The last pop culture recap of 2025 is short, but unfortunately not very sweet, as there’s just as much bad news to offset the good. First up, actor James Ransone has died aged 46 from suicide. Ransone had a key role in The Wire and The Black Phone movies, in addition to playing an adult member of the Losers Club in It Chapter Two. He’s in the centre of this image, as the grown-up version of hypochondriac Eddie.
Film
Movies at least are brightening the end of 2025, and providing something to look forward to. Like Disclosure Day, which once more has filmmaker Steven Spielberg exploring the topic of alien-human interactions – having already made the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds. Plot details are under wraps, but right now Spielberg’s next looks very Signs-esque. Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth head up the cast.
Disclosure Day beams into cinemas on 12 June.
The biggest casting news of the past week? German actor Lars Eidinger has been chosen to play villainous Kryptonian supercomputer Brainiac in Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, which is out in 2027.
Series
South Africans are soon going to have a lot less to watch. You may have already encountered the news, from early December, that negotiations between Multichoice and Warner Bros. Discovery broke down when it came time to renew the former’s distribution agreement, i.e. Multichoice has the rights to screen the media company’s content on satellite TV service DStv and its streaming service Showmax, across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Officially, there’s still a chance that an agreement will be reached. It just seems unlikely, with the 31 December deadline looming, AND Multichoice already running messages like this, as seen on the Showmax app.
While DStv will lose popular channels like Discovery Channel, Cartoon Network, CNN International, Food Network and The Travel Channel, all HBO content will also be stripped from the various Multichoice platforms. That means no more past and future House of the Dragon, The White Lotus, The Last of Us, Euphoria, Hacks, True Detective, The Pitt, IT: Welcome to Derry and much much more.
Unless another streaming service steps forward on the distribution front (i.e. Prime Video) in the interim – the Netflix WB buyout will take months to finalise – locals will have no legal means to watch any HBO content. So if you had any plans to watch a HBO series or documentary, do it over the next two weeks. The clock is ticking.
Speaking of Netflix, all five seasons of animated reboot and LGBT+ favourite She-Ra and the Princesses of Power are leaving the streamer on 21 February next year.
This isn’t so much the choice of the streamer as the fact that the series was made in conjunction with DreamWorks Animation, and that licence is expiring, as creator ND Stevenson explains here.
It’s currently unclear whether the cartoon removal is in the US only, or globally. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is currently not available on physical media or in any other format for purchase.
