HBO Max reveals ‘The Other Two’ return date, Season 3 details
The wait for the next season is almost over. PLUS: Ben Affleck says he’d ‘absolutely not’ direct a DC movie, Shazam! sequel disappoints at the box office, and I found Pepsi X Peeps.
Being a fan of The Other Two, the comedy series from former Saturday Night Live co-head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, has taken a ton of patience. The show’s first season aired from January to March of 2019 on Comedy Central. Then there was more than a two-year wait until the show reappeared on HBO Max in August 2021. And while we’ve known there would be a third season for awhile, it wasn’t revealed until this past week that The Other Two will return on May 4.
If you missed the first two seasons of The Other Two, the show began as the story of two siblings trying to navigate their own places in the world just as their younger brother found Justin Bieber-esque fame as a pop star.
In addition to Heléne Yorke and Drew Tarver as siblings Brooke and Cary, The Other Two features Molly Shannon (in a show-stealing role), Case Walker, Ken Marino, Wanda Sykes and Josh Segarra.
Kelly and Schneider chatted about the upcoming season with Vanity Fair, revealing a few key details about what’s in store for The Other Two. (If you haven’t caught up with the show, there are some spoilers in this next bit.)
Season 2 of the show ended with the twist that the characters were still in the pre-pandemic world, with rehearsals for Cary’s new gig set to begin on March 13, 2020. The day the pandemic became real for those of us in the United States.
Vanity Fair asked the co-creators if we should expect The Other Two would pick up right where in left off as the pandemic was beginning.
“We did just skip right the hell over that,” Kelly told Vanity Fair. “Please make sure you print that this is not, like, a COVID show. We are not all about COVID now.”
“We are three years in the future, but all of our characters have been impacted in some way by what we’ve all gone through,” Schneider added. “And we just tried to explore different funny routes that that would take them.”
Hopefully HBO Max lets The Other Two go on as long as its creative team wants to keep telling stories about these characters.
We’ll get the first two episodes of the new season on May 4. HBO Max is then doing that weird thing where they release two episodes on each of the following Thursdays before switching to a one-episode-per-week format. I dunno. It’s confusing and an easy way for people to miss episodes.
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‘I would not direct something for the [James] Gunn DC. Absolutely not.’
Any speculation that Ben Affleck would direct a movie for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Studios died with the publication last week of a Vanity Fair profile of the actor/director.
“I would not direct something for the [James] Gunn DC. Absolutely not,” Affleck said when asked how he would respond if DC were to ask him to direct. “I have nothing against James Gunn. Nice guy, sure he’s going to do a great job. I just wouldn’t want to go in and direct in the way they’re doing that. I’m not interested in that.”
In the profile, Affleck confirmed just how awful the production of Justice League was.
“That was the worst experience I’ve ever seen in a business which is full of some shitty experiences. It broke my heart,” Affleck told Vanity Fair. “There was an idea of someone [Joss Whedon] coming in, like, ‘I’ll rescue you and we’ll do 60 days of shooting and I’ll write a whole thing around what you have. I’ve got the secret.’ And it wasn’t the secret. That was hard. And I started to drink too much. I was back at the hotel in London, it was either that or jump out the window.”
Yikes. No wonder Affleck is done with superhero movies.
Gladiator sequel adds Denzel Washington and Barry Keoghan
The concept of a Gladiator sequel was a fantasy for so long, it’s bizarre to now see actual casting news about the film. Two new names were added to that cast list this past week.
Deadline reported on Friday that Denzel Washington was joining the film, reunited with director Ridley Scott, who he had worked with on American Gangster. Right before that news broke, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Barry Keoghan was also in talks for the Gladiator sequel.
Washington and Keoghan would join Paul Mescal, who was the first actor attached to the film.
Tom Cruise has seen The Flash and loved it
It’s not unusual for studio insiders to see a movie before it comes out. That’s kind of how the game works. It is unusual, though, for a studio to screen a movie per the request of an actor who has nothing to do with that studio. If you’re Tom Cruise, that precedent doesn’t apply.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote on Friday that Cruise personally asked Warner Bros. Discover CEO David Zaslav if he could see The Flash.
A Warners employee brought the movie to Cruise’s home in Beverly Hills and stayed until the actor finished watching The Flash. It is unclear on what format Cruise watched it, whether it was digital or film. When Cruise finished, the movie was given back to the messenger, who returned it to the studio.
Cruise reportedly loved the film enough to call director Andy Muschietti to tell him he thought The Flash was “everything you want in a movie” and “this is the kind of movie we need now.”
I’m very curious to see if The Flash lives up to how Cruise, Zaslav and Gunn have hyped it up.
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Weekend of March 17-19, 2023
Shazam! Fury of the Gods (N)
Weekend gross: $30.5M / Total domestic gross: $30.5M / Percent drop: NA
Maybe The Flash will change this when it debuts (hey, it has Cruise’s endorsement, right?), but it looks like the DCEU is limping toward its end. Shazam! Fury of the Gods failed to live up the $53.5 million opening weekend of the first Shazam! movie. Of the twelve DCEU movies that have been released since 2013, Fury of the Gods’ debut ranks tenth, ahead of only The Suicide Squad’s $30.5 million and Wonder Woman 1984’s $16.7 million. Both of those films were pandemic era releases that Warner Bros. also made available on HBO Max.
- Scream VI (1)
Weekend gross: $17.5M / Total domestic gross: $76M / Percent drop: -61
Creed III (2)
Weekend gross: $15.4M / Total domestic gross: $127.7M / Percent drop: -44
Creed III is now the highest grossing of the three Creed movies at the worldwide box office. There’s also a shot that once the final numbers for the weekend come in, Creed III will pass the original Rocky’s lifetime gross. (It’s behind roughly $700,000 at the moment, which is basically a rounding error.)
- 65 (3)
Weekend gross: $5.8M / Total domestic gross: $22.4M / Percent drop: -43
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (4)
Weekend gross: $4.1M / Total domestic gross: $205.8M / Percent drop: -43
The box office numbers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have pretty much come to a halt. After an impressive $106.1 million opening weekend, the bottom fell out for latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Its domestic gross ranks No. 23 for the MCU while its worldwide total ranks No. 25. (There are currently 31 MCU movies.)
Box office numbers via The Numbers
Ted Lasso
“Smells Like Mean Spirit”
I’m very curious to see where Ted Lasso goes in its third and possibly final season. Nothing seems to be going well for Ted — his team is expected to finish last in the league and be relegated, his ex-wife appears to have a new boyfriend — and while it’s easy to expect he’ll turn everything around as the show wraps up, Nick Mohammed told Uproxx last week that this season is “not a fairy tale ending.”
Mohammed’s Nate is in full villain mode this season, huh? The “dumb-dumb line” scene was an especially nasty turn for his character.
Abbott Elementary
“Festival”
Is that it for the charter school storyline? Was that the last we’ve seen from Leslie Odom Jr.? I fully expected this to be how the season ends, but I guess there’s a chance Legendary Charter could make one last play for Abbott Elementary over the next few episodes.
This was the first episode in awhile to feature Tariq, Janine’s ex-boyfriend Tariq. Is he back? The final minutes of the episode revealed that Tariq needed a ride back to New York City to get his stuff to move back to Philadelphia. We might not get the expected resolution to the Janine/Gregory storyline this season after all.
Corrections
“Calling All Forwards”
Is “Animal Deaths” the end of “Animal Flubs”?
- It’s the End of DC As We Know It (Richard Newby, The Hollywood Reporter)
- How Abbott Elementary Janitor William Stanford Davis Steals Every Scene (Fletcher Peters, The Daily Beast)
- How American Vandal became one of the decade's best (and stupidest) mysteries (Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly)
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Pepsi X Peeps
It took me a bit, but I finally found Pepsi X Peeps. I normally stick to zero-calorie soda, but that wasn’t an option when it came to this special edition.
I have no idea how people drink full-sugar soda.
This was a pure sugar bomb. I’m not sure what part of that was my unfamiliarity with normal Pepsi and what part of that was the marshmallow flavor attributed to the Peeps. I wound up dumping this out after a few sips.
How about Pepsi flavored Peeps next year? I’d be down to try that instead.
Zapp’s Pretzel Stix New Orleans Style Voodoo
My research shows that these came out at the end of 2022, but I only just discovered them on Friday. It took me every ounce of willpower to not devour the entire bag in one sitting. Our daughter even took a liking to them. (She has also recently endorsed Shamrock Shakes and Krispy Kreme donuts, so you know she has an excellent palette.)
‘Raise the Teremana’
This tweet from Ian Karmel, the co-head writer on The Late Late Show, showed up on my timeline (the good reverse chronological timeline, not the Elon and Friends Timeline) on Saturday, and I thought it was worth sharing.
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