Wonka vs. The Marvels, Colin Jost vs. Michael Che, and more of this week's top news stories

It doesn’t take a lot of pure imagination to notice that the language surrounding Wonka’s $39 million opening this past weekend was a whole lot more sugary than what was used to describe The Marvels’ $47 million debut last month. We’re not exempt; The A.V. Club, for example, called Wonka’s haul “a sweet debut” while The Marvels got “Marvel’s The Marvels opens at the top of the weekend box office, and let’s leave it at that.” As headlines praising the Timothée Chalamet-led reboot rolled in, MCU fans on Twitter/X were quick to point out the disparity in coverage, which was pretty hard to ignore. The real question is why this disparity happened in the first place. Read More

Colin Jost and Michael Che are brave, brave men. After it was unceremoniously cut for time last year, Weekend Update’s annual joke swap is back on Saturday Night Live—but after this weekend, its participant’s jobs may not be. Okay, we’re kidding; this was clearly all in good fun. Read More

Well, that didn’t take long at all: A little more than an hour after a jury in New York found Jonathan Majors guilty of misdemeanor counts of reckless assault and harassment against ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari, a representative for Marvel confirmed to Deadline the studio has fired Majors from his role as Kang The Conqueror/He Who Remains, a character who was meant to be the main Marvel Cinematic Universe villain for the foreseeable future—he was even going to be the title character in one of the upcoming Avengers movies, The Kang Dynasty. Read More

This week, Jonathan Majors was found guilty on misdemeanor counts of reckless assault and harassment against ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari, and later that same day, Marvel Studios confirmed that it would no longer be working with the actor who was said to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s new main villain, after Josh Brolin’s Thanos. Majors had already appeared as several different versions of multiversal menace Kang The Conqueror in Loki and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, and his storyline was going to fully come together in the next Avengers movie (originally announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, but now simply referred to as Avengers 5, per The Hollywood Reporter). - Sam Barsanti Read More

We don’t know how Stranger Things is going to end, but thanks to a chat that Matt and Ross Duffer (a.k.a. the Duffer Brothers) had with Metro, we do know how it’s not going to end: with the reveal that all of the exciting supernatural stories and the friendships made along the way were just a complicated, drawn-out dream. That’s apparently the basic gist of a fan theory that is so popular that Metro had to ask the Duffers about it, despite the fact that it totally sucks and would be a terrible way to end the show. Read More

In yet another frustrating reminder that it’s a good idea to value the things you love while you have them, because you never know when they will be cruelly taken away from you, vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows will be coming to an end after its upcoming sixth season. That comes from Vulture, which says the news came straight from “an FX source”—though the network, which has aired the series since it began in 2019—has yet to make an official announcement. - Sam Barsanti Read More

Actor James McCaffrey who had such a long career in live-action that people might not even realize he was an iconic video game voice actor (or vice versa), has died. TMZ, which first confirmed the news, says that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and that he died on Sunday while “surrounded by friends and family.” McCaffrey was 65. Read More

It’s been a long year. The Titan submersible getting crushed? That was only six months ago even though it feels like it must’ve been at least two years ago considering all that has happened since then. Elon Musk, especially, has been in the news constantly and rarely for anything positive. Yes, he finally managed to deliver 10 Cybertrucks, which is great news for Joe Rogan fans, and he cut prices on most of Tesla’s lineup, but he also made it abundantly clear over the last year that even if you like Teslas, you shouldn’t be giving him your money. Read More

David Lynch was on the fence about his cameo as John Ford in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans, but was wooed by Cheetos in his dressing room

The actor says what people recognize him for depends on what street he’s walking down