movies
Blake Lively Looks for an Edge in ‘It Ends With Us’ Settlement
New details are emerging of the 11th-hour deal between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni to avert a headline-splashing trial over alleged sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us.
Baldoni indicated in a joint filing on Thursday that he waived his right to appeal the court’s order last year dismissing his $400 million lawsuit against Lively, opening the door for the actress to recover legal fees and pursue damages under a California law intended to shield sexual harassment victims from retaliatory defamation claims.
If Lively’s bid is granted, the court will schedule proceedings to assess the reputational fallout that flowed from Baldoni’s lawsuit. The actress also seeks punitive damages, which are meant to punish the It Ends With Us director and his faction in the case for particularly egregious misconduct.
After the settlement was announced on Monday, both sides issued a tame joint statement saying that the movie was a “source of pride to all of us” and that Lively’s concerns “deserved to be heard.” At the time, neither group proclaimed they came out of the deal on top.
Now, Lively is jockeying for a legal and public relations edge. Michael Gottlieb and Esra Hudson, lawyers for Lively, in a statement called the settlement a “resounding victory.” They added, “Justin Baldoni and every individual defendant now face personal liability for abusing the legal system to silence and intimidate Ms. Lively. And by admitting that Ms. Lively’s concerns ‘deserved to be heard,’ the defendants have ended once and for all the fiction that Ms. Lively ‘fabricated’ claims of sexual harassment and retaliation.”
Thursday’s filing adds to the uncertainty around the scope of potential liability by Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer, for initiating defamation battles against Lively and The New York Times. Also in play: a lawsuit filed by one of Wayfarer’s insurers for the film, Harco National Insurance, seeking a court order that it has no duty to pay legal fees. Baldoni later accused a trio of other insurers of breach of contract for refusing to cover litigation costs. In total, their policies collectively carried at least $8 million in insurance.
With the settlement, Lively already met one of the hurdles to recover damages from Baldoni after the court last year dismissed his defamation claims. And because he waived his right to appeal the ruling in the deal, the judgment is final.
Under the California law Lively asserts, the actress could be entitled to attorneys’ fees, plus treble and punitive damages, for harm caused by Baldoni’s defamation claims. The law, which went into effect in 2024, is intended to shield sexual harassment and assault victims when they report misconduct as long as they had a reasonable basis for their claims.
In the filing, Lively argues that Baldoni’s lawsuit was meant to retaliate against her. He cites a statement from Wayfarer cofounder Steve Sarowitz in which he said that he was “prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family.” The billionaire financier later said, “I will protect the studio like Israel protected itself from Hamas. There were 39,000 dead bodies. There will be two dead bodies when I’m done. Minimum,” according to the court document.
The actress also contends that she reported the incidents of alleged sexual harassment on the set of the film in good faith, saying that she repeatedly raised concerns to the production, negotiated contractual protections to address the issue and exposed herself to intense scrutiny by filing her lawsuit.
“The Wayfarer Parties defamation action against Blake Lively was baseless from the start,” Hudson writes in the court document. “Despite repeated warnings about the impropriety of their legal claims, and the consequences of continuing to pursue them, the Wayfarer Parties refused to back down. Instead, they stoked the flames of public sentiment.”
Lively says she expects to seek a “multimillion dollar reward” to recover her legal fees and is entitled to damages for harm caused by Wayfarer’s allegedly frivolous lawsuit.
Both sides hired a sprawling team of lawyers for the litigation, with legal expenses likely in the tens of millions of dollars. Many of their firms charge north of $1,000 an hour, and there were nearly 1,500 docket entries in Lively’s case alone.
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movies
Jennifer Lawrence Boards Zach Cregger’s New Line Pic ‘The Flood’
What has been buzzed about is becoming a reality: Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence is starring in Zach Cregger‘s next movie, The Flood at Warner Bros’ New Line Cinema. The pic has a release date of August. 11, 2028.
The sci-fi thriller project brings the Weapons filmmaker back to New Line on which he’ll direct, produce and write based on his original idea. The news comes just as Cregger’s Resident Evil for Sony/Constantin has just crossed the two century mark at the global box office.
Said Cregger, “Mike, Pam and the whole Warner Bros./New Line team were an absolute dream to collaborate with on Weapons, and I couldn’t be happier to dive in with them again. Jennifer is one of a kind, and I’m beyond excited to see her in this role.”
“Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most gifted and compelling actors working today, and we are thrilled to have her at the center of Zach’s bold and wholly original vision for The Flood. Following our extraordinary experience together on Weapons, we could not be more excited to reunite with Zach and the team at Vertigo, as well as Amblin to bring this ambitious film to audiences around the world,” said Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy.
Amblin Entertainment is producing alongside Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment. Plot details are being kept under wraps.
Weapons led the domestic box office for four consecutive weeks and earned $270 million worldwide last year, ranking among 2025’s highest-grossing horror films. Amy Madigan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Aunt Gladys, a character whose story will continue in the upcoming film Gladys.
Lawrence received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook and has also starred in American Hustle, Joy, Don’t Look Up, and The Hunger Games franchise. Through her production company, Excellent Cadaver, she has produced acclaimed films including Causeway, No Hard Feelings, and Die My Love, as well as the documentaries Zurawski v Texas and the Peabody Award-winning Bread and Roses. Most recently, Lawrence earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in Die My Love. Up next, Excellent Cadaver will produce the highly anticipated What Happens at Night, starring Lawrence alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese.
Lawrence is represented by LBI Entertainment and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Kaller & Gellman.
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movies
Trump Looks To Rebrand AI As “Super Intelligence”
Amid a backlash against data centers, worries of massive job loss and doomsday warnings from the industry itself, Donald Trump stood with top tech CEOs and pitched a rebrand.
“We’ve changed the name officially to SI,” Trump told reporters gathered just outside the West Wing, referring to the switch from “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence.”
The president planned to sign an executive order as such on Tuesday afternoon, but it remains to be seen whether it actually will take hold when AI has become so ubiquitous.
Standing with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, among others, Trump also said that the White House meeting between the top executives produced a “self-policing” agreement and one that would be “morally binding.”
Three years ago, when Joe Biden was president, many of the same CEOs gathered on Capitol Hill for a forum on AI led by then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But that meeting, along with others he held to address concerns over the technology, produced no new regulation.
Trump has continued to dismiss calls for greater regulation, warning of a race with China to dominate the technology. And he’s also expressed continued support for data centers even amid a backlash in local communities that has drawn opposition from lawmakers in both parties.
“The data centers are incredible,” Trump said. “And by the way I am very good at real estate. Some of those buildings are absolutely beautiful. They are big strong powerful buildings but they are beautiful.”
Zuckerberg said, “I think what we can all agree on is that the American public and our customers want to know that what we are building is working the way we intended. We drafted a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators, and agreeing that we are going to have all of our board of directors independently review the reports that come from the auditors.”
He added, “The idea isn’t that this is the only thing we will ever do, it is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry can come to.”
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movies
Jennifer Lawrence to Star in Zach Cregger’s The Flood
Jennifer Lawrence will star in Zach Cregger’s sci-fi thriller The Flood.
Warner Bros.’ New Line division is behind the movie, having picked up the project out of turnaround from Netflix earlier this year.
Cregger wrote the script and will direct and produce the thriller, which is based on his original idea and is set for theatrical release on August 11, 2028.
With Cregger’s Resident Evil movie now out and a hit, this is the filmmaker’s next movie to go. Production is due to begin in Europe in the first months of 2027.
Amblin Entertainment is producing alongside Cregger’s frequent collaborators, Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment.
Lawrence’s casting is a coup – for any studio, really – as the actress is known for being quite choosy. Most recently, she earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in post-partum drama Die My Love and will next be seen with Leonardo DiCaprio in drama What Happens at Night, directed by Martin Scorsese.
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