When it first premiered at SXSW way back in the spring 2025, director Andrew Patterson’s “The Rivals of Amziah King” looked like it could be a future awards contender and major crowdpleaser, a triumphant return to the screen for star Matthew McConaughey (for the first time in six years) and an affirmation of rising director Patterson (“The Vast of Night”).

But the film‘s combination of bluegrass-tinged saga and crime film, which followed McConaughey as a singing beekeeper, took some time to find a home and proved to be a harder sell for international audiences, so producer and financier Black Bear opted to release “Amziah King” itself.

The film’s limited opening this past weekend, more than a year after that strong world premiere, was respectable, but not the heralded summer sleeper we may have hoped for.

With just over $1 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend from 632 theaters, “The Rivals of Amziah King” failed to crack the domestic Top 10 in a slower mid-August weekend and managed a per-screen-average of $1,625. That put it behind the concert film “Katseye: Wild Hearts” (also in limited release), Bollywood movie “Vishwanath & Sons” (which was on even fewer screens), and the tenth anniversary re-release of the popular anime “Your Name.”

“Amziah King” is still one of the first releases for Black Bear’s new distribution arm, which also has, to date, put out the Sydney Sweeney boxing biopic “Christy,” Daniel Roher’s “Tuner,” and Guy Ritchie’s “In the Grey.” “Christy” quickly became a punching bag as a major flop from last fall, bringing in just shy of $2 million domestic despite a budget of $15 million and the belief that Sweeney could launch that movie into orbit.

But “Tuner” has proven to be a pleasant surprise. It opened on just four screens this Memorial Day and had a PSA of $26,105. It did $1.7 million in its second weekend from 452 screens, fewer than “Amziah King” did in its opening. It topped out at $4.4 million domestic, the type of specialized release that clearly benefitted from word of mouth and some light awards chatter.

Can that still happen with “Amziah King”? The film is unlikely to expand wider next weekend and will ultimately hit a similar screen count to what “Tuner” did in its own run, never going above 500 theaters, so it will rely on critics and awards buzz to help it grow. IndieWire’s review wasn’t glowing out of last year’s SXSW, but it has a strong Rotten Tomatoes score and a premise that certainly stands out. (In fact, the film’s premise is so unique that comping it to other films would be both tricky and fruitless.)

Perhaps the best comp is to another Black Bear film that hasn’t come out yet, “Wicker,” another starry festival darling with an unusual premise, following a character played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman who falls in love with a man made of wicker. That film has been picking up its own grassroots buzz since it premiered at this year’s Sundance, with people online seeing the first trailer and almost instantly making memes about what it must feel like to sleep with essentially a giant basket.

Regardless, some growing pains are to be expected for some of these upstart distributors, with everyone from 1-2 Special to Row K (which has certainly had its share of problems) trying to thread a needle with smaller films, many of them still with big stars and commercial premises, hoping to find their audience in an unforgiving theatrical market.

“The Rivals of Amziah King” isn’t a flop, but it seems like it’s going to take a bit longer to find its own audience.

Shortly after the news broke that actress Hayden Panettiere had died at 36, fans of her 2005 Disney movie “Ice Princess” began writing the fantasy ending reality had denied them. Panettiere, they imagined in a slew of viral posts, would now be reunited in heaven with Michelle Trachtenberg — her co-star in the ice-skating movie, who died at 39 from complications of diabetes mellitus just last year.

The sentiment draws its power from not just how recently both women passed away, but also the specific arc this beloved Disney film provides. In “Ice Princess,” Trachtenberg plays Casey, a gifted physics student who discovers she would rather pursue a lyrical sport than study math and science at Harvard — while Panettiere plays Gen, the rink’s reigning star, who secretly wants a personal life beyond the athletic career her mother (Kim Cattrall) has chosen for her.

Initially positioned as storytelling opposites and potential teen rivals, the girls gradually recognize over the course of the film that they are fighting versions of the same battle. When Gen learns her mother sabotaged Casey to protect her place in a competition, she rejects the victory, quits skating altogether, and becomes one of Casey’s most enthusiastic supporters.

That’s a thought worth remembering, and a fitting example of the roles Panettiere fit especially well. But the “Ice Princess” tributes flooding the internet since her death also demonstrate how quickly entire lives can be compressed into a single tragic image.

From the indestructible cheerleader on “Heroes” to the ferociously ambitious country singer on “Nashville,” the late Panettiere was particularly beloved among millennial women. Blonde and objectively beautiful, she specialized in playing female characters whose familiar surfaces often concealed complex inner worlds tangled up in forces of darkness. Even the seemingly unattainable dream girl Panettiere played in 2009’s “I Love You, Beth Cooper” turned out to be funnier, kinder, and more vulnerable than anyone in her predictably shallow high school expects.

On screens big and small, Panettiere could refract the light around the archetype she embodied until something messier and more human shone through her performance. That was particularly radical in the 2000s, and considering the struggles women face in the U.S. right now, it’s no wonder fans reached for the girl-power nostalgia of “Ice Princess” to process this death. The imagined reunion with Trachtenberg depicted in those remembrance posts is tender, and the grief behind losing both actresses is very real. But even in the context of Panettiere’s shocking death this past weekend, the theoretical scene — two young women finally free to just skate — cannot capture the real people they were or explain either loss.

Hollywood obituaries tend to develop along two parallel tracks. There are artistic appreciations, which reconsider a celebrity’s life primarily through the work they produced. And there are tabloid stories, which operate like miniature true-crime dramas — inviting audiences to assemble causes, clues, timelines, and previously disclosed struggles until the deceased becomes the central character in the mystery of their own death.

The fascination is understandable, and the facts underlying Panettiere’s death are a matter of legitimate public interest. Her cause of death has not been determined, but speculation has already gathered around the addiction and depression she discussed publicly. Interviews from her recent memoir tour will inevitably be reconsidered for warning signs. But when a particularly high-profile person in Hollywood dies under unusual circumstances, that search for answers can rapidly overwhelm consideration of the life and work that preceded it.

It would be easy to blame that impulse entirely on tabloids and true-crime obsessives. The more uncomfortable truth is that it can shape even the sincerest expressions of grief.

When I learned Panettiere had died, I could almost picture her reacting to the news herself. I imagined the tenderly apologetic expression she might make after some terrible mistake, because I had seen her deliver versions of that moment on “Nashville” and in movies like “Ice Princess.”

Then I felt ashamed. I do not and did not know Hayden Panettiere. What I knew was the emotional vocabulary of her performances. I knew how often her characters pursued redemption, and without realizing it, I had converted those familiar arcs into a final scene in my head that cast Panettiere as explaining herself to an audience that wasn’t there.

Unusual circumstances can expand our understanding of an artist, raising legitimate questions and illuminating aspects of a career that deserves serious consideration. But they also alter a celebrity’s cultural shorthand. “Actor from ‘Heroes’ and ‘Nashville’” can quickly become “tragic star whose death remains unexplained.” And once that happens, honest grief becomes harder to metabolize as a viewer. Curiosity about the unknowable begins masquerading as intimacy, and you can be left feeling both heartbroken and filled with self-disgust.

We saw that tension most clearly after Rob and Michele Reiner were killed, also last year. Responsible journalists had to acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances of the married couple’s death — while keeping that nightmare from swallowing the decades of art and activism that made them so cherished in Hollywood.

More recently, the family of special-effects visionary Screaming Mad George waited months before announcing his death, also this past weekend. The cult filmmaker and artist died in February at age 69 of cardiac arrest after several years of documented health problems, but the news was only just shared. Having grieved privately, his family invited the public to then celebrate the artist behind the “shunting” in “Society,” the cockroach transformation in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” and a career devoted to finding beauty in the grotesque. They created a rare separation between private loss and public remembrance that the nature of Panettiere’s death could never allow. 

Most celebrity deaths do not allow for that separation, meaning movie lovers must create it for themselves. That does not mean pretending Panettiere’s struggles never existed. Rather, it suggests preserving the duality her career was built around — instead of replacing it with the duality her death now suggests. We can resist turning every interview into evidence and every performance into prophecy because fans do not need to solve Hayden Panettiere’s death to explain why they are grieving her.

Ariel Levy, the longtime New Yorker writer and National Magazine Award winner, is joining “60 Minutes” as a contributor for the CBS newsmagazine’s upcoming 59th season.

“Ariel is an astonishingly original writer and reporter, fearlessly going to far-flung places and exploring sensitive topics that have driven consequential debates,” “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Nick Bilton wrote in a Monday memo to staff obtained by TheWrap.

Levy has spent nearly three decades reporting and writing for New York magazine and The New Yorker, covering culture, gender, sexuality, health and other topics. She joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008 after spending 12 years at New York magazine.

Her 2013 New Yorker essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which chronicled the loss of her pregnancy while on assignment, won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism in 2014. Levy later explored grief and other experiences from her life in her 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply.”

She is also the author of the 2005 book “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” and hosted the podcast “The Just Enough Family,” about the rise and fall of the family behind what Bilton described as “one of the most successful family businesses in America.”

Bilton said Levy has demonstrated “an ability to get people to talk, to find the unexpected story and to tell it with depth and humanity.”

“I’m beyond excited to see what she does at 60 Minutes,” he added.

Levy joins the long-running CBS newsmagazine as it prepares for Season 59 under Bilton, who took over the program earlier this year. In his note to staff, the executive producer said the show’s correspondents and contributors bring different journalism backgrounds and storytelling approaches but share the qualities central to “60 Minutes.”

Those include “curiosity, independence, incredible reporting, a willingness to hold power to account, and an instinct for the kind of stories people can’t stop watching,” Bilton wrote.