Ryan Reynolds will once again don his full-body red jumpsuit in a new “Deadpool” movie.

At Fanatic Fest 2026, Reynolds confirmed that there would be a new movie in the franchise, following the massive success of “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

“There’s stuff upcoming. There’s eventually, you know, remotely another ‘Deadpool’ film. It’s going to be great,” he said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The anticipation. The chase. The powdery, sugar-coated board of gum! For generations of baseball card fans, there was nothing like scrounging up some change and sprinting to the store to buy a wax pack.

Some tore the slightly tacky paper wrapper open and flipped through the cards in an insatiable instant (hence the popular phrase “ripping wax” for opening card packs even today, about 35 years since use of actual wax wrappers ceased). Others did the slow reveal: one card at a time, peeking out of a corner of the pack, or maybe upside down and reversed. However you did it, it was the right way.

“There is something inherently magic about peeling away the paper of the wax pack. There’s something visceral about it, taking the pack to your face and smelling it,” says Brian Pirrip, owner of collectible business M1NT. “It’s something about the mix of all these scents — the wax, the gum, the cardboard — that transports you back to a different time.”

Collecting and trading cards has been part of the baseball ecosystem since the 1860s. But the wax pack emerged as the delivery method in 1951 by Topps.

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Let's have an open topic about the shows we're watching and enjoying!

NASHVILLE (AP) — The time has come for country music superstar Alan Jackson to hang up his signature Stetson hat.

The genre traditionalist from Newnan, Georgia, whose career kicked off in the 1980s and exploded shortly thereafter in the oft-cited ‘90s country wave with heartfelt songs for the working man who’d rather be drinking, or fishing, or ideally both, has sold over 60 million records across his storied career. And on Saturday night at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, he brought his touring career to an end.

Five years ago, the 67-year-old music giant Jackson shared that he has a degenerative nerve condition that affects his balance called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which he was first diagnosed with a decade prior. He said it was a genetic condition, and its effects on his ability to walk and perform had become more noticeable.

For those who missed Jackson’s final bow, the show will be released later in the year as an NBC concert special. But for those who were in the stadium — in the middle of a huge storm — it was an unrepeatable and unmistakable night.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Charlie Brown began writing to a pen pal not long after the comic strip “Peanuts”debuted in newspapers back in 1950. No one has gotten a look at whoever was on the other end of his letters — until now.

Her name is Mia, and she’s a young girl from London of South Asian descent who uses a wheelchair. She glides into the spotlight in the animated movie “Snoopy Unleashed,” coming to Apple TV in 2027, helping Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang explore what being a pal is really all about.

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The company that promotes the legacy of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” has a reminder: Fred Rogers still wants to be your neighbor.

Starting this week, Fred Rogers Productions is situating the iconic show as nearby as YouTube, where it’s getting its own channel.

The channel will debut Thursday, June 4, with five episodes including the very first one, which was shot at Pittsburgh’s own WQED TV studios on Sept. 21, 1967, and aired the following February.

Episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” are already available online and via paid streaming services. But folks at Fred Rogers Productions, which continues to produce spin-off programs like the animated “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” said the flagship series, with its messages of kindness, acceptance and understanding, deserves to be even more widely accessible.

New episodes of the show — there are nearly 900 in all — aired through 2001. DiQuollo said the channel will post a rotating roster of 10 episodes at a time, including rarely seen shows, along with streaming episodes.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Frankie Valli, whose legendary falsetto defines the sound of the 1960s rock group the Four Seasons, has cancelled the remainder of the band’s 2026 tour dates, citing health concerns.

“I’m so sorry to disappoint the folks who have purchased tickets to my shows, but I have decided to take the rest of the year off from touring to focus on my health,” the 92-year-old singer wrote on social media Friday.

Valli, the frontman and only original member still performing with the Four Seasons, launched an extended farewell tour billed “The Last Encores” in October 2023. Shows scheduled for April of this year were rescheduled to dates in summer and fall. Now, all eight performances remaining for 2026 in cities from Scottsdale, Arizona, to Detroit have been called off entirely.

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On Reddit, user Dull_Entry_8287 writes:

The mall didn't die because of Amazon. It died because of a lease clause. And mid-size towns got screwed twice.

Everyone has the story wrong.

Ask people why malls died and you get the same three answers: Amazon, COVID, and "people just stopped going." Those things all happened. But a lot of our local malls closed in the 1990s. Amazon was a bookstore. COVID was thirty years away. Something else killed them first.

Here's what actually happened, and why the nostalgia you feel for your mid-size town's mall is about something more than the Auntie Anne's pretzel smell.

The numbers don't match the story

The U.S. had roughly 25,000 malls of all sizes in 1986. From that year through 2017, they closed at a rate of 764 per year. The enclosed mall peaked in the mid-1990s, right around the time your town's mall probably started looking a little rough, and then the tide turned. The retail apocalypse narrative of the 2010s was the obituary, not the cause of death.

In 1990, department stores accounted for 14.5% of all U.S. retail sales. By 2024 that share had fallen below 1.8%. The freefall started in 1990. The internet went mainstream in the mid-2000s.

The receipt problem

Here's the thing almost nobody talks about. Mall leases were structured differently from every other commercial real estate deal in America. In addition to base rent, mall tenants were required to pay a percentage of their gross sales to the landlord, typically around 6%, sometimes more. The landlord had the right to audit your books. You had to hand over your receipts. The more you sold, the more you paid.

No other commercial landlord in America worked this way. The guy who owned the strip mall down the highway just wanted his fixed rent check on the first of the month. He didn't care if you had a good October. The big box developer who built the Walmart on the bypass wanted a flat lease, nothing more. No revenue share. No audit rights. No one looking at your receipts.

And retailers noticed.

Why Target and Walmart built boxes instead of moving in

Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy — the retailers that thrived through the 1990s and 2000s — almost universally chose freestanding buildings over mall locations. They were called "category killers" partly because of what they did to mall anchor stores, but also because of how they operated: purpose-built boxes, fixed rent, total control of their own space and hours.

If the mall owners had seen it coming, the fix was obvious. Drop the percentage rent requirement for the big box retailers, charge enough flat rent to cover the Easter Bunny and the food court fountain maintenance, and compete for the tenants who were walking out the door. Target wasn't asking for a sweetheart deal. They just wanted to pay for the space and keep what they earned. The mall owners had MBAs. They had real estate lawyers. Somewhere in there, someone should have run the math on what it would cost to keep a Target inside versus what it would cost to lose one to the bypass. They didn't, or if they did, the percentage rent model was too baked into their financing structures to change. Either way, Target built a box down the road and the mall started dying.

What the malls never grasped, or refused to accept, is that the percentage rent model made sense when the mall itself was the scarce resource. In the 1960s and 1970s, if you wanted to reach suburban shoppers, you had to be in the mall. The landlord had real leverage. Taking a cut of revenue was justifiable because the mall was genuinely creating value you couldn't replicate anywhere else.

By the 1990s that was no longer true. The highway bypass had cheap land. Big box developers were ready to build. And they didn't ask for your receipts.

There's actually a third layer to this, and it's pretty wild

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in a 2004 New Yorker piece called "The Terrazzo Jungle" (free to read here: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/4327827/the-terrazzo-jungle-malcolm-gladwell), drawing on historian Thomas Hanchett's research. In 1954, Congress accidentally supercharged mall construction by passing an accelerated depreciation law intended for factories that ended up applying to any income-producing building. Suddenly developers could take enormous tax-free deductions on new mall construction, making a new mall more profitable than buying stocks, even if the mall itself wasn't doing that well.

So malls got built everywhere, including markets that genuinely couldn't support them, because the financial incentive was the tax shelter, not the retail performance. And once you've taken your depreciation, you have very little motivation to modernize the property. The math on when those 1950s, 60s, and 70s-era malls would start aging out of their owners' interest lands squarely in the mid-1990s through about 2015. Which is exactly when the dead malls started piling up.

The owners weren't saving the mall. They were milking the depreciation clock.

What this meant for mid-size towns

The Buckle was never going to open a freestanding location in a city of 40,000 people. Neither was Waldenbooks, or Foot Locker, or Sam Goody, or any of the other stores that made a mall trip feel like access to something bigger than your town. The percentage rent model, for all its extractiveness, was also the thing that made it financially viable to bring those stores to mid-size markets. The developer could afford to take a risk on a secondary market because they'd participate in the upside if it worked.

When big box developers came along with flat-rent strip development, that math changed. Retailers followed the economics, not the geography. They went to the highway bypass. Mid-size towns ended up with a Walmart, a dying mall, and eventually nothing in between.

The cruelest part is that most of those downtowns were already hollowed out. The mall had spent twenty years pulling retail gravity away from Main Street, and then the mall died too. A handful of cities have managed to bring their downtowns back through sustained civic effort, dedicated planning, and in some lucky cases a major private investment. But that's not a formula you can replicate. A few cities got lightning. Most didn't.

The mall never required any of that. It just needed a parking lot and enough car-owning people within 20 miles.

So what is the nostalgia actually about?

It's not about the mall as a retail format. It's about the fact that for mid-size cities, the mall was the only real third place that wasn't a bar or a church, a climate-controlled semi-public space where you could run into people, where teenagers could exist without buying anything, where a family could spend two hours on a Saturday without a plan.

The strip of big boxes on the bypass doesn't do that. You can't accidentally run into someone at Walmart. There's no food court. There's no anchor store that makes the whole trip feel like an event.

The mall died because a leasing model got underbid by competitors who were willing to just charge for the box. The places that lost the most weren't the big cities that could absorb it. They were the mid-size towns that got the national retail once, briefly, imperfectly, and then watched it leave.

The nostalgia isn't for the mall. It's for the access.

Any other songs you think belong on this list more?

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess what exactly is going to happen with Avengers: Doomsday, a film that Marvel has a lot riding on during an uneven period for the MCU since Avengers: Endgame.

Endgame was the moment for the MCU, so much so that Doomsday is being described as a literal sequel to that film. It remains to be seen what that means, but now the Russos are doing something wild and a little bizarre.

Speaking at the Sands Film Festival, Joe Russo said that for the theatrical re-release of Avengers: Endgame, there will be new footage in the film “that is set in the Doomsday story that we have added to Avengers: Endgame,” Russo said.

“It’s an opportunity to create a bridge from Endgame to Doomsday in a very unique way, and because the movie was so successful, we have an opportunity to re-release it. You don’t always get the chance to re-release because it costs money, so the fact that we can enhance the story of Doomsday by bridging it to Endgame and these characters that we worked with for years that we love so much, and continue their story: It’s a really unique opportunity.”

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What do you think about this?

NEW YORK (AP) — Phil Collins, Iron Maiden, Billy Idol, Queen Latifah, Oasis, Sade and Joy Division/New Order will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, along with first-time nominees Wu-Tang Clan and the late Luther Vandross.

The list was revealed on Monday night’s airing of “American Idol.” Artists must have released their first commercial recording at least 25 years before they’re eligible for induction. Nominees were voted on by more than 1,200 artists, historians and music industry professionals.

Those nominated this year but who came up short for the class of 2026 include Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, INXS, Melissa Etheridge, Jeff Buckley, Pink, New Edition and Shakira.

The induction will be held Nov. 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. A TV presentation will air in December on ABC and Disney+.

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by Jared Bahir Browsh

“¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Meaning “hurry up, let’s go,” the trademark slogan of Speedy Gonzales was, for generations of children, the first Spanish words they learned.

But by the 1980s, ABC had pulled his cartoons due to concerns that his dress, accent and characters like his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, were insensitive toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The Cartoon Network followed suit in 1999.

I’ve studied and written about the history of animation, including how characters have been received around the world. Though rooted in a well-intentioned effort at cultural sensitivity, taking Speedy Gonzales off the air was a step too far for many viewers. He was one of the few cartoon characters rooted in Mexican identity, and he’d become a cultural icon across all of Latin America. The ensuing uproar in the wake of his cancellation prompted the Cartoon Network to reinstate the cartoon mouse in 2002.

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

A speedy rise to stardom

“The fastest mouse in all of Mexico” first appeared in the 1953 animated short “Cat-Tails for Two.”

He was redesigned with his iconic yellow sombrero and red kerchief when he starred in his eponymous 1955 film, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

The short film features the general framework for future plots: Speedy helps members of his border community – a place inspired by Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas – evade the conniving Sylvester the Cat.

It opens with a town of starving mice looking longingly at the AJAX cheese factory through a fence establishing an “international border.” They try to determine who will try to outrun Sylvester, the factory’s guard. One of the mice says that his sister is friends with Speedy Gonzales. (Another pipes in that Speedy is friends with everybody’s sister, signaling Speedy as something of a Don Juan.) After they call on Speedy, he uses his speed and smarts to outrun and outwit Sylvester.

The basic premise also appears in a number of cartoons, from Tom and Jerry to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote: An antagonist is consistently thwarted by a clever protagonist who avoids increasingly complicated traps and attempts at capture.

Speedy Gonzales is unique, though, in that he was the first cartoon star to be from a Latin American country.

In the 1940s, with the European and Asian markets cut off due to World War II, Disney had turned to the Latin American market. The studio produced “Saludos Amigos” in 1942 and “The Three Caballeros” in 1944 to abide by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which aimed to leverage diplomacy, trade and cultural exchange to improve relations with Latin America.

Speedy ended up appearing in 45 theatrical shorts. In 1969, Warner Bros. shut down its animation studio, but the character lived on in Saturday morning cartoon anthologies like “The Bugs Bunny Show,” which repackaged older cartoons for younger audiences.

Animation’s racial reckoning

The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air at a time when networks and studios were starting to reassess animated characters from earlier eras.

Many early cartoon characters, including Mickey Mouse, had been modeled after blackface minstrel characters. Warner Bros.‘ first star, Bosko, was originally patented as “Negro Boy.”

Since racist tropes were ubiquitous in early-20th-century animation, films and shorts like Disney’s “Dumbo,” “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” or Warner Bros.’ “All This and Rabbit Stew” were either pulled, edited or updated to feature a content warning.

But after The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air in 1999, there was unexpected pushback from the Hispanic American community and the character’s Latin American fans. Groups like League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States, declared Speedy a cultural icon and requested that his cartoons return to the air.

Back when Speedy Gonzales was first introduced to audiences, Hollywood had been filming more movies in Mexico and at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, most of these films depicted Latinos as either incompetent or villains.

In this regard, Speedy represented something different. Though the character’s English speech and accent reflected stereotypes – and he was voiced by a white actor, Mel Blanc – the character was ultimately a clever, quick-witted and good-natured protagonist. And the Spanish dubbing of his cartoons in Latin America had removed the stereotypical accent altogether.

Let the people decide

The trajectory of Speedy Gonzales resembles that of another controversial cartoon character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from “The Simpsons.”

An Indian immigrant who earned his Ph.D. in computer science in his home country, Apu becomes the manager of a convenience store in the U.S.

Some critics viewed Apu’s depiction as problematic; voiced by a white actor, Hank Azaria, Apu’s exaggerated Indian-American accent and catchphrase – “Thank you, come again” – was routinely mimicked and mocked by viewers of the show. Others, however, saw Apu as the embodiment of the American Dream: He was intelligent, hardworking and morally grounded.

Cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall have written about the complexities of how audiences understand – and either resist or embrace – what they read and watch. They ultimately argue that viewers and readers often interpret media however they see fit, regardless of the creators’ intent. For example, many minority groups who are underrepresented or misrepresented in popular culture will nonetheless find their own meaning and inspiration in characters, even if those characters weren’t supposed to represent those groups in the first place.

This happened with “The Goofy Movie.” Some audiences went on to describe the 1995 film as Disney’s first “Black” animated feature, despite the fact that the characters’ race is never mentioned. There were hints, of course: Black R&B singer Tevin Campbell played the movie’s fictional pop star, Powerline, and the themes of fatherhood and generational tensions eerily echo those in the play “Fences,” written by Black playwright August Wilson.

Of course, in the case of a character like Speedy Gonzales, depictions can become more nuanced as cultural norms and sensitivities change. Jorge R. Gutiérrez is set to direct the animated feature. If his work on films like “The Book of Life” is any indication, he’ll be well-equipped to bring cultural awareness to the animated feature – even if Speedy continues to sport his big, floppy sombrero.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies at University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is shared through a Creative Commons License by The Conversation.

Quite a few of our favorite '80s cartoons have gotten modern remakes or live-action adaptations. But they will never match the pure nostalgia of the originals. Here are seven of the cartoons that made our Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons magical.

Smurfs (1981-1989 )

Smurfs was based on the Belgian comics, written by Peyo (Pierre Culliford), about little blue creatures who lived in mushrooms. The Smurfs are a peaceful people, but they are constantly under threat from the wizard Gargamel, who wants their magic. He also had a strange obsession with trying to eat them.

Smurfs exploded in popularity and ran for a decade on Saturday mornings. Though it was technically the second animated series about the Smurfs, with the first premiering in the 1960s, it became the most well-known media featuring Peyo's characters. From Smurfs in the '80s, the beloved franchise spawned several films and a rebooted series in 2021.

See the rest of the list here.

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After more than 13 years at the helm of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down from the “Star Wars” factory founded by George Lucas.

The Walt Disney Co. announced Thursday that it will now turn to Dave Filoni to steer “Star Wars,” as president and chief creative officer, into its sixth decade and beyond. Filoni, who served as the chief commercial officer of Lucasfilm, will inherit the mantle of one of the movies marquee franchises, alongside Lynwen Brennan, president and general manager of Lucasfilm’s businesses, who will serve as co-president.

“When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn’t have imagined what lay ahead,” said Kennedy. “It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm.”

Kennedy, Lucas’ handpicked successor, had presided over the ever-expanding science-fiction world of “Star Wars” since Disney acquired it in 2012. In announcing Thursday’s news, Bob Iger, chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Co. called her “a visionary filmmaker.”

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The private deal for “Action Comics No. 1” was announced Friday. It eclipses the previous record price for a comic book, set last November when a copy of “Superman No. 1″ was at sold at auction for $9.12 million.

The Action Comics sale was negotiated by Manhattan-based Metropolis Collectibles/Comic Connect, which said the comic book’s owner and the buyer wished to remain anonymous.

The comic — which sold for 10 cents when it came out in 1938 — was an anthology of tales about mostly now little-known characters. But over a few panels, it told the origin story of Superman’s birth on a dying planet, his journey to Earth and his decision as an adult to “turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind.”

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The title of the film already indicates a lot. Jay and Silent Bob have been dynamic characters with a big arc in Smith’s films. They’ve also often served as symbolic or metaphorical figures, reflecting changing times in the world, or phases in the director’s life, most often illustrated by “Silent” Bob’s standalone moments giving sage-like monologues. Clerks III (2022) was Smith’s unabashed rumination on his own near-death experience and new reality as a middle-aged man, but it also had a funny subplot joke about Jay and Silent Bob’s place in the changing world.

“For those who recall and still follow this closely, in Clerks III, they now run their own dispensary, since weed is legal in New Jersey,” Smith explains. “Store Wars is basically Spy vs. Spy. Another dispensary opens up across the street, and they spend the whole movie fighting and trying to destroy one another. So, it’s a stoner comedy, man, of the highest order, and I’m happy as hell.”

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As such, MTV today stopped showing a 24-hour feed of music videos in the UK after 38 years in rotation. MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live have all stopped broadcasting in the UK as well as Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Australia and Brazil.

They went out just as the original American 24/7 music video channel began, according to the BBC’s Jono Reed: with the Buggles’ sunny “Video Killed the Radio Star.” 

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Though it has been 25 years since a new daily “Peanuts” comic strip was drawn, it remains a force in popular culture, and the museum holds a great variety of artifacts showing the work of its creator, Charles M. Schulz, and revealing how the strip and its characters have won a prominent place in entertainment history. Schulz announced his retirement in December 1999 after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. His last newly drawn daily, Monday through Saturday, strip appeared on January 3, 2000, and, in a shocking coincidence, his final full-color Sunday strip ran on February 13 of that year, just one day after he died.

Among the National Museum of American History’s trove of “Peanuts”-related paraphernalia are a pen, pencil, brush and artist’s board used by Schulz. An original hand-drawn comic strip, a camera-ready strip and cels from animated TV productions reflect Schulz’s creative work, and the museum also holds everyday items bearing the likenesses of “Peanuts” characters, such as mugs, lunchboxes, musical banks, thermoses, yo-yos and a 1973 Mother’s Day plate.

While “Peanuts” ended, in a sense, in 2000, it has since found new audiences through continued syndication in thousands of newspapers and productions in other media. Today, Peanuts Worldwide, which owns the “Peanuts” characters, has millions of followers across its social platforms, where “Peanuts” comic strips, graphics and clips are regularly shared. At the same time, the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, welcomes guests to explore the artist’s life and work.

Charlie Brown, who Schulz said was modeled on himself, “was dealing with an existential crisis,” says Jentsch. He believes that Charlie Brown’s confrontation with his failures and the way he dealt with them “really resonated with not only kids, but obviously adults, because it’s a universal condition.”

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