Hello, welcome to today’s edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s pop culture news roundup. While it seems like everything is slowing down before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, there’s still a lot to cover, including Taylor Swift’s big night at the American Music Awards and Frozen 2’s big weekend at the box office. Let’s get going.
A Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Script Almost Sold on eBay
Need proof that you should never, ever take your eyes off eBay? If you’d been watching closely, you could have nabbed a legit copy of the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker script. During an appearance on Good Morning America today, director J.J. Abrams revealed that, thanks to a careless actor, the script almost got out into the public’s hands too soon. “One of our actors, I won’t say which one—I want to, but I won’t—left it under their bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place,” he said. “It was given to someone else, who then went to sell it on eBay.” Luckily for the filmmakers, someone at Disney spotted it and “got it back before it sold,” Abrams said. Guess now we’ll have to wait until December 20 to see what happens.
Taylor Swift Got to Play Her Hits at the AMAs
After a long dust-up between Taylor Swift and her former label Big Machine over whether she’d be able to play any of her old songs at the American Music Awards last night, Swift took the stage in Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater and played quite a few of them. From 2008’s “Love Story” to her current hit “Lover,” Swift performed a full medley before accepting the award for Artist of the Decade. (She also won Artist of the Year.) The night’s other big winners? Billie Eilish, who won New Artist of the Year, and Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, who won for Favorite Song—Rap/Hip-Hop for “Old Town Road.”
Frozen 2 Dominated the Box Office
Perhaps not surprisingly, Frozen 2 had a helluva weekend at the box office. The Disney animated film brought in $127 million in North America, setting a November record for an animated film. Elsa and the gang also pulled in a gargantuan $223 million overseas for a global take of $350 million. If it makes another $650 million—not an impossibility by any stretch—it will be the sixth Disney film this year to gross $1 billion.
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