In what international news scientists are already calling a confluence of three of the worst dudes to ever do it, Armie Hammer, Elon Musk, and director Uwe Boll entered into a brief collaboration this weekend, forcing untold numbers of generally blameless human beings to read all three of their names within the span of a single sentence.

In a further escalation against the forces of good taste, the trio also forced people with eyeballs to take in a carefully crafted triptych of their faces; truly, an offensive on all fronTS.

It shakes out like this: Boll and Hammer have been working together for a minute now, having teamed up for Boll’s latest clumsily crafted provocation, Citizen Vigilante. Said film sees Hammer—who hasn’t appeared in a Hollywood movie since 2022’s Death On The Nile, after being accused of abusive behaviors toward women in 2021—play a man who goes on a violent vigilante spree against migrants who have committed the most pulled-from-the-right-wing-tabloids kinds of crimes across Europe.

(He also yells at people for not paying their bus fare.)

According to Boll, the movie was recently given an “unrated” rating by Germany’s self-regulating movie rating board, the FSK, making it unlikely it would be shown in German theaters—and if the confluence of supposed censorship and “paints migrants as uniformly violent criminals” has your Elon senses tingling, congratulations: Your grasp of the rhythms of the 2026 news cycle is currently operating at a graduate level.

Apparently fed up by the censors, Boll posted Citizen Vigilante on Twitter this weekend for a span of 48 hours, aimed at his whopping 19,400 followers.

At which point, Musk decided to step in and personally promote the film to the 240 million people who follow him, to say nothing of all the non-follower folks that the X algorithm regularly serves his “content.”

Musk, as far as we know, has no investment in the movie—outside of the way it rhymes with the virulent anti-immigration campaigns he’s been waging for months and years at this point, leastways—but serving it up to a population more than half the size of the entire United States has to be viewed as some slight measure of endorsement.

It’s not clear how many people actually watched the film, which Boll has now pulled back down, courtesy of Musk’s lift, but 313,000 have liked the post promoting it.

(Among other things, the film now sports more than a thousand glowingly positive ratings on the audience side of Rotten Tomatoes, many of them posted in the last hour; meanwhile, it sports all of four write-ups from professional critics, all negative.) All of which is to say that Musk may finally have helped Boll find his dream audience: A bunch of people who will slather his movies with praise not for their questionable craft or content, but for punching down at exactly the right folks.

Weary Minions And Monsters director once again forced to address the Hitler question

Long-time franchise director and actor Pierre Coffin swears he doesn’t know where Minions And Monsters’ Minions were in 1936, but he knows where they weren’t.

We should be clear that the persistent question, “Did the Dreamworks Animation mascot characters the Minions work for the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler?” is a problem entirely of the franchise’s own making—mixed, admittedly, with a healthy dose of the usual online contrarianism.

We didn’t invent the idea of “little yellow guys who are instinctively drawn to serve the most evil person they can find;” nor did we muddy the waters surrounding the series’ previously cartoonish conception of evil by asserting, in 2015’s Minions, that your boys Bob and Stuart served under a real-ass nationalistic European dictator in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It could all have been Draculas and super-scientists, and nobody would have made a peep.

Of course, that same movie also addressed the Hitler question indirectly, by having the Minions it depicts decide to hang out in a cave from 1812 to 1968, thus skipping what would turn out to be a pretty staggering number of war crimes and genocides in the process.

While a tad transparent, this handwave was also, basically, fine: A clear statement of “We’re not talking about those particular 156 years, so stop asking.” Until, that is, the franchise decided to roll out a (surprisingly pretty good) new movie, and bafflingly set it during that same interregnum—thus kicking off a whole new round of “Okay, but where were these new guys in 1936?”

All of which was brought to the door of long-time franchise director and voice actor Pierre Coffin this week, who made the perhaps foolhardy decision to take some questions about Minions from the folks over at Polygon.

That included “How do they reproduce?” (Coffin implies that all extant Minions have been present since the Big Bang) and “Can they die?” (No.) But then, inevitably: The Hitler question, which Coffin sounded genuinely depressed to have to answer.

“I knew you were going to ask me that question,” he says in response to the query.

“Shame on you.” He tries to feint toward the cave thing, but is then reminded that the Minions from Minions And Monsters are some whole other tribe of Minions that were off having Hollywood movie adventures while their buddies were chilling.

“I was trying to avoid the answer,” Coffin admits, before stating, hopefully definitively this time, that the Minions did not participate on any side in World War II, or any other major global conflicts since: “The Minions that we know from Minions 1 were stuck in the cave.

These ones, I don’t know where they were, but they were not part of the Big History.” Which, again, feels like it would have been pretty easy to avoid by just skipping the Napoleon gag a decade ago—but that’s simply not the world we, or Coffin, are now forced to live within.

Couple from Netflix’s Skywalkers get engaged, then arrested after climbing Empire State Building

Take that, Sleepless In Seattle.

Shaming Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, and anyone else who merely thinks they’ve had a romantic moment at the “top” of the Empire State Building, Russian daredevils Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus reportedly got engaged at the structure’s highest point today—and then got promptly arrested, because you’re not actually allowed to do that.

The couple (who were featured semi-recently in Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story) flew an anti-war banner from the top of the 1,454-feet-up antenna installed on the building’s roof, exchanged a few kisses, and apparently popped the question.

It’s not clear if Netflix had any early knowledge of the stunt, but it was certainly happy to capitalize off of it, showing off pictures of Beerkus holding Nikolau aloft at the tippy-top of Malaysia’s Merdeka Tower from the movie’s climax on its social media this afternoon.

The streamer distributed Jeff Zimbalist’s documentary about the pair—prolific influencers in the “rooftopping” subculture, who began a relationship after Beerkus decided his videos would do better with a female partner—back in 2024.

(Our own review highlighted the aesthetic pleasures of watching the pair do what they do, while also dinging the film for taking a too-accepting view of its subjects’ influencer-trained skills at crafting narratives around themselves.)

The pair were reportedly met on the way back down the spire by members of the NYPD, whose bodycam footage of the arrest serves as a nice counterpart to all the photos and videos Nikolau and Beerkus were posting themselves of their (admittedly very cool) crime.

Meanwhile, we’d love to watch a documentary about the response to all this from the PR department for the Empire State Building, who risked a severe (and possibly fatal) case of patting themselves on the back after they came up with this response to the stunt (per ABC News): “It is to be emphasized that the Empire State Building Observation Deck, atop the World’s Most Famous Building in the center of New York City, does offer a practical way for the most memorable marriage proposals.”

They’re Avengers: Endgame-ing The Passion Of The Christ

A September revival of Mel Gibson’s religious blockbuster will include a sneak peek at next year’s The Resurrection Of The Christ: Part One.

Back in 2024, the Marvel Cinematic Universe managed to get one over on Jesus, as that summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine managed to finally steal the title of “most lucrative R-rated movie ever made” from Mel Gibson’s crucifixion-heavy 2004 blockbuster The Passion Of The Christ.

Now, Gibson and Jim Caviezel are (per Variety) looking to return the favor, in a way, by putting The Passion back in theaters this September with a little treat for loyal fans: A teaser for Gibson’s long-in-the-works sequel, The Resurrection Of The Christ: Part One.

That’s right: They’re Avengers: Endgame-ing Jesus, as Fathom Entertainment and Lionsgate team up to whet the appetites of Bible-less spoiler hounds by including a sneak peek at The Resurrection alongside the original film.

We’re guessing that just means “Playing the trailer,” but it’ll presumably give Christ fans a chance to check out Jaakko Ohtonen in the title role.

(Caviezel was originally supposed to come back, but the costs of de-aging technology, as well as various scheduling issues, apparently scuttled God’s plan.) Honestly, we’re just wondering if they’ll show off some of what Gibson has described as “acid trip” material from the movie, since his film apparently follows Jesus as he heads down into Hell in the aftermath of the big spoiler that happens at the end of the first one.

Now, nobody at Lionsgate is outright promising that these extra minutes of footage will make this re-release a “critical companion story” to The Resurrection the way the Russos claimed that putting Endgame back into theaters with a couple of new clips was part of the vital storytelling experience of this December’s Avengers: Doomsday.

But the actual goals—goosing past revenues while stoking the fires for the upcoming release—do feel like they dovetail pretty nicely.

The Passion Of The Christ returns to theaters for a one-week engagement starting on September 10. The Resurrection Of The Christ: Part One is currently aimed at a May 6, 2027 release.