Alien vs. Predator,” which, though a crossover, is the biggest domestic box office hit ever for the franchise with $80.2 million in North America.
“Regretting You” will round out the top five, earning $1.2 million on Friday and projecting a 39% drop for a $4 million fourth weekend and another strong hold. Paramount’s release of the Colleen Hoover adaptation will hit a domestic total of $45 million through Sunday.
MSNBC transformed into the newly named MS NOW on Saturday morning, as the network splits from parent company Comcast.
“Don’t adjust your settings,” Jonathan Capehart, co-host of The Weekend, told viewers shortly after 7 a.m. ET, from studios in Washington. “We are formerly MSNBC. As of this moment, we have a new name, MS NOW, which stands for My Source for News Opinion and the World. But other than that, and these snazzy new graphics, not much is changing. Bottom line: Same mission, new name.”
Moments earlier, viewers saw Morning Joe Weekend host Willie Geist sign off for the final time under the MSNBC name, with a shot of the NBC Peacock logo.
MS NOW has been preparing for this moment since last year, when Comcast announced that it would be spinning off MSNBC along with other cable networks into a new company, later named Versant. MS NOW has built up its own newsroom, as NBC News no longer is a sister network.
MS NOW will not stream episodes of its shows after they air on Peacock, the Comcast service, although past MSNBC shows like Morning Joe and Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace were still available as of Saturday morning. MSNBC ended its original programming on Peacock several years ago, but some MSNBC shows were available the next day. MS NOW will be available to pay TV subscribers on its mobile app and Roku, tvOS, Fire TV, Android TV and Comcast Xumo connected apps.
The website has changed as well, to MS.NOW, with MSNBC.com redirecting to that page.
MSNBC was launched in 1996 as a partnership between NBC News and Microsoft. With an initial focus on internet connectivity, the network eventually transformed into a channel offering a mix of news and opinion, and Microsoft eventually sold its stake but the name remained.