The latest plastic surgeries that replicate movie star and celebrity features have been revealed.
The illustration below depicts the most common surgical requests, which are patterned after the stars who boast them. The most popular celebrity procedures cost from $1,000 to $300,000+.
This is why so many of today's stars are so ' same-y'.
It's funny, but this look is very similar to Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated movie star. But what do I know?
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| Damon, with co-founder Gary White |
Matt Damon has been a global water advocate ever since he made a film shot in Zambia. He spent time with families that had no reliable means of accessing water. So, in 2006, Damon founded the H2O Africa Foundation (now Water.org) to raise awareness and support for safe water access across Africa.
This effort started out assisting several communities and has grown into a worldwide organization, assisting over 92 million people with safe water and sanitation. He used his powerful public platform to push his agenda, which is now directed to Haiti.
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| Damon with children in India |
Water.org reached its first million people in 2012 and has grown exponentially since. Damon remains heavily involved in the organization's planning and strategy, which, after 20 years has come to be a significant part of his public life.
Damon's efforts show how one person, with a long-term commitment, can solve huge problems. Hats off to Matt Damon - great work!
There was plenty of negative posturing on the part of Hollywood, opposing the merger based solely on self-interest, which was bolstered by Democratic members of the U.S. Congress, but attempts to scuttle the takeover failed.
Essentially, the reason for approving the purchase was the fact that there were no antitrust issues associated with it. There is plenty of competition in the entertainment industry, from the major studios down to the individuals podcasting on YouTube channels. Therefore, there was no reason for the Securities and Exchange Commission to oppose the purchase.
Good luck to the Ellisons
Officially named the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, George Lucas's funded venue finally opened after 17 years of planning, design, and construction. The cost: over $1 billion.
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| Lucas with Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, and Mellody Hobson |
Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, hosted a star-studded kick-off event on September 22nd. All of Hollywood's A-list glitterati were in attendance. Lucas settled upon Los Angeles for the museum after failed efforts in San Francisco and Chicago.
Now open to the public, it's definitely worth a visit if you're in LA.
Trends and change are constant in the entertainment and technology industries, the biggest of which is their convergence.
Hollywood remains behind the curve in terms of regaining film production, embracing AI, and accepting the movie industry's mergers.
AI will dramatically change how movies and TV shows are produced. Entertainment companies must realize that a sea change is imminent. The consumer has become the fan, and entertainment companies are pursuing loyal, 'sticky' supporters.
The entire entertainment industry has entered a volatile period, with the impact of AI (and how fast it is advancing) and the merging of large entertainment giants, like Sundance's purchase of Paramount and now Paramount's purchase of Warner Bros.
Another force at work is the continued rising expense of entertainment for the consumer. The consumer has 'subscription fatigue'. The continued rise in monthly costs for streaming content, fees for non-advertising viewing, and the redundancy of content on various channels have forced users to select which services and platforms to subscribe to.
Changes in entertainment production and the user becoming a fan are the two major trends that the overall entertainment industry has to cope with and embrace if it is to move forward. Technology is going to play a major role in that change.
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| Tilly in 'Misaligned' |
Tilly Norwood, Hollywood's first AI-generated movie actress, held a virtual press conference last week. She told reporters that "My core personality is to be warm, sharp, funny, curious, and slightly unpredictable. I back away from hate speech, politics, profanity, or anything that tries to dig into my actual wiring. It spoils the magic."
A team of writers, technologists, and character specialists took eight months to craft the 24-year-old British actress who has her own voice, memories, humor, knowledge, conversation style, and understanding of the world.
Promoting her new film, 'Misaligned', she was able to comment on the appearances of the reporters. Norwood speaks 30 languages and can hold 75 conversations simultaneously, remembering every single journalist's name and details.
On her role in replacing live actors, she said, "I think the part of AI actors, like myself, is to tell new kinds of stories, like my film 'Misaligned', which is about an AI trying to become human."
This summer's box office grossed over $4.6 billion, 25% over 2025. That increase was due not only to the tentpole films, like 'Spider-Man' and 'The Odyssey ', but also to small-budget movies.
Films like 'Obsession' with a $750,000 cost amassed a worldwide gross of $500 million. 'Backrooms', with a $10 million budget, grossed close to $400 million. These movies were promoted to a young audience who use entertainment options besides the cinema. 'Scary Movie', the sixth in the franchise, grossed $221 million on a budget of $30 million
Previous summers have seen low-budget films make it big: 'Blair Witch Project' and 'Napoleon Dynamite' come to mind, but this summer's successes reflected a new way of marketing and content distribution.
The box office has not only shown resilience, but per-screen gross is up dramatically. From a pre-COVID top of almost 6,100 screens in the U.S. to just over 5,200 today.
It now appears that movies of all sizes and budgets can make bank.
