When you enter RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, it’s almost impossible not to think about the person whose name appears everywhere.

RM (short for Rap Monster) is, after all, one of the most recognizable musicians in the world. As the leader of BTS, he has spent years performing on the world stage and existing in a state of near-constant visibility. But inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the scale of that fame begins to feel almost beside the point.

What’s on display here isn’t RM the celebrity. It’s just him: Kim Namjoon, a 32-year-old private citizen from Seoul, South Korea, who happens to have a penchant for finding beauty in everyday life through art.

RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me opens on October 3 and runs until February 7, 2027. It’s his first time as a co-curator and the first museum show of 142 pieces from his own collection. Along with 36 works from SFMOMA, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 pieces by Korean and international artists, spanning centuries and many art forms—paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, textiles, and animation. Artists include To Sangbong, Yun Hyong-keun, Mark Rothko, Chang Ucchin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Nam June Paik, and others.

RM insisted on variety. “There’s not a singular style, there’s no singular medium,” SFMOMA co-curator Hyoeun Kim told Deadline. “He has a painting, sculpture, furniture, ceramic, fabric, and then animation [all in the same space].”

Since the works aren’t arranged as a linear historical timeline of Korean art, it makes you wonder what RM wanted to say by mixing artists from different times and cultures. “From the beginning, we didn’t really want to highlight something that was just like, ‘Oh, this is going to be an exhibition about Korean art,’” Kim explained. “This exhibition was about good artists from Korea, and then we also added other artists from America and other international places. We wanted all of these artworks to have a conversation together.”

RM has been in conversation with art since, as he told the New York Times, a visit to The Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 during downtime while BTS was on tour. Since then, his relationship with art has extended well beyond collecting. In 2020, he donated approximately $80,000 to the Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Foundation to support the production and distribution of Korean art books for public and school libraries. He later narrated an audio guide for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA)The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art in 2022. And this past June, the National Museum of Korea appointed him as its first Global Public Relations Ambassador, a role focused on helping promote the value of Korean cultural heritage to audiences at home and around the world.

But Between You and Me doesn’t feel like a celebrity checking another cultural box. If anything, RM seems almost suspicious of the idea that his collection needs to make him look sophisticated. “Do I really need to carry so many unnecessary things that I don’t even need? Have I ended up becoming just a boring, rich snore?” RM said jokingly during his opening remarks to the media. “I’m always drifting and floating somewhere, whether I’m in the U.S. or even when I’m in Seoul, where I was born and raised, and it’s not a very pleasant feeling,” RM remarked. “So I think I’ve leaned on art a lot because of that feeling.”

The answer to his question, as offered by the exhibition, offers little evidence of pretentiousness. Instead, it reveals a mind constantly making connections, jumping between eras, cultural references and visual artists, finding meaning in both the grandiose and the seemingly insignificant.

Split into eight sections titled Bluewater (파아란 물), Friendscape (친구가 있는 풍경), Home (집), Photobuddha (포토붓다!), People (사람들), Passion (열정), I Don’t Know, But I Like It (말로 설명은 안 되는데, 좋아) and Umber (다색), the exhibition serves up a little bit of thought-provoking discourse about certain aspects of one’s state of being. However, during our preview, there was one room in particular that felt like the exhibition’s beating heart—a place where RM, the bombastic musician, and the more pensive Kim Namjoon meet.

I Don’t Know Why, But I Like It is perhaps the least inclined to behave like a traditional museum gallery. The walls are a deep galaxy blue. Rock formations sit throughout the space. A small model of a modern home with boulders inside is backlit by bright white light. There’s a photograph featuring Doraemon, abstract works with warped faces and hard lines, pixelated imagery, and childlike scribblings by Cy Twombly. One seemingly unassuming portrait is simply a tidy list of anxieties a person might face in their lifetime.

The room’s title comes from RM’s inability to explain every impulse behind his collection. As you enter the room, scribbled on the wall, he explains that he was asked again and again to articulate why he liked the works gathered here, but he couldn’t convey their meaning. “So, I just made a room instead,” he wrote.

It’s an honest take to place on the walls of one of the first exhibitions of its kind inside one of the country’s most high-profile museums. The wall-scroll explanation also reads: “…They’re simply things that I like. But when you think about it, that’s how everyone lives. A captured image, a sentence that passed by, a playlist for working out, a strangely shaped pebble picked up from the beach… even a corner of the heart is, in the end, just each person’s own small exhibition. I don’t know why, I just like it. And honestly, that’s enough.”

But then in the profundity there is Pikachu.

Considering RM’s well-known love for Pokémon, it’s not exactly surprising to see it honored in some way. However, the small animated celluloid depicting the iconic yellow-and-black thunder-magic monster is one of the room’s funniest—and almost unexpected—inclusions.

While speaking to Deadline, co-curator Kim laughed while acknowledging the mouse-type Pokémon just hanging out in the room. “It’s hard for me to pick a favorite piece, but the fact that there’s a Pikachu amidst all of these other brilliant pieces too says a lot about [RM’s] mind.”

Pakistan has selected Mo Naqvi’s nonfiction action thriller Hanging By a Wire as its official entry for Best International Film at the Academy Awards, the first time the country has chosen a documentary for that distinction.

The film captures the drama and suspense around a news event that captured the world’s attention in 2023: the desperate attempt to save six school kids and two adults stranded in a cable car 900 feet above the ground, in a remote area of Northern Pakistan. The kids and adults were nearly hurled out of the car after a cable snapped, leaving them, as the film’s title indicates, hanging by a wire.

“Directed by Naqvi, and written and produced by Naqvi and Bilal Sami, the film revisits the August 2023 cable car emergency in Battagram, northern Pakistan,” notes a release announcing the film’s selection for the Best International Film category. “Combining eyewitness footage, survivor testimony and cinematic reconstructions featuring participants in the rescue, Hanging by a Wire unfolds as a documentary thriller.”

The documentary premiered in World Cinema Documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It has gone on to screen at Tribeca Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. Next Friday, it plays at the 23^rd annual Bend Film Festival in Oregon.

“I’m honored that Hanging by a Wire has been selected to represent Pakistan in the International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, and grateful to the Pakistan Academy Selection Committee,” Naqvi tells Deadline exclusively. “It’s a straight-up disaster film, except it really happened, and you’re watching real footage of it unfolding live. The community on the ground filmed it themselves and trusted me with that footage, so in a real sense they co-authored this film with me. How resilient and resourceful they were, both in the rescue and in documenting it, is what the film is about, and there’s nothing more Pakistani than that.”

Hanging By a Wire is produced by EverWonder Studio, Universal Pictures Content Group, Mindhouse Productions and 64th Street Media. Its theatrical distribution is handled by Dogwoof in the U.K. and Abramorama in the U.S., with a Paramount+ streaming release set for later this month.

There are no “proper roads” in the area where the incident took place, Naqvi explained in a Meet the Filmmaker video posted by Sundance. “The way people get around in the mountains is by using makeshift cable cars. And it is so dangerous.” His Sundance Filmmaker video showed him on board one of the cable cars, only a crisscross metal gate separating him falling to the earth below. “During location scouting, I did this stupid thing of taking one.”

Hanging By a Wire foregrounds an ad hoc group of locals who attempted to stage a rescue, including Sahib Khan, a cable car repairman known in his community as a “sky pirate” for his aerial exploits. Another of the rescuers, dashing Ali Swati who had access to high-quality zipline equipment, also sprang to the aid of the cable car passengers. The Pakistani official who ultimately oversaw the operation – and the likely fall person if the mission went awry — was the forceful Sonia Shamroz, “the district’s no-nonsense head of police.”

Sana Zahra Jafri, deputy chairperson of the Pakistan Academy Selection Committee, commented, “The selection marks a historic milestone for Pakistani documentary filmmaking and brings an extraordinary story from northern Pakistan to the International Feature Film Oscar race.”

After spinning his last web in Spider-Noir, Nicolas Cage wants to see the MCU bring better storytelling back to the superhero genre.

The Oscar winner compared the MCU’s current slate of projects to “a well-funded and glorified WWE,” following its “marvelous” roots as he discussed the recent cancellation of Spider-Noir after one season at Prime Video.

“It started out, in my view, terrific. Some of the early stories were marvelous, the way that they wove all the threads together and told the different character stories and backstories,” he said in a Q&A at Fan Expo Dallas. “But lately, I do say this with love, when I see these 50+ otherwise intelligent, remarkably gifted thespians putting on these ridiculous outfits and getting ready for the fight—let’s face it, it’s cutting all to the fight—it’s hard for me not to be reminded that the MCU is becoming a well-funded and glorified WWE.

Cage added, “And one of the things I liked about Spider-Noir, was it wasn’t cutting to the fight. It was a detective story. There was a mystery there. And I would like to see it get back to telling the stories and not just cutting to the wrestling match.”

Last month, Prime Video opted not to renew Spider-Noir for a second season as Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television explore other Marvel projects in their partnership.

Cage previously reacted to the show’s cancellation after what he called a “perfect” first season, praising his “dangerous, innovative, pop-art Spider-Man” from series creator Oren Uziel.