Latest news with #CancelCulture
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nick Cave says he declined Morrissey's request to sing ‘silly anti-woke screed' on new song
Nick Cave has said that he turned down Morrissey's request to appear on a new song in 2024, claiming that the former Smiths frontman wanted him to sing 'an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written'. In response to a fan question on his Red Hand Files site about his relationship with the singer, Cave said that 'although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn't my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve.' The Guardian has contacted representatives for Morrissey for comment. In 2019, Cave said: 'Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.' A year later, he called cancel culture 'bad religion run amuck'. In 2024, he clarified in an interview with the Observer that he was 'totally down' with social justice but didn't 'agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. 'There's a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it's a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it's made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.' In addition to the lyrical content of Morrissey's proposed collaboration, he said, 'while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro'. Cave said that the two of them had never met, 'which is probably why I like him. He is undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off. As enjoyable as some may find this, it holds little interest for me, but for the fact that Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation – certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle.' Answering a further question about the state of yearning, Cave said that 'certain music' can fill the void that he described as 'the essence of being human … a sense of incompleteness, of abandonment, a feeling of something lacking'. 'We feel complete when we listen to music we love, while being guided towards the goodness of things,' Cave wrote. 'I find that Morrissey's music, regardless of how jaundiced and disaffected the songs may sometimes seem, does precisely that – ushers us toward what is true.' Answering one final fan question about what he was currently listening to, Cave namechecked the New York punk-funk noise band YHWH Nailgun, whose debut album 45 Pounds has been hailed as one of the year's best, and who, Cave wrote, 'in their own purifying way, do all of the above, pointing us to the heavens by going all the way down. Completely awesome.' Cave has used his Red Hand Files site to communicate directly with fans since 2018. 'Over the years, the Red Hand Files has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency,' he wrote on the site. Cave is currently on a solo tour of Europe that concludes in Luxembourg in September. His most recent album with the Bad Seeds, Wild God, was released in March 2024. Morrissey has not released an album since 2020's I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. He has claimed that a follow-up album, Bonfire of Teenagers, was 'gagged' and prevented from release as a result of 'idiot culture' after he left his US label, Capitol, in 2022. He has called it 'the best album of my life'.
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Woke rocker causes outrage at first concert of biggest US tour since MAGA member was forced out
Marcus Mumford upset fans as he abruptly stopped his concert and launched into a foul-mouthed tirade this week - which was captured in a shock video. The 38-year-old musician is currently on his first US tour with his band Mumford & Sons since former member Winston Marshall departed four years ago in a cloud of controversy after praising a US conservative journalist. During their recent tour kick-off concert in Bend, Oregon, fans were stunned when he stopped the show and stormed off-stage after hurling expletives. A TikTok video of the incident has surfaced where Marcus - who is married to multi-time Oscar nominated actress Carey Mulligan - appears to be focused on something in the crowd as he points something out in the audience. He seemingly says 'sorry, f*** them,' before unstrapping his acoustic guitar and exiting stage left. has reached out to representatives for Marcus and has yet to hear back. The 38-year-old musician is currently on his first US tour with his band Mumford & Sons since Winston Marshall (pictured) departed four years ago after he became the victim of ' Cancel Culture ' when he praised a US conservative journalist - pictured 2019 While it remains unclear why he left the concert abruptly, a few comments on the TikTok seemingly shed some light on the decision. One user wrote: 'People kept getting hurt! He tried to play this song 3x and ended up walking off stage so they could give medical. Never finished the song.' Another said: 'About 3 people passed out in a row. In the same song. So he stopped so they could get help.' Back in October, Marcus led Mumford & Sons to perform at a Kamala Harris rally in Madison, Wisconsin days before she was defeated by current US President Donald Trump in the election. At the time he tried to rally fans to vote for the Democratic candidate as he said: 'I would encourage you to get with your mates, make a voting plan and go out and vote, because every vote will matter you.' Marcus has previously stated that his political views are 'somewhere between centrist and liberal,; Mumford & Sons have not toured since the end of 2019 as they have played several festival gigs from 2023 to 2024. This is also their first tour after guitarist Winston Marshall famously left the band four years ago after sharing his conservative political views. The musician said he was a victim of 'cancel culture' as he was ousted from the band and hounded by fans for sending a tweet to conservative journalist Andy Ngo thanking him for his book, which was critical of Antifa. Marshall, son of multi-millionaire hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall, told Ngo: 'Congratulations . . . Finally had the time to read your important book. You're a brave man.' Left-wing social media users immediately piled on to the star, accused him of being a 'fascist.' Before he posed the question of granting asylum to British people convicted on free speech grounds to Leavitt in the White House, Marshall often spoke out about cancel culture within the entertainment industry. In 2022, this included appearing at the Conservative Party Conference, where he slated artists for failing to support free speech, and said his departure from his band the year before would allow him to 'speak freely about political issues.'
Forbes
30-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
J.K. Rowling Is A Billionaire—Again
The Dark Arts of Cancel Culture have been no match for the magic of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. If there was any price to be paid for placing herself at the center of the debate over transgender rights, you wouldn't know it by looking at her pugnacious feed on X (formerly Twitter). There, Rowling posts several times a day in support of gender fundamentalism to her 14 million-plus followers, frequently trading barbs with commenters—even fracturing her relationship with Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint—while toasting her own personal successes. 'I love it when a plan comes together,' she wrote in mid-April, channeling The A-Team's Hannibal Smith, after the United Kingdom's Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. The accompanying photo showed Rowling holding a cocktail and smoking a cigar aboard her superyacht, which is valued at $150 million. Bruising culture war aside, the 59-year-old's Rowling's business empire is now larger than ever. In the four years since she began posting about transgender rights in 2020, Forbes estimates Rowling has earned more than $80 million per year from the sales of her books and the vast litany of Potterverse brand extensions, including movies, TV shows, theme parks, video games, theater and merchandise. Even after factoring in high U.K. taxes and her extensive charity ventures, she has comfortably rejoined the billionaire ranks with a net worth of $1.2 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Rowling was previously a fixture on the Forbes billionaires list from 2004-2011—the height of Pottermania—until new reporting in 2012 uncovered $160 million in philanthropic giving. In the years since, she's built back her 10-figure fortune through multimillion-dollar revenue streams across every conceivable medium. West End Wizardry: The Harry Potter stage play has sold more than 11 million tickets and grossed over $1 billion since opening in London in 2016. And her momentum is not slowing any time soon, with a new HBO Max series adaptation of the Harry Potter books going into production this summer, expected to run for a decade beginning in late 2026 and mint a whole new generation of fans. Forbes estimates that Rowling could earn about $20 million per year for her involvement in the new series—one part of a wide-ranging deal with Warner Bros.—and she was 'very, very involved in the process selecting the writer and the director,' said HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys in November. One has to imagine she had the same input in casting the new pre-teen Harry, Hermoine and Ron, announced on Monday. When asked about Rowling's politics on an episode of The Town with Matt Belloni in April, Bloys said, 'She's entitled to those views. And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter." In the nearly three decades since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone debuted in 1997, Rowling has shrewdly expanded the Potterverse, building it into a franchise that is likely to run as long as Harry's fictional British compatriots Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. According to Habo Studio, a consulting firm that ranks the strongest intellectual property brands in the U.S. by surveying thousands of consumers, Harry Potter is the sixth strongest brand in all of entertainment, and No. 1 among millennials. Warner Bros. saw the potential of Rowling's intellectual property very early, licensing the movie rights before the first book was even released, when Rowling was still a single mother living on welfare—'as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless,' she told The London Times in a recent interview. By the time that first big screen adaptation came to theaters in late 2001, Rowling had published four Potter books and sold over 100 million copies, vaulting her from living off welfare checks to multi-millionaire celebrity status. Just two years later, Rowling's then-agent Chris Little told Forbes the Harry Potter series had sold 250 million copies, building Rowling's initial fortune. The film franchise would then go on to gross almost $7.7 billion at the global box office after its final installment in 2011, at the time the highest-grossing franchise in movie history. By then Rowling's contract with Warner Bros. had been renegotiated numerous times to include various provisions and protections, including participation in the films' profits, an executive producer credit on the final two movies and, most importantly, authority over 'non-author written sequels,' which meant that no further Harry Potter material could be developed without Rowling's approval. If there's one thing Rowling has been more fiercely protective of than her political beliefs, it is the rights to her signature characters. That contractual stipulation allowed Rowling to negotiate for screenwriting control over the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2016 and its two sequels. The third installment, released in 2022, was the first to be stress tested by public backlash (including calls for boycotts) to Rowling's stance against transgender rights. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore grossed $400 million at the global box office against a budget of more than $250 million, and is considered an enormous flop. Riding High: A sixth Wizarding World attraction was revealed at Universal's Epic Universe when the theme park opened in May. Still, Rowling was far from cancelled. By that point, tickets for her Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play were selling steadily on Broadway, in London's West End and five other locations around the world—grossing more than $1 billion since its premiere in 2016, of which Rowling shares in the profits. HBO Max was also producing the fifth season of C.B. Strike, an adaptation of Rowling's adult detective novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. And in 2023 a new video game Hogwarts Legacy sold 24 million copies, the best-selling game of that year, grossing another $1 billion. Because of that momentum, Warner Bros. was eager to double down on Potter projects. When CEO David Zaslav was hired in 2022, he flew to Scotland to meet with Rowling to find a way to develop new wizarding world content. While Rowling held rights to prequels and spin-offs, Warner Bros. still controlled the material from the original seven novels, which is why the studio pursued a remake of the original series. Eventually the project secured Rowling's blessing in 2023. 'Max's commitment to preserving the integrity of my books is important to me,' Rowling said in a statement last April when the show was announced. Despite the obvious ubiquity of the Potterverse, analysts believe that Rowling's tight-fisted control and near-singular authorship over the Harry Potter world has protected it from the kind of overexposure and dilution that has plagued other popular intellectual property in recent years, such as Disney's Marvel and Star Wars universes. Everywhere the Potter brand goes, it finds eager customers. When Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park opened its first Wizarding World attraction in 2010, it saw a 36% jump in attendance and a 40% increase in revenue. Comcast's annual financial report called it 'transformative to the company,' and it has since implemented Harry Potter into its parks in Orlando, Hollywood, Tokyo and Beijing, all of which saw boosts in attendance as a result. Similarly, an hour north of London, a studio tour of the Warner Bros. lot branded 'the making of Harry Potter' reported over $300 million in revenue and $120 million in operating profit in 2023. "Nothing has ever given a 36% increase in attendance in parks, from Disney to Six Flag to whoever,' says Dennis Spiegel, founder and CEO of International Theme Park Services. "The Harry Potter licensing deal, in my opinion, is probably the greatest licensing arrangement that has been done in theme parks in the last 40 years." Universal licenses the property from Warner Bros., and by extension Rowling gets a percentage of every purchase in that portion of the park, everything from wands to scarfs to butterbeer. According to Forbes estimates, theme parks account for the second largest income stream for Rowling over the past decade. Of course, the largest portion of Rowling's empire continues to be her book sales. The Harry Potter series has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide, according to its U.S. publisher Scholastic, and has been on the New York Times Best Seller List for 843 weeks and counting. A hardcover edition of the script for Cursed Child—written by veteran playwright Jack Thorne but based on a story by Rowling, Thorne and director John Tiffany—sold more than four million copies in its first year of release in 2016, and a picture book Christmas at Hogwarts was the No. 1 holiday book overall in 2024. In addition, Rowling has published five Comoran Strike novels under the Galbraith pseudonym since 2013. Rowling never sold the rights to ebooks for her work, instead founding Pottermore Publishing in 2012, a business that took off during the pandemic and now pays her several million per year. A spokesperson from The Blair Partnership, Rowling's management team, declined to comment on her wealth but sent the following statement to Forbes: 'The global passion for Harry Potter continues to drive growth and innovation across the brand, supported by our incredible partners—from publishing and theme parks to consumer products, theatre, gaming, and television. With numerous exciting new projects in development globally, fans from every generation can look forward to even more meaningful ways to experience the magic of J.K. Rowling's beloved stories. We're thrilled about this next chapter in the franchise, including the 10th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the full-cast audiobooks from Pottermore and Audible featuring over 100 actors, and, of course, the highly anticipated HBO Max television series.' Based on her earnings and diverse revenue streams, Rowling's net worth could be considerably higher, were it not for her commitment to philanthropy. Forbes estimates she has donated more than $200 million in the past 20 years, primarily to three causes: Lumos, which has helped more than 280,000 abandoned children in orphanages in Romania, Haiti, Colombia and Ukraine; Volant, which supports victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence; and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, which treats patients with neurological conditions such as MS, the disease that took her mother's life when Rowling was just 25. She has also been very vocal about maintaining her residency in Edinburgh, Scotland, and paying the country's highest income tax rate of 45%. In 2010, Rowling wrote that she wants her children to be 'citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.' She considered it a form of payback for how far she had come in her own life, adding, 'I am indebted to the British welfare state,' and that it is 'my notion of patriotism' to pay into the system for others. Still, Rowling doesn't shy away from her wealth in the public square of social media, where she deploys it as a trump card against those who would condemn her for her anti-trans statements. 'How do you sleep at night knowing you've lost a whole audience from buying your books,' wrote one X user in 2022. 'I read my most recent royalty cheques,' Rowling replied, 'and find the pain goes away pretty quickly.'
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Fans of Beloved NBC Series Cling to Hope After Update Following Cancellation Outrage
Fans were left in disbelief, with emotions of outrage and disappointment fluttering in, after finding out that NBC canceled Found after two seasons, along with a slew of other beloved shows that deserved a second chance. The series stars Shanola Hampton as Gabi Mosley, a public relations and crisis management specialist at M&A, who helps locate missing people with her team, after getting kidnapped as a child by her English teacher, Hugh 'Sir' Evans, played by 90210 alum Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In flashback scenes, fans see the dynamic between Gabi and Sir unfold, as it's revealed she imprisoned him in her basement as payback, with season 2 trailing his movements following his escape and further plans for Gabi. 🎬 🎬 With many fans calling it one of the best shows on television, the sudden cancellation was a huge blow and shock, even as viewership dropped over 30 percent year over year, per TV Series Finale. Still, the fandom remains devoted and calls to save the show were loud and clear. Now, there may be light at the end of the tunnel as it was reported that this may not be the end for Gabi and Sir after all, with Warner Bros. allegedly shopping the story around to land a home for the procedural. Variety revealed that someone with 'knowledge of the situation' said it was looking for other outlets for the series. At the same time, Deadline also noted that the show will be available on the market for a network or streamer to scoop up. Hopefully, NBC's shortsighted decision ends up being a promising opportunity for another—like when Netflix gave new life to Manifest, which also carried a very dedicated following upon cancellation. Fans who get invested in a storyline deserve some kind of closure, which the season 2 finale of Found likely won't deliver, likely ending on a cliffhanger when it airs on Thursday, May 15.
Wall Street Journal
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Remembering the ‘Olden Days' Before Trump
Peggy Noonan frequently reminds us that Donald Trump, like the rest of us, has faults ('When Establishments Fail: Trump's 100 Days,' Declarations, May 3). Fine. But when she writes that his supporters look at his foes and say, 'They had it coming,' it suggests she needs to get out more, as southerners like to say. Borrowing a phrase from Michael Corleone: 'It's not personal, Peggy, it's strictly business.' That business would be cleaning up the mess from Joe Biden, wokeness, cancel culture, open borders, pronouns and so on. The list of bad stuff was long. Some of us say chaos is a small price to pay to eliminate what we suffered for four years.
