movies
Daily Telegraph Publisher Sold To Axel Springer For $761M
The publisher of The Daily Telegraph‘s sale to Germany’s Axel Springer for £575M ($761M) has completed.
The deal brings to and end a long period of uncertainty at Telegraph Media Group (TMG), which publishes the 172-year-old Telegraph tabloid newspaper in the UK. It closed after regulatory approval was gained in the UK, Ireland and Austria.
Axel Springer, owner of German tabloid Bild and dozens of other titles such as Politico and Business Insider, is planning for TMG “accelerated digital transformation, leverage AI to support innovation and growth, continue to develop its journalistic excellence, and expand into the U.S. market.”
”Today is a day we have worked towards for a long time, and one we will always remember,” said Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. “Axel Springer was founded in 1946 under a British press license, and The Telegraph was our North Star.
“Axel Springer and The Telegraph share strong commitments to freedom, values, a tradition of embracing and pioneering technological change, and an entrepreneurial will to actively shape the future. This creates a strong foundation for further accelerating our AI-powered digital transformation. Together we can lead the next generation of trusted media.“
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movies
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Season 2 Down 59% On Netflix
Harlan Coben‘s latest mystery is dominating Netflix. I Will Find You attracted 34M in its first full week on the streamer, making it easily the most-watched title from June 22 to 28.
That’s also up from the 24M views that I Will Find You snagged in its opening weekend, which was already the streamer’s biggest original debut of the year so far, suggesting some strong momentum. In the eight episode thriller, Sam Worthington plays David Burroughs, a father serving a life sentence for the murder of his son — a crime he didn’t commit.
Avatar: The Last Airbender also returned to Netflix over the weekend with Season 2 tallying 8.7M views and taking second place on the English TV list. That’s a steep decline from the first season, which premiered to 21.2M views over the same timeframe in 2024. The first season also reentered the list in the No. 3 spot with 3M views.
The viewership decline isn’t isolated and, to some degree, many television shows see audience depreciation season-over-season. Netflix in particular has experienced this lately with several returning series that debuted to strong numbers but couldn’t beat the sophomore slump, including The Four Seasons, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Running Point, A Man on the Inside, and Beef.
Elsewhere in TV, Season 3 of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders managed No. 5 with 2.2M views.
Over in film, the success of I Will Find You was rivaled by Voicemails for Isabelle, which topped the English film list with 31M views in its first full week, up significantly from 17.5M views for its opening weekend.
Little Brother debuted to No. 2 on the film list with 14M views, and Maternal Instinct took the No. 3 spot on the list with 8.5M views.
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movies
Comcast’s Credit May Suffer From “Reduced Revenue Diversification” After Split, Moody’s Says
Many of Comcast‘s long-impeccable credit ratings have been put under review for a potential downgrade by Moody’s due to the company’s planned split into two separate companies.
A report issued Tuesday by the major ratings agency said the revenue mix that has sustained Comcast for 15 years will no longer be in place once the split is completed in mid-2027. The result will be two more focused entities – one with the entertainment assets of NBCUniversal and Sky, and the other with the cable and broadband portfolio that has long been a foundational element of Comcast.
The operating environment confronted by the company has significantly changed, according to the report by Neil Mack, VP and senior analyst in Moody’s corporate finance group, and Lenny J. Ajzenman, Associate Managing Director
“Comcast’s reduced revenue diversification following the planned public spin-off of NBCUniversal and Sky assets concentrates the remaining entity’s exposure to intensifying competition in broadband end markets,” Mack said in a statement provided to Deadline. “The credit resilience of cable broadband business models remains under pressure due to debt leverage increasingly in conflict with negative operating trends, which is raising investor concerns about appropriate debt leverage tolerance levels in lower-growth end markets.”
Comcast has about 29 million residential broadband customers, 10.9 million pay-TV customers and 46 million subscribers to streaming flagship Peacock.
The spin-off of most of NBCU’s cable networks into a stand-alone company, Versant Media, has helped the balance sheet, but Moody’s sees it as presenting challenges at the same time.
The company’s enviably low debt-to-earnings ratio of 2.7x for the 12 months ended March 31 is “in line with year-end 2025,” prior to the Versant spin. Still, “debt leverage will be pressured in 2026 from the loss of EBITDA and cash flow tied to the declining but high-margin businesses spun-off as Versant,” the report said. “While the company’s excellent liquidity and financial flexibility are supportive of the current credit profile, the negative secular pressures buffeting Comcast’s broadband-focused Connectivity and Platforms segment are heightening overall business risks.”
Comcast shares, which rose 4.5% on Monday after the split news, were up another fraction toward the end of Tuesday’s trading session.
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movies
Michael Byrne Dead: ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘Harry Potter’ Actor Was 82
Michael Byrne, the British character actor and stage veteran who played a Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the wizard Gellert Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, died June 20, The Guardian reported. He was 82.
The blue-eyed Byrne also was memorable as a soldier to attempts to rape the wife of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in Braveheart (1995) and as a concentration camp survivor who helps bring down Ian McKellen’s Nazi war criminal in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998).
His film résumé included Mike Newell’s The Good Father (1985), Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Philip Noyce’s The Saint (1997), Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), Phil Alden Robinson’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) and Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet (2012).
Byrne portrayed the ruthless Colonel Vogel in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and he was the elderly Grindelwald, the dark wizard who had been defeated in a duel with Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010).
Born in Hampstead in north London on Nov. 7, 1943, Byrne appeared alongside the likes of Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens in National Theatre Company productions in the 1960s.
In 1971, he starred with Alan Bates in the West End in Butley, directed by Harold Pinter, and the trio reunited for the 1974 film version.
The 1970s also saw him in several war films, among them John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Guy Hamilton’s Force 10 From Navarone (1978).
His more recent stage roles included a turn in 2010 as Romeo opposite Sian Phillips as Juliet at the Bristol Old Vic. And for television, he starred from 2008-10 as Ted Page, the long-lost ex-lover of Sue Nicholls’ Audrey Roberts and dad of Helen Worth’s Gail Platt, on the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.
Survivors include his wife, actress Carole Nimmons, whom he married in 1965; their daughters, Tara and Bryony, and their grandchildren, Tom, Chloe and Jasmine.
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