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Saturday AM Update: While it’s clear that The Lion King is bound to be the king of July, overtaking Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ($169.1M), the pic, after clocking an estimated $78.5M yesterday, is now headed to $192M-$200M for the weekend, which, for the second half of the calendar year, is the third-best opening after Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($247.9M) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($220M). For director Jon Favreau, Lion King is easily the best opening of his career, leaping far beyond the debut of Iron Man 2 ($128M.1). How much front-loading will occur...

As an heiress to the Disney fortune, anything Abigail Disney says about the brand beloved by millions worldwide garners attention. And she’s calling out Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger for his nearly $66 million yearly salary, saying he isn’t doing enough to rectify the huge gap between his own earnings and that of other Disney workers. “Bob needs to understand he's an employee, just the same as the people scrubbing gum off the sidewalk are employees,” Disney said during an interview with the Yahoo News show Through Her Eyes. “And they're entitled to all the same dignity and human...

When Disneyland Resort's $1billion Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land opened last month, park-goers braced themselves for gigantic queues. But they never materialised - thanks to the resort putting crowd control measures in place. However, it seems they've worked almost too well because the park has been described by visitors on Twitter over the past few weeks as being 'empty' and 'a ghost town'.

Like more or less everyone I know, I have no desire to see a single entertainment company take over the future, dominating what had been a movie industry of multiple entities, each one fighting for their slice of your attention span. Disney, the movie studio so powerful that it ate another movie studio, looks, to many, like it could be that company. The full impact of its absorption of 20th Century Fox has yet to be felt, but now that the smoke has cleared, the mega-corporation that was formed stands before us like an unprecedented colossus, looming over all other...

An American organization called One million Moms has started a campaign in order to protest a 'lesbian' scene that was present in the movie. Also, the group of mothers has accused Disney of choosing ‘to be politically correct versus providing family-friendly entertainment’, and have advised the Mouse House that they should stick to entertainment, rather than pushing an agenda and exposing children to controversial topics. This scene has caused enough outrage among the members of the organization that they have started a petition against Disney and has gained 12,555 signatures. According to the petition, the members believe they have been...

This is the craziest fight yet — men beating women, women slapping men — while out for a fun day at Disneyland with the children. A family went to Disneyland with the children and then got into a violent brawl in front of the children. The men and women were slapping and punching each other. This is absolutely nuts. The poor children. Several people tried to intervene during the four minutes of mayhem, with a Disneyland janitor being the first park employee to try to break up the violence. The Anaheim police were called when Disney security couldn’t stop these...

EARLY SUNDAY AM UPDATE: Sony is calling the 6-day opening of Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home at $185M which reps a record for a 6-day Independence Day launch and the Culver City studio’s best opening over that number of days. Both records were previously held by Sony’s 2004 Spider-Man 2 which made $180M over the July 4th 6-day stretch. Industry estimates for Far From Home are around $184.5M at 4,634 theaters, still excellent. 10-day global for Far From Home is an amazing $580M. By the way, remember we said Far From Home would get to at least $170M when it...

Disney actor Cameron Boyce, 20, has died, according to a report. The young performer, a native of Los Angeles, was known for his roles in the Disney franchise “Descendants” and the Disney Channel show “Jessie.” Boyce died in his sleep “due to a seizure which was a result of an ongoing medical condition," his family told ABC News on Saturday.

A 22-year old college student, just a month into a job at Disney World, was paralyzed and nearly killed after being struck by a drunken driver. Gabby Murillo was stopped at a red light near Orlando on June 15 when the driver hit her from behind at full speed, causing her vehicle to slam into a concrete wall. The driver of the other vehicle was ticketed for careless driving with serious bodily injury, according to the police report.

Disney’s forthcoming live-action Little Mermaid is set to star actress and singer Halle Bailey, of the R&B duo Chloe x Halle, as Ariel, Variety reports. That means that one of Disney’s most iconic princesses is going to look quite different. This Ariel will be black. That’s a giant deal, and not just because Ariel is a popular Disney princess with arguably the best “I Want” song in the Disney canon. Ariel is also the princess whose character design set the mold for the astonishingly homogenous run of giant-eyed, small-nosed Disney princesses we’ve met since The Little Mermaid debuted in 1989....

Pro-LGBT activists are praising Disney’s Toy Story 4 for including a “small but important moment of LGBTQ representation” with a scene of two moms dropping off a boy to school, both of them showing him affection. “At the start of the movie, when Woody’s new owner Bonnie goes for her first day of kindergarten, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where one child is dropped off by two moms. Later, the moms return to pick up their child and give them a hug,” states Gay Times in a June 26 article about the scene. “It’s a small scene, sure, and it’s certainly...

Everybody does.Let’s start here: Julia Roberts reveals original ending for ‘Pretty Woman’ — and you’d be shocked.In an interview in Variety magazine this week Julia Roberts revealed that the original ending of Pretty Woman as written was anything but the fairy tale ending of “prostitute-falls-in-love-with-a-rich-john-and-they-both-live-happily-ever-after.” She explained that the original script was “really dark and the ending was really heavy.” In fact the original script ended with Robert’s character, the prostitute Vivian Ward, left sprawled out in a dirty alley where Richard Gere’s character, Edward Lewis, had chucked her out of the car. For good measure, and to get the...

The programmers at HBO pride themselves in setting the tone for the rest of television, especially when it comes to the absence of taste, from Bill Maher's "Real Time" talk-show tantrums to Lena Dunham marching around undressed on "Girls." Every time HBO hits the bottom of the gutter, it finds a way to go deeper still. It is really headed into the gutter, and it knows it. A new HBO series about teenagers and sex and drugs called "Euphoria" is starting June 16, starring 22-year-old Zendaya, another former Disney Channel star desperately seeking to keep her career alive in the...

An attorney for Hollywood director Bryan Singer announced Wednesday that the filmmaker will pay $150,000 to resolve allegations that he raped a 17-year-old boy while partying on a yacht in 2003. The "X-Men" director was accused of sexually assaulting then-underage Cesar Sanchez-Guzman during a Seattle yacht party. Singer allegedly lured him into a secluded area and forced the teen to perform oral sex. Sanchez-Guzman's lawsuit filed in December 2017 also alleges that Singer performed oral sex on the 17-year-old against his will and anally penetrated him, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Ron Howard has said that online trolls were partly to blame for the lacklustre box office performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who is currently promoting upcoming documentary Pavarotti, told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that “aggressive trolling” was a crucial factor in the film’s financial under-performance but that he still greatly enjoyed the creative experience of making the film. “I wish it could have lived up to the box office expectations,” Howard said. “That’s disappointing. Why didn’t it? Maybe that’s the release [date], maybe it was too nostalgic, maybe pushback from the previous movie…some trolling,...

Netflix is saying it will “rethink” its investments in Georgia because of the fetal heartbeat bill that was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp. The law, formerly House Bill 481, is formally known as the “Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act.” It prohibits abortions in the state after a heartbeat is detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The law allows exceptions in the case of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger. For now, Netflix will continue filming “Ozark” and other shows in Georgia. But the media giant says it...

RUSH: Look at Bob Iger. So Bob Iger, he runs a business. Disney is a network that got started doing what? Making programs and theme parks for who? Children! Children! Kids! Little babies, who grow up to become Disney fans. They watch Disney TV shows, they watch Disney movies, they buy Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse dolls, they go to the theme park. So Bob Iger is out there, and he is livid over the anti-abortion bill in Georgia. And he’s saying (paraphrasing), “You know what, we may have to pull out of there. We may not be able to...

The Walt Disney Company is considering boycotting Georgia over its new abortion law, even as Disney profits from doing business in China, a notorious human rights violator that is putting Muslims in internment camps. Disney CEO Bob Iger told Reuters on Thursday the company is likely to cease filming in Georgia if the pro-life law takes effect.[snip] Disney apparently has no issue with doing business in China, which has undertaken mass detentions of Uighur Muslims, placing them in internment camps. Disney opened a $5.5 billion resort in Shanghai, China, in 2016. Iger called Shanghai Disney the company’s “greatest opportunity since...

Few companies appeal to more disparate corners of American society than the Walt Disney Co. , so count us among the bewildered to see Disney CEO Bob Iger march to the front lines of the culture wars. Mr. Iger told Reuters this week that it would be “very difficult” for Disney to continue filming its movie and television content in Georgia if a new state abortion law takes effect. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard. Right now we are watching it...

The filmmaker behind The Amazing Spider-Man films is casting his web on a Disney classic. Marc Webb is in talks to direct a live-action remake of Snow White, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The project started taking shape in 2016, when The Girl on the Train screenwriter Erin Cressida was tapped to write the script. La La Land songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are writing new songs for the project, and Marc Platt is producing. Webb rose to prominence with 2009's 500 Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, and went on to helm The Amazing Spider-Man...