The prequel, tentatively titled 'Oceans,' centers on the parents of Danny Ocean—the character originated by George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh's 2001 heist classic. In the story, Cooper and Robbie portray these characters, who teach their children, including a young Danny and his sister Debbie , the intricacies of high-stakes thievery from the wealthy. The narrative unfolds against the glamorous backdrop of the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix, drawing stylistic inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's 'To Catch a Thief.'

This development follows a turbulent production history. The project was greenlit three years ago with Jay Roach initially attached to direct. Roach later departed, replaced by Lee Isaac Chung, known for directing 'Minari' and 'Twisters.' Chung exited last month citing creative differences, prompting a search for a new director amid plans for a summer shoot. Cooper, who had already stepped in as co-lead replacing Ryan Gosling, now appears poised to direct as well.

The current screenplay comes from Carrie Solomon, who previously penned the 2024 Netflix film 'A Family Affair.' Plot details are described as locked in, with production targeted to start this summer in Monaco. Puck reporter Matt Belloni broke the news of Cooper's potential involvement.

Cooper's move to direct aligns with his recent filmmaking choices. Following acclaimed directorial efforts like 'A Star Is Born' and 'Maestro,' he helmed the December 2025 romantic comedy 'Is This Thing On?,' a lighter project that served as a departure from awards-season contenders. This prequel represents a continuation of that approach, focusing on an entertaining caper rather than dramatic prestige fare.

While the story itself does not directly involve LGBTQ+ characters or themes based on available details, the 'Ocean's' franchise has long appealed to diverse audiences, including LGBTQ+ filmgoers who appreciate its blend of glamour, wit, and ensemble dynamics. Margot Robbie, an outspoken ally to transgender people and other LGBTQ+ communities, has consistently used her platform to advocate for inclusive representation in Hollywood. Her involvement could draw attention from LGBTQ+ media outlets eager for stylish, star-driven entertainment. No specific community responses to this casting or directorial news have emerged in initial coverage. Warner Bros. has not issued an official statement confirming the talks.

The film's old-school heist vibe, evoking Hitchcock's elegance, positions it as a potential summer crowd-pleaser amid a competitive release landscape. Industry observers note the project's resilience despite setbacks, signaling strong studio commitment. As deals progress, further updates on the creative team and casting are anticipated.

The parade traditionally draws crowds from across Massachusetts and beyond, with marching bands, floats, veterans’ groups and local organizations making their way along the route through South Boston.

City officials said preparations had been underway for weeks, with police, transit officials and emergency crews coordinating safety and transportation plans as large crowds gather in the neighborhood.

The event is a major annual tradition in Boston, a city with deep Irish roots, and often coincides with celebrations of Evacuation Day, which commemorates the departure of British troops from Boston in 1776.

Officials encouraged people attending the parade to plan ahead for road closures and crowded public transit as the neighborhood fills with spectators throughout the day.

Last year’s parade drew tens of thousands of attendees and featured dozens of marching groups.

This year’s event was expected to begin late Sunday morning and continue into the afternoon.

Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is the favorite heading into the ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. But Coogler’s “Sinners” comes in the lead nominee with a record 16 nominations. Both filmmakers are poised to leave with their first Oscar.

But little else is assured at an Academy Awards where Michael B. Jordan or Timothée Chalamet (despite the ballet diss heard 'round the world) could win their first Academy Award in a too-close-to-call best actor race.

How to watch and stream the Oscars and red carpet

The telecast will air live on ABC and stream on Hulu beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern. (YouTube will be the new home of the Oscars beginning in 2029.) The official red carpet preshow begins on ABC and Hulu at 6:30 p.m. EDT, while E! will kick off its red-carpet broadcast at 4 p.m.

The Associated Press will have a livestream of fashion arrivals from noon to 3:30 p.m. Pacific on APNews.com and YouTube.

What to expect from the 2026 Oscars

Conan O’Brien is returning as host for the second year in a row. Despite the war in Iran and expanding geopolitical turmoil, O’Brien has pledged an entertaining show in the mold of hosts like Bob Hope and Johnny Carson. “Let’s have fun with it, is my attitude,” O’Brien told reporters earlier in the week.

Still, the already high security will be even greater this year at an Oscars, taking place two weeks after the United States and President Donald Trump launched the war with Iran.

“Of course, every year we monitor what’s going on in the world,” Raj Kapoor, executive producer of the show, said earlier in the week. “We have the support of the FBI and the LAPD, and it’s a close collaboration.”

Two of the five best song nominees will be performed: “I Lied to You,” from “Sinners,” with Miles Caton, Raphael Saadiq and others; and “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters.”

Theatrical looks to best streaming, again

“KPop Demon Hunters,” a Sony Pictures production that was sold to Netflix, was the most-watched movie of 2025. (It has 325 million views and counting, making it Netflix's most-streamed movie ever.) But it seems all but certain that the night’s final award won’t go to a streaming release; Apple's “CODA” remains the only to achieve that. Instead best picture is likely to go to an anomaly in today’s movie industry: big-budget original films from a personal vision.

“Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” were both theatrical releases shot on film. And both came from Warner Bros., the legacy studio that’s agreed to merge with David Ellison’s new media colossus, Paramount Skydance. The $111 billion deal, which awaits regulatory approval, has rattled an industry already reconciling itself to the acquisitions of MGM (by Amazon) and 20th Century Fox (by The Walt Disney Co.).

Elegy may mark Sunday’s Oscars. The in memoriam segment is expected to include, among many others, remembrances of Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall. O’Brien, who had hosted a party attended by Rob and Michele Reiner the night before their deaths, has promised a “very powerful” tribute.

New this year is a best casting category. Another innovation is a requirement that Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members watch all nominees before voting. On the academy’s streaming platform — even Oscar voting is streamed — voters had to check a box attesting to having watched each nominee before voting in a category.

Few sure things in the acting categories

Whether those changes will have any effect on some of the night’s closest races remains to be seen. Coming into the show, best actor is one of the most hard-to-call categories. Chalamet had been seen as the front-runner for his performance in “Marty Supreme.” But a swaggering meta campaign, that drew headlines, of all things, a perceived slight of ballet and opera, may have helped put Jordan into the lead. (In Chalamet's favor, the uproar only started as voting was ending.)

While Jessie Buckley (“Hamnet”) is widely expecting to win best actress, a first for Irish performers, the supporting categories are highly competitive. Amy Madigan (“Weapons”) is the slight favorite in best supporting actress, but Teyana Taylor (“One Battle After Another”) and Wunmi Mosaku (“Sinners”) are in the mix, too.

Despite almost no campaigning, Penn is viewed as the best supporting actor favorite. That award, could easily also go to Stellan Skarsgård (“Sentimental Value”) or Delroy Lindo (“Sinners”).

Though the Oscars often feel largely removed from their times, a crop of nominees that explicitly grapple with the current political moment will be center stage. That includes not just “One Battle After Another,” which opens with a raid on an immigration detention facility, but movies like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian political thriller “The Secret Agent” and Jafar Panahi’s Iranian revenge drama “It Was Just an Accident.”

The war in Iran has particular meaning to Panahi, whose film is nominated for best international feature and for best screenplay. The esteemed Iranian filmmaker and last year's Palme d'Or winner has made films clandestinely in his native Iran despite repeated imprisonment, travel ban and even home arrest. While promoting the film, Panahi was sentenced to a year in prison. At least one of his cowriter nominees, Mehdi Mahmoudian, was unable to leave Iran to attend Sunday’s awards.

Twenty three years ago, the Academy Awards were also held amid war in the Middle East. The 2003 Oscars took place just three days before the Iraq War began. Many in Hollywood protested the war. “Chicago” won best picture.

The storied Chicago Bears want to leave historic Soldier Field, where they've played for half a century. Indiana lawmakers are attempting to lure them from the Windy City with a plan to finance and build a domed stadium in Hammond, Indiana, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from their current home on Lake Michigan's shore.

The Illinois General Assembly has responded with legislation that would give tax breaks to so-called megaprojects of at least $100 million, a plan that would encompass the Bears' proposal to build a complex in the northwest Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, about the same distance from Soldier Field as Hammond.

Critics complain it's a bad deal for Illinois, where property taxes are already among the highest in the nation — especially when taxpayers still owe hundreds of millions of dollars on a Soldier Field renovation from two decades ago.

Here's a look at what's shaping up to be a showdown.

Why the big deal?

The Bears, one of only two remaining NFL founding members, are legend. Their nine championships, including a Super Bowl win, are second only to the rival Green Bay Packers — though recent decades have brought mostly heartbreak. The franchise carries an $8.9 billion price tag, among the most valuable of the NFL’s 32 teams, according to Forbes.

Born in the central Illinois city of Decatur in 1920, the Bears have called Chicago home for 105 years. Losing them to the Hoosier State would be a major thumb in the eye.

What's wrong with Soldier Field?

With 61,500 seats, it's the NFL's smallest. The Bears have always rented their facilities — the Cubs' Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970, and Soldier Field, maintained by the Chicago Park District, since. Like most teams, they want to own a stadium, giving them control over operations, scheduling and revenue streams from ticket sales, concessions, parking, naming rights and more.

And Soldier Field is open air. An enclosed facility would allow for other marquee sporting events: Super Bowls, NCAA Final Fours or WrestleMania, for instance.

Why the imbroglio between the states?

Along with the states' established cultural and economic differences and an intense college basketball rivalry, the political fissure between Democrat-dominated Chicago and conservative Indiana has widened. It amped up last year when Indiana adopted a commission to study changing the state's boundaries to include some central Illinois counties whose voters have approved ballot measures calling for secession from Chicagoland.

Arlington Heights, back to Chicago, to Hammond

The Bears have threatened to leave Chicago previously. When they broached moving in 1975, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley replied, “Like hell they will.”

But the City of Big Shoulders heaved an anxious sigh in 2023 when the Bears paid about $200 million for a 326-acre (132-hectare) former horse-racing track in Arlington Heights. They have envisioned a $5 billion, taxpayer-assisted development for a domed stadium and campus of housing, hotels, entertainment and retail space.

In 2024, the Bears offered a $5 billion plan, partially taxpayer-funded, for an enclosed stadium next to Soldier Field, which garnered little interest in the capital of Springfield. Late last fall, the team turned to Indiana.

Where the proposals stand

Indiana's lure creates the Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority to finance, construct and lease a domed stadium near Wolf Lake in Hammond. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun signed it into law on Feb. 26. The Bears would agree to a 35-year lease. Borrowed state money would cover the as-yet-unknown cost of construction, repaid by increased local hospitality taxes.

In Illinois, majority Democrats have advanced legislation in the House that would provide incentives for any so-called megaproject of at least $500 million — or less, down to $100 million, depending on the number of jobs created. Developers would pay property taxes frozen at the parcel's pre-construction value for as long as 45 years. During that time, they would make annual payments in lieu of taxes negotiated with local governments. There would also be a sales tax exemption on building materials for up to 15 years.

Critics claim weakness in Illinois plan

Opponents say the Illinois legislation, with its decades-long property tax freeze, would simply mean increased taxes for homeowners and other businesses — the payment in lieu of taxes would be a bonus.

Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who supports the plan, last week countered that the proposal would encourage development on land that isn’t producing property taxes while ensuring increased revenue for local governments.

Meanwhile, a substantial debt remains on the last accommodation. Taxpayers in 2001 put up $399 million to finance a $587 million renovation of Soldier Field. With interest, the remaining tab is $467 million, according to the state's Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

The Bears' $7 million annual lease runs through 2033. Breaking it would cost the Bears a $10.5 million penalty for each year left on the agreement.

Standing in the way? Canada again.

Just like in the men’s and women’s tournaments at the Olympics, Sunday’s gold medal match in Para ice hockey will be between the U.S. and Canada.

“We got to do our part, right? So they got the two done, so now it’s our job and we just got to bring it home for them,” U.S. forward Kevin McKee told The Associated Press.

Naturally, Canada wants bragging rights in the rivalry and to break American Para hearts.

“It is a source of pride for us just to win, like we believe Canada is THE hockey country and we want to prove that,” Canada forward Adam Dixon said.

Both teams dominated the group stage at the Paralympics, each winning all three of their matches. The U.S. then beat the Czech Republic 6-1 in Friday’s semifinals, when Canada struggled at times before overcoming China 4-2.

Canada Para ice hockey captain Tyler McGregor said the two Olympic losses were not playing on his teammates’ minds.

“No. You know what, we’re going to write our own story,” he said. “We watched both our men’s and women’s team compete here a few weeks ago and they played phenomenal.

“Those were two of the best hockey games I’ve ever seen, but this is our story at the Paralympics and we have a chance to bring home a gold medal for Canada. And what an honor that would be.”

Rather than avenge the Olympic defeats, Canada is driven more to avenge losses to the U.S. in the past two gold-medal matches at the Paralympics. It has also lost to the U.S. in four of the past five world championship finals.

“That kind of fuels us,” forward Liam Hickey said. "We’ve learned from those. They’re a great team and we’ve had a great rivalry for as long as this sport’s been around. So for us it’s another kind of chance for redemption and we’re excited for it.”

US domination

If the U.S. achieves the treble, it would be the second straight year it has swept the major tournaments, having won the men’s and women’s world championships and world Para ice hockey championship in 2025.

There is no women’s division at the Paralympics as its classified as an open-gender sport.

U.S. defender Jack Wallace said the group has been talking about the sweep since watching the women’s Olympic final together during a training camp. They were also messaging each other during the men’s final.

Coach David Hoff would prefer his players bury all thoughts of a sweep before Sunday’s final.

“There’s a lot of talk about it,” Hoff admitted. “I think for us it’s really just putting the blinders on and really focusing on what we have to do. Don’t let that outside stuff cloud your preparation or bother you. Sometimes that’s hard to do but I think our guys have really done a good job.”

While the Olympics saw the U.S. men’s team win gold for the first time since the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980, it’s a different story at the Paralympics.

The U.S. has triumphed at five of the past six Paralympics and several players are targeting a fourth straight gold medal. Captain Josh Pauls is incredibly aiming for a fifth.

“You’ve got to enjoy the guys you’re playing with,” Pauls said when asked about the team’s secret to success. “We have such a brotherhood, we just enjoy playing the game, we enjoy competing, we enjoy getting better, but also helping the other guy across from us get better.

“And I mean, I am just so glad to play another team other than our guys, because man, our guys are really tough to play.”

“If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll turn up late,” White wrote, saying his kitchen staff at Harveys accepted that. “They were all pain junkies, they had to be. They couldn’t get enough of the bollockings."

No more.

The public downfall this week of Denmark's Rene Redzepi, arguably the world's top chef, has forced a reckoning in real time over when “brigade de cuisine" becomes abuse and what should happen to perpetrators who direct the creation of edible art.

At issue is whether time is up on the storied bullying and intimidation of fine dining kitchen culture, brought to the masses through pop culture by celebrity chef reality shows and high-end TV like “The Bear." Lofty, pricey matters like leadership style and legal liability are suddenly at the center of a relatively small industry known for narrow profit margins, not HR departments or training.

“The resources aren’t there for self-policing,” said Robin Burrow, associate professor of organization studies at the University of York. “The general feeling, though, is that things are so tough even for very good chefs that this kind of culture ends up being inevitable.”

Kitchen magician, toxic chef

Redzepi, a Danish knight and the founder of Noma and innovative “New Nordic” cuisine, stepped down Thursday after The New York Times reported that dozens of former employees had shared their accounts of abuse and assault between 2009 and 2017 at the Copenhagen landmark. Redzepi had been dogged for years by reports of mistreating his staff and employing unpaid interns at Noma, which received three Michelin stars and was ranked first on the World's 50 Best Restaurants List five times.

The allegations overshadowed Noma's $1,500-a-head pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles. Sponsors pulled their funding for the residency, which opened on Wednesday to a small gathering of protesters. Redzepi announced his resignation on Instagram with a tearful video soon after. “An apology is not enough,” he said. "I take responsibility for my own actions.”

Former employees said Redzepi has never been held accountable for his conduct, which included punching members of the staff, jabbing them with kitchen tools and threatening to get them blacklisted from restaurants or have their families deported.

Jason Ignacio White, a former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, collected anonymous testimonies of alleged abuse at the restaurant and posted them to his Instagram page. The accounts have been viewed millions of times.

“Noma destroyed my passion for the industry," one post said. "I struggled with intense anxiety, bad enough to give me panic attacks in the middle of the night. The trauma, abuse and idea that nothing would ever change all led me to walk away from the career.”

The kitchen brigade system is entrenched

The process at the heart of restaurants worldwide is the “brigade de cuisine," a strict organization of the kitchen developed around the turn of the 20th century by French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, who based it on his own military experience.

Under its hierarchy, every member of the staff has a specialty — from the “chief” to the sauce-maker, the roast cook, the grill cook and the fish cook. Their choreography and their communications — “Hand!” and “Yes, chef!” — are designed for speed, consistency and cleanliness.

Even so, kitchen atmospheres have long been filled with chaos and intensity. Escoffier himself wrote that his first chef believed it was impossible to govern a kitchen “without a shower of slaps.”

George Orwell, the essayist and author of the dystopian classic “1984,” once described the restaurant kitchen of his time as a place where one person in the hierarchy yelled at his subordinate, who yelled at someone below him and so on. Weeping was not unusual. As a plongeur (dishwasher), Orwell ranked at the bottom.

“A plongeur is one of the slaves of the modem world,” he wrote in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933. “He is no freer than if he were bought and sold.”

It's a place 'where the rules don't apply'

In the modern era, professional kitchens are thought to be some of the toughest places to work thanks to a recipe of long hours, close quarters, strict hierarchies, grueling physical conditions and relentless pressure.

The rise of the chef as an auteur during the 1970s with an obsession with Michelin-star-level excellence only accelerated the poor behavior as prices and egos rose.

In his 2006 memoir, White described his kitchen at Harveys in London as “my theatre of cruelty” and boasted of giving his chefs “a 10-second throttle.” Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” helped romanticize that testosterone-fueled vision, describing kitchens filled with “heated argument, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting.”

Personal accounts and research suggest there's painful truth behind the romanticized branding. Cardiff University conducted interviews with 47 elite chefs for a 2021 study and found that the isolation of commercial kitchens can produce a sort of “geography of deviance” that create “feelings of invisibility, alienation and detachment” in lower-ranking employees. It also found that chef conduct can make a kitchen “an instrument of social withdrawal and a symbol of deviance around which the community pivots.”

Open kitchens in part were designed to merge the two spaces, kitchens and dining rooms. Several employees told The Times that when Redzepi wanted to discipline them in the open kitchen but there were customers in the dining room, he would crouch under the counters and jab them in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil.

Many chefs' proteges stay silent because they don't want to risk the opportunity to learn from the best — or the potential to launch high-flying culinary careers of their own. That was the case in the fictional, wildly popular show “The Bear,” in which the main character, Carmy Berzatto, endured open and flagrant abuse so that he can study under one of the world's greatest chefs.

The downfall of a 'visionary'

Noma — a contraction of the Danish words for Nordisk and Mad, meaning Nordic and food — opened in 2003 dedicated to "a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients by foraging and to follow the seasons." By the time Redzepi stepped down, he had become so prominent in the culinary world that Noma played a role in “The Bear” as the training ground for two main characters. Redzepi himself appeared on the series in a cameo.

It wasn't his first time on camera. He'd also been seen yelling at cooks in the 2008 documentary “Noma at Boiling Point,” and has made several public apologies. He acknowledged in a 2015 essay, being “a bully for a large part of my career.” He said he's “yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times.”

And — today's mass-culture excitement around intense kitchen behavior notwithstanding — he seemed to recognize even then that the old way alienated young, talented workers and jeopardized the future of cuisine.

“The only way we will be able to reap the promise of the present is by confronting the unpleasant legacies of our past," Redzepi said, “and collectively forging a new path forward.”

Instead, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker is looking forward to spending one more night with his “Sinners” collaborators who helped bring the film to life.

Coogler could become the first Black filmmaker to win best director in the Academy Awards’ nearly century-long history. While speaking before the eighth annual Macro Pre-Oscars party Thursday night in Los Angeles, he said he’s trying to stay present as the ceremony approaches.

“I’m just trying to enjoy the days as they come, stay present in the moment,” Coogler told The Associated Press. “When Sunday comes, man, I’m pull up and enjoy celebrating all the movies that’s being celebrated here, including our own.”

For Coogler, the Oscars also mark the final stop in a monthslong journey shared with the cast and creative team behind “Sinners.”

Since early January, the group has traveled the awards circuit together, appearing at major stops including the Golden Globes,Actors Awards and NAACP Image Awards as the film built momentum ahead of the Oscars, where it's the leading nominee with 16.

Coogler said that experience helped turn the production into something closer to a family.

“We made a big ole family,” he said. “Sunday kind of represents the last time that we all get to hang with each other in an official capacity as the ‘Sinners’ team.”

After the ceremony, those gatherings will likely become less frequent.

“The next time we see each other, it won’t be for this movie unless it’s doing like a reunion or something,” Coogler said. “I’m looking forward to hanging out with a lot of people that I love. We were able to do something very specific together.”

The cast and creative team of “Sinners” were among those honored Thursday at the Macro party, which celebrates nominees of color across the film industry.

Hosted by Macro founder and CEO Charles D. King and Chief Brand Officer Stacey Walker King, the eighth annual gathering has become a sought-after event, drawing more than 700 attendees — which included Damson Idris, Coco Jones and Janelle James.

“I could not be more excited about 'Sinners’ nominations,” Stacey Walker King said. “I could not be more excited about the way that we’re showing up on these carpets and in these areas.”

Charles D. King said Coogler’s influence on the industry already represents a meaningful achievement.

“He’s already winning,” King said. “To be able to be this filmmaker who can inspire and entertain the world and then be acknowledged by their peers within our artistic industry is icing on the cake.”

“Sinners,” a supernatural drama set in the American South that blends historical storytelling, folklore and genre filmmaking, stars Michael B. Jordan in dual roles and continues the actor’s long creative partnership with Coogler.

Previous Black filmmakers nominated for best director at the Oscars include John Singleton, Lee Daniels, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele and Spike Lee.

Since at least the 1960s, the telenovelas, Latin American TV series often compared to soap operas, produced by Brazil's leading broadcaster TV Globo have evolved from simple daily dramas into a multi-million-dollar industry with 13 studios, three set towns, 122 edit bays and reaching up to 60 million of Brazil's 213 million people every week.

Many Brazilian actors associated with Oscar-contending films — such as “Central Station” (1998), “I’m Still Here” (2024) and this year’s four-category nominee “The Secret Agent” — first became household names via TV Globo. Actors like Wagner Moura and Fernanda Torres gained broad national visibility through telenovelas.

In contrast, Brazil only has about 3,500 movie theaters, mostly located in major cities and where U.S. blockbusters feature prominently. This creates an ecosystem where success on TV may lead to big cinema roles, which then circle back to popular telenovelas, and then on to movies again.

Telenovelas fuel fame

Moura, the lead actor in “The Secret Agent," starred in the telenovela “A Lua Me Disse” (The Moon told Me) 21 years ago. Similarly, Fernanda Torres, the star of “I’m Still Here,” which won Brazil’s first best international feature Oscar, was already a beloved actor due to two major TV Globo comedic series that many in the public see as telenovelas.

“Globo’s telenovelas are key for Brazil’s audiovisual production," said Amauri Soares, director of TV Globo and Globo Studios, hailing them as “a continuous platform of creation and production of content.”

"‘The Secret Agent’ has actors and staffers who worked at Globo, who will work at Globo again and the film itself has Globo investment despite being independent,” Soares said.

TV Globo broadcasts three telenovelas simultaneously from early evening to prime-time. They are produced at studios in Rio de Janeiro and often run for six months from Mondays to Saturdays, involving more than 1,000 people. A finale can turn into a national viewing event, with bars, restaurants and gyms airing main episodes.

The industry requires adaptability. With some episodes written only days in advance based on audience ratings, telenovelas allow viewers to indirectly co-create the narrative. And their economic impact is powerful: a remake of the hit “Vale Tudo” (Anything Goes) reportedly generated over 200 million reais ($38 million) in advertising — fourfold the global box office of “The Secret Agent.”

Dozens of actors scouted every year

Each year, TV Globo recruits up to 70 new actors from theater, film and regional productions. Soares says they hone their skills with high-end equipment and new techniques for a year. Then many leave for other productions, some just stay at the broadcaster for more short series.

Dira Paes, a veteran actor and one of TV Globo’s frequent pundits during Oscars’ night, notes that Brazil’s telenovelas and cinema industries are increasingly intertwined, as professionals can move from one to the other to create and also make more money. She was recently in another popular series,“Pantanal” (Wetlands), and in “Manas,” a film praised by Julia Roberts and Sean Penn.

“Telenovelas are not only about ratings, but also heart and affection. When you do it on prime-time, you experience the power of an entire nation watching you. When the public loves your character ... it is a very special popularity,” said Paes, the star of “Tres Gracas” (Three Gracas), a show filmed in Rio but set in an impoverished area of Sao Paulo.

Mauricio Stycer, an author and critic of TV culture, says Brazil's inequality boosted free TV channels like Globo in a way that reduced the general public's interest in cinema. Ultimately, he argues, that led to “Brazilian cinema holding a grudge for not having the same reach of telenovelas.”

TV a ‘safe haven’ for some actors

Stycer added that many actors have a Hamletian dilemma whenever recruited for a telenovela.

“To be popular and have a sure income every month or to take risks in a career that involves theater and cinema? TV was always a safe haven for most actors,” he said.

While rival Brazilian TV networks have tried to challenge Globo’s supremacy in the genre, few have achieved success. But even TV Globo productions are no longer as dominant as they were up until the early 2010s. And company executives have acknowledged they face growing competition from streaming video.

Even so, “Globo is still Brazil’s biggest company for actors,” Stycer said. “Up until the year 2000, Globo alone was responsible for about 50% of TV ratings in Brazil."

Actor and director Lázaro Ramos first appeared in telenovelas after he had kicked off his career in theater and cinema. He says Brazilians have learned to love both telenovelas and films with the same intensity when they succeed in portraying the country’s joyful and sometimes dark personality.

“Brazilians see themselves in telenovelas, more and more. Our acclaimed writers created many of them based on literature classics,” Ramos said. “They are an investment in a national voice through characters, language and esthetics that viewers greatly identify with."

Ramos — a lifelong friend of Moura — will attend the Academy Awards but will fly back to Brazil soon after to continue working on his new show, “A Nobreza do Amor” (Love's Nobility).

For him, the ability to transition between theater, cinema and TV is what keeps Brazilian performers afloat.

“An American actor could get $10 million for a film. That’s not the Brazilian reality,” he said. “But telenovelas are not a lesser product; they are a product of the highest quality.”

The legal conflict traces back to October 2025, when Kardashian, 45, and Jenner, 70, sued Ray J, also 45, for defamation after he publicly alleged they engaged in racketeering and violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act . Ray J responded in November 2025 with a cross-complaint, claiming Kardashian and Jenner orchestrated the tape's release to create "buzz," defraud the public, and file a fabricated lawsuit against Vivid Entertainment. He further alleged they violated a prior settlement agreement by discussing the tape.

In her declaration, Kardashian stated: " claim that I had a plan with my mother and others to release a sex tape, defraud the public, and file a 'fake' lawsuit against the porn company that released it to 'create buzz' is a lie." She added that she has incurred expenses combating Ray J's "lies." Jenner described the accusations as "absolutely false" and "deeply offensive and harmful," emphasizing: "As a mother, the notion that I orchestrated or produced sex tapes involving my daughter, or was in any way involved in the creation or distribution of any sex tapes, is not only entirely untrue but deeply offensive and harmful and has haunted me for decades." Both called the claims "disgusting."

Kardashian has separately argued that Ray J's statements are harming her efforts to become a lawyer, while Jenner accused him of "publicly terrorizing" her daughter. Following the filings, Ray J told TMZ: "The fact of the matter is, if you lie like that under oath, don’t you go to jail?" A hearing on Ray J's motion to dismiss occurred last week, with a ruling pending.

This case revives long-standing public speculation about the tape's origins, which some attribute to intentionally boosting Kardashian's profile. While no direct LGBTQ+ community responses or impacts are documented in coverage of this specific development, the broader context of non-consensual intimate imagery distribution has drawn attention from organizations advocating for survivors, including those in the LGBTQ+ community where revenge porn disproportionately affects transgender people and others facing digital harassment. The Kardashian-Jenner family's influence in media continues to shape discussions on celebrity privacy and exploitation narratives. Legal experts note that defamation cases involving public figures require proving actual malice, a high bar set by precedents like New York Times v. Sullivan. The dispute underscores enduring reputational stakes from early-career scandals in the entertainment industry.