May 26, 2026

DEATH OF STALIN WRITER/DIRECTOR ARMANDO IANNUCCI HIRED TO WRITE PADDINGTON 4 SCREENPLAY. No, really:

Armando Iannucci, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated Glaswegian best known for creating hit TV shows Veep and The Thick of It, will write the upcoming fourth film in Studiocanal‘s hit Paddington franchise, alongside co-writer and long-time collaborator Simon Blackwell.

Paddington 4 will follow on from 2014’s hit movie Paddington, followed in 2017 by Paddington 2 and in 2024 with Paddington in Peru. The film series has had a combined global box office in excess of $800 million. The fourth Paddington movie was officially confirmed earlier this year at CinemaCon, with Studiocanal CEO and Canal+ Chief Content Officer Anna Marsh revealing that the film was in development, and that “world-renowned comedy writers” had been hired to work on the script.

Film trade publication Variety were first to confirm the news that Iannucci had been hired and stated that Dougal Wilson, the director of the third film in the series, is in talks to return.

Paddington Meets Lavrenti Beria is going to be lit!

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT WENT WRONG, KAREN?

Related: Uh-Oh: Spencer Pratt Files Complaint, Says Karen Bass Filmed Herself Violating Election Law.

More:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

LEFTIST DISCOVERS MEMORY HOLE: CBS News Prez Ordered Morning Show to Ignore Colbert’s Finale Because of Late Show’s ‘Unprofessional’ Shot at Tony Dokoupil: Report.

“I’m told the ghosting was a specific directive from CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, who hated Colbert’s recent bit mocking their failure to secure a China visa for anchor Tony Dokoupil, Belloni wrote. “Colbert ‘kicked colleagues when they were down,’ one source at CBS News told me today. ‘It was unprofessional and unprovoked.’”

The segment that angered Cibrowski mocked Dokoupil for reporting from “The Wrong China” — he was forced to broadcast from Taiwan during President Donald Trump’s China trip because of the botched visa — and showed a phony version of the anchor with his head stuck inside a pumpkin.

It then showed an old lady portraying Bari Weiss entering the shot and smacking him on the head with a mallet… in an effort to help him out, apparently. The Colbert crowd seemed to find it fairly funny.

But the CBS News bosses didn’t, especially since the news unit had supported Colbert following his cancellation and in his battle with the FCC earlier this year, Belloni reported.

As Jason Zinoman wrote in his 2017 biography of David Letterman, when GE bought NBC in 1985, Letterman began to routinely tear into the giant corporation on air:

Building General Electric up as the enemy enabled Letterman, at the height of his cultural influence, to reclaim the role of the little guy. It also put him in the tradition of comedians saying the things to their bosses that you always wished you could say to yours. Letterman, who still wanted to be seen as an underdog, turned Late Night into a drama for playful complaints about the corporate giant. He staked out his most aggressive stance toward his bosses in April 1986, when he ventured out to the headquarters of General Electric to give them a welcoming gift, with a camera crew in tow. With his arm around a large fruit basket, he entered the revolving door, only to be stopped by security. “We received your letter,” a woman told him, adding that he had not gotten authorization. “We need authorization to drop off a fruit basket?” Letterman asked.

* * * * * * * * *

In the video, a GE security guard approached Letterman aggressively, and later walked up to Hal Gurnee, who had been filming the scene. Both Letterman and Gurnee extended their hands for a handshake, and the security guard started to do the same before having second thoughts, pulling his hand back abruptly. In the editing, Hal Gurnee saw this moment and knew it would make for the key part of the comedy. On the air, after showing the remote piece, Letterman gave this aborted greeting a name: the General Electric Handshake. He smiled when he said it.

But Letterman delivered good ratings for late night, and his show carried the imprimatur of Johnny Carson. At least until Carson announced his retirement in 1991, Letterman could get away with his anti-corporate shtick at NBC. In contrast, Colbert was costing CBS $40 million a year. Why should the news division lay down for him after his last show?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MAKE THEM PAY:

Posted at 6:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE GREATNESS OF JUSTICE THOMAS: If you read nothing else this week, this month, this year, sit down in a quiet place and focus your mind on the words delivered April 20 at the University of Texas by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Don’t skim it, don’t skip long paragraphs, read it carefully, slowly and fully focused. It may well be the most vital and energetic explanation of the American founding since Madison, Hamilton and Jay collaborated on The Federalist Papers.

 

Posted at 6:36 pm by Mark Tapscott

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — Megalopolis. 

I feel badly for Francis Ford Coppola having spent decades ruminating over the film and investing a fortune into it, only to have this be the result:

But as the Drinker notes, “no matter what else you might think about this film and the man who created it, I have to admit I kind of respect Coppola just for getting the thing made. The man had an artistic vision, that’s for sure. And he was willing to sacrifice half his life and all of his accumulated wealth pursuing it. And in a world of creatively bankrupt studio slop like the Mandalorian and Grou, maybe Hollywood could use a few more Francis Ford Coppolas these days.”

This was my take on the movie from October of 2024, after taking the above photo at a Fort Worth Studio Movie Grill: Megalopolis: Making Sense of Francis Ford Coppola’s Fever Dreams.

Posted at 5:46 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD ADVICE:

Posted at 5:37 pm by Stephen Green

WHY IS ROLLING STONE INSULTING ITS OWN READERS?

Hey, not everyone can be totally cool and dreamy like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

Or Charles Manson:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.

And not everyone can afford to leave their city after the leftist politics that Rolling Stone has been promoting for 60 years now began to make it a hellhole:

Jann Wenner said it was [his then-wife] Jane who ultimately catalyzed Rolling Stone’s move to New York. Her paranoia and anxiety had spiked to uncomfortable levels in the wake of the Patty Hearst episode. “San Francisco got very tricky at one point, because you had the Zodiac, the Zebra, and the SLA,” she said. “It was too small. There were too many people that were just too closely removed from the SLA and the Mansons…there was something creepy happening at that point.”

Related: The staffers at Variety no doubt have “unfathomable levels of self-confidence” as well, even as they lie about Karen Bass, or know nothing about her past:

Posted at 5:23 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORN, POPPED:

Posted at 5:18 pm by Stephen Green

IT LOOKS LIKE THE FERRARI FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIKE FERRARIS: This Is Ferrari’s First EV: The Luce.

Also: ‘The market has spoken’: Ferrari shares fall after carmaker unveils first fully electric vehicle. “The highly anticipated model marks a departure from the aesthetic of typical Ferraris and comes even as other luxury car manufacturers, notably Porsche and Lamborghini, have scaled back on plans to launch their own EVs due to weak demand.”

Related (From Ed):

Which is pretty astounding considering that “the expression ‘copyright infringement’ doesn’t translate terribly well into Mandarin,” to coin a phrase:

 

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT:

Although these days, it’s fair to ask whether Platner is really all that far to the left of the typical Democrat office-holder.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

ED DEPT DEFINES INSANITY: You know the maxim, doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Well, a new data deep-dive by Open the Books shows the Department of Education illustrates the accuracy of the maxim.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Mark Tapscott