From Horror Reboots to Soul Reinventions: This Week’s Entertainment Headlines

Hollywood’s casting carousel spun fast this week, delivering two major announcements that reveal how studios are betting big on both rising stars and established names to anchor their next tentpole projects — while over in music, genre-bending artist Meshell Ndegeocello proved once again that she has little interest in staying inside anyone’s lines.

The buzziest news comes from the horror world, where Chase Infiniti — fresh off her breakout turn in the best picture winner “One Battle After Another” — has landed her next film role in “Portrait of God,” a mysterious religious horror project for Lionsgate. The film comes from Dylan Clark, a young filmmaker who built his reputation posting high-concept horror shorts to YouTube that racked up millions of views. The original “Portrait of God” short, released in 2022, became something of a cult sensation online, and Clark has now expanded it into a feature with a script co-written alongside Joe Russo.

What makes the project especially notable is its producing team: Sam Raimi, through his Ghost House Pictures banner, and Jordan Peele, via Monkeypaw Productions, are joining forces for the first time. Two of modern horror’s most influential figures backing a single film is a rare enough event that it’s generating buzz independent of the plot details, which remain tightly under wraps beyond descriptions of “a new twist on religious horror.”

The project had previously been in development at Universal before that studio let it go earlier this year, clearing the way for Lionsgate to swoop in. For Clark, it’s part of a fast-rising trajectory — before “Portrait of God” even begins shooting, he’s set to direct Lionsgate and Blumhouse’s reboot of “The Blair Witch Project.” Lionsgate film chief Adam Fogelson called the pairing of Clark, Raimi, Peele and Infiniti “an exceptional creative team,” while Clark himself praised Infiniti’s performance in “One Battle After Another” as part of why he wanted her on board.

The deal also reflects a broader trend: studios are increasingly racing to lock down young horror filmmakers who’ve built audiences online before ever stepping onto a traditional set, following recent breakout hits from creators like Curry Barker and Kane Parson.

Meanwhile, Paramount has made its own splashy casting move, confirming that Bradley Cooper will star as Duke in the studio’s reimagined “G.I. Joe” movie, directed by Danny McBride. The film marks a significant reset for the Hasbro-inspired franchise, severing its long-rumored crossover ties to “Transformers” in favor of a standalone vision. McBride, who is also co-writing the script, reportedly had Cooper at the top of his wish list from the start — a reunion of sorts, given McBride previously brought Cooper in for a memorable guest spot on “The Righteous Gemstones.”

Cooper’s involvement comes during an unusually packed stretch for the actor, who recently wrote, directed and starred in the Searchlight film “Is This Thing On” opposite Will Arnett, and stepped in to direct the upcoming “Ocean’s” prequel alongside Margot Robbie after the project’s original director departed. Squeezing “G.I. Joe” into that schedule suggests just how much Cooper wanted in on McBride’s take on the material.

The casting fits into Paramount’s larger strategy of resurrecting and refreshing its library of established franchises, a push that also includes a new “Days of Thunder” with Anne Hathaway, a “World War Z” sequel bringing back Brad Pitt, a Taylor Sheridan-penned “Call of Duty” film, and the next “Top Gun” installment. Studio leadership has made clear that reviving dormant or underperforming IP with top-tier creative talent is central to its plans going forward.

On the music side, the week’s most striking release came from Meshell Ndegeocello, whose new album “Synonym” takes the humble cover-song record and turns it inside out. Rather than simply reinterpreting tracks from artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Jennifer Lopez, the Human League and Barbra Streisand, Ndegeocello restages them as duets between women, reframing songs originally built around heterosexual dynamics into statements she has described as “an expression of queer liberation as a synonym for liberation of all kinds.”

Critics have praised the record’s audacity: Streisand’s “Guilty,” sung with co-writer Ink, becomes a declaration of defiance rather than romantic confession, while a reggae-inflected take on the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” performed with Cat Power, subtly inverts the song’s power dynamics through vocal phrasing alone. Not every experiment lands with the same cohesion — a closing cover of Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” with Bill Callahan drifts from folk simplicity into distorted electronic noise, a choice that feels more chaotic than purposeful — but the ambition throughout is hard to ignore.

Taken together, the week’s entertainment news tells a familiar story: an industry constantly reaching for the next big swing, whether that means pairing horror’s biggest names behind an unproven young director, betting an A-list actor’s packed schedule on a franchise reboot, or watching a veteran musician tear apart pop standards just to see what’s left underneath.