
Here's what's leaving Netflix soon
Netflix has scrapped a string of blockbuster film franchises as part of a major movie clearout. This month the streaming service will wave goodbye to an award-winning animation, a legendary horror and a film series dubbed the 'sexiest ever'. Fans will be gutted to know that the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey, Shrek and the Final Destination franchise will no longer be available.
Don't worry though, you have around two weeks until these programs and popular blockbusters are taken off the streaming service. Scroll down to find out if your favorite Netflix flick or show is set to be removed and how much time you have to watch it.
August 1, 2025
Close Your Eyes Before It's Dark (2016), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Drinking Buddies (2013), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Georgia Rule (2007), The Ghost and the Tout (2018), Have You Ever Fallen in Love, Miss Jiang? (Season 1), Life Plan A and B (Season 1), Little Man (2006), Love Storm (2016), Masha and the Bear: Nursery Rhymes (1 Season), The Nightingale (2018), The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (2017), On Nom Stories (Season 1), Suspect (Season 1), Think Like a Man (2012), Warcraft (2016), The Water Horse (2007), White House Down (2013).
August 2, 2025
August 3, 2025
Aloe Vera (2020), Elevator Baby (2019), Final Destination (2000), Final Destination 2 (2003), Final Destination 3 (2006), Final Destination 5 (2011), Shaka Inkosi YamaKhosi (2021)
August 4, 2025
August 5, 2025
'71 (2014), Lockdown (2021), Love Is War (2019), Nairobby (2021)
August 6, 2025
A Man Apart (2003,) DC League of Super-Pets (2022), Norbit (2007), Sugar Rush (2019)
August 7, 2025
A History of Violence (2005), Demolition Man (1993), Ever After High (5 Seasons), N Gods of Egypt (2016), Up North (2018)
August 8, 2025
August 9, 2025
Deep Blue (1999), Merry Man 2: Another Mission (2019), Peter Rabbit (2018)
August 10, 2025
American Psycho (2000), Chef (2014), Coming from Insanity (2019), Conan the Barbarian (2011), How to Be a Latin Lover (2017), The Hunger Games (2012), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015), What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012)
August 11, 2025
The Vendor (2018)
August 12, 2025
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Telegraph
37 minutes ago
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Nicola Benedetti on marrying a man 25 years her senior
As one of the best-known violinists in the world, Nicola Benedetti enjoys a stellar public profile. Yet she has maintained a strict secrecy around her private life, even though it has been long-rumoured in music circles. Now she has confirmed for the first time that she is married to Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated jazz musician who is 25 years her senior, and they have a baby daughter. They met professionally when she was 17 and he was 42, and much later began a romantic relationship. Benedetti has publicly shared the joys of motherhood but did not, until now, confirm the identity of the father. Speaking to the Telegraph, Benedetti, 38, said of her marriage to Marsalis, 63, who counts former US president Barack Obama among his admirers: 'I think it's pretty much out there now. I really don't care any more if people want to write about it or not.' Explaining why she has not talked about her relationship with Marsalis, with whom she has collaborated on musical projects for many years, Benedetti said: 'I don't tend to discuss my private life because people don't come to my concerts because of whom I'm in a relationship with. They come because I play the violin.' Benedetti was 17 when she travelled to New York to attend the American Academy of Achievement summit as a student-delegate. A year earlier, she had won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. She performed in the company of Marsalis, a trumpeter who was the first jazz musician to receive the Pulitzer Prize. 'When we met then, I was already a huge fan, and we just kept in touch as good friends,' Benedetti once explained. Marsalis has said they felt 'a certain type of kinship'. Many years later, Marsalis wrote a violin concerto for Benedetti, although in a joint interview they joked about not remembering who had proposed the idea. Marsalis said: 'It's like a scene from When Harry Met Sally. I don't know if I said it or she said it.' They have continued to collaborate and perform together. Benedetti, from Ayrshire in Scotland, is artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival and had her daughter in May 2024. Marsalis also has a teenage daughter and two adult sons from previous relationships. The 'Pied Piper' of jazz Marsalis started playing the trumpet at the age of six and went on to become a key figure in the jazz renaissance of the 1980s. He has been credited with rekindling interest in the genre, has been referred to as the 'Pied Piper' of jazz and won nine Grammy awards during his career. He is currently the artistic director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center, in New York. Benedetti told the Telegraph that she has begun to question her upbringing, during which her mother made her and her older sister practise the violin for three hours every day during the school holidays. 'My daughter is only one, but my sister has two children, aged three and five, and seeing her experience has definitely made me consider my own childhood,' she said. 'But both of us have a realistic, even a positive view of our upbringing. It was very strict – we feared upsetting our parents, or doing the wrong thing – but we also knew we were loved to death by our mum and dad.' She believes that today's young people are less willing to make the sacrifices required to become a world-class musician, saying: 'I think young people have become used to a lack of basic discipline in their daily lives – and that really worries me.'


Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Labubu fans dote over ugly-cute doll trending at Comic-Con
SAN DIEGO, July 27 (Reuters) - San Diego Comic-Con is the latest location where the ugly-cute dolls named Labubu have been trending, with fans carrying the plushies globally popularized by celebrities Rihanna, Lizzo, Dua Lipa, and Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink. The wide-eyed and grinning doll was created in 2015 by Hong Kong artist and illustrator Kasing Lung. In 2019, Lung allowed them to be sold by Pop Mart ( opens new tab, a Chinese toy company that sells collectible figurines, often in "blind boxes". "Blind boxes" are sealed boxes containing a surprise item that is usually part of a themed collection. Naomi Galban, from San Diego, waited in line on Sunday at the Pop Mart booth in the San Diego Convention Center for a chance to get her first Labubu. "Every time I go to a Pop Mart store, they're sold out," the 24-year-old told Reuters. She hoped to buy one for her little sister. Emily Brough, Pop Mart's Head of IP Licensing, spoke to Reuters on Thursday about Labubu fans at Comic-Con. "We love to see how fans are personalizing it (Labubu) for themselves," Brough said next to the Pop Mart booth. While Brough noted that there were many people with a Labubu strapped to their bags and backpacks at Comic-Con, the doll's popularity did not happen overnight. Labubus had a huge boost in 2019 after Pop Mart began selling them, and in 2024, when Blackpink's Lisa, who is Thai, created a buying frenzy in Thailand after she promoted Labubu on social media. Pop Mart saw sales skyrocket in North America that same year, with revenue in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2025 already surpassing the full-year U.S. revenue from 2024, Pop Mart said. When he created Labubu, Lung gave the character, who is female, a backstory inspired by Nordic mythology. He called her and his other fictional creatures "The Monsters." Diana Goycortua, 25, first discovered Labubu through social media, and before she knew it, it felt like a "game" to try and collect the dolls. "It's a little bit of gambling with what you're getting," the Labubu fan from San Diego said on Sunday while waiting at the Pop Mart booth, concluding that her love for the character made it worth trying blind boxes. Goycortua already has three Labubus, and was hoping to score her a fourth one at Comic-Con.


Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
What I learned from running my own Squid Game
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You're trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there's only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do? This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix's Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. Future generations will probably have thoughts about why we kept returning to this particular trope with the bloodthirsty voyeurism we associate with Ancient Rome. Obviously, these stories are meant to say something about human nature, and the depraved things desperate people can be made to do to each other; they're meant to say something about exploitation, and how easy it is to derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Squid Game says these things while shovelling its doomed characters through a lurid nightmare playground where they die in cruel and creative ways. After each deadly game, blood-spattered contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It's a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, they're all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only themselves to blame. If they object, a masked guard will accuse them of interrupting the free and fair elections and shoot them in the face. This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy. 'I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society,' said director Hwang Dong-hyuk, just in case you didn't get the message. The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. I'm reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps audiences in parts of the Anglosphere where irony is an unaffordable foreign luxury and the experience of everyday economic humiliation feels a lot like being hit over the head with a huge blunt analogy. Squid Game does not want you confused about who the baddies are. There's a bored cabal of cartoon billionaires drinking scotch and throwing tantrums while they watch our heroes shove each other off cliffs. They smoke cigars and say things like 'I am a very hard man to please'. We never get to find out who they are or what their plan is, because it doesn't matter. How could it possibly matter? How could anything matter in a fake hotel lobby where all the furniture is naked ladies? This is how people who want to be rich think people who are rich ought to talk: like insurance salesmen cosplaying sexual villainy in a kink club for tourists. Nobody is supposed to be able to relate to the Squid Game villains. As it turns out, though, I can. There's an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show of Death Game. Well, mostly innocent. I happen to have a secret other life as an immersive game designer. It's what I did instead of drugs during my divorce, after discovering that here, finally, was a hobby that would let me be a pretentious art wanker and a huge nerd at the same time. The games are intense – like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment – the kind that actual researchers can't do any more because it's inhumane. Famously, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down early after students who were cast as guards got far too excited about abusing their prisoners. The sort of people who pay actual money to play this kind of game are expecting to be made to feel things. They're expecting high stakes and horrible choices and wildly dramatic twists. The Death Game trope is an easy way to deliver all of that. Mine forced players to pick one of their friends to 'murder on live television'. It's a five-hour nightmare about social scapegoating with a pounding techno soundtrack. I had a lot going on at the time. I swotted up on Hobbes and Hayek. I took notes on Squid Game and its infinite derivatives. I gave the players character archetypes to choose from – the Diva, the Flirt, the Party Animal – and got them to imagine themselves in Big Brother if it were produced by actual George Orwell. I wrote and rewrote the script to make sure players wouldn't be able to opt out of picking one person to bully to death. I thought that it would be easy. Instead, I learned two surprising things. The first was that it's harder than you'd think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time, my players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I created a whole rule system to punish acts of altruism, spent ages greasing the hinges on the beautiful hellbox I'd built for them, and still the ungrateful bastards kept trying to sacrifice themselves for one another. Even the ones who were explicitly cast as villains. Even when it was against the rules. It takes a lot of fiddly world-building to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It takes a baroque notional dystopia and a guaranteed protection from social punishment. What you get is a manicured, hothouse-grown garden masquerading as a human jungle – an astroturfed Hobbesian state of nature where the cruelty is cultivated to make viewers feel comfortable in complicity. The story of these games scrapes the same nerves as the ritual reporting about shopping-mall riots on Black Friday – the ones that lasciviously describe working-class people walloping each other for a £100 discount on a dishwasher. The message is that people who have little are worse than people who have more. This is a wealthy person's nightmare of how poor people behave. The rich, of course, are rarely subject to this sort of moral voyeurism. But that story isn't true. In the real-life Lord of the Flies, the children actually worked together very successfully. In the real-life Stanford prison experiment, the guards had to be coached into cruelty. Real poverty, as sociologists like Rutger Bregman keep on telling us, is actually an inverse predictor of selfish behaviour. Not because poor people are more virtuous than anyone else, but because the rich and powerful can afford not to be. The rest of us, eventually, have to trust each other. The fantasy of these games is about freedom from social responsibility. In the Death Games, nobody has to make complex and demeaning ethical choices as an adult person in an inhumane economy. In the Death Games, it makes sense to light your integrity on fire to survive. But if we did, actually, live in a perfectly ruthless market economy where competition was the essence of survival, none of us would survive past puberty. The Death Games don't actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels. The second surprising thing I learned while running my own Squid Game is that nothing feels better than running Squid Game. If you need a rush, I highly recommend building a complicated social machine to make other people hurt each other, picking out a fun hyperpop soundtrack and then standing behind a production desk for five hours jerking their strings and cackling until they cry. People apparently like my game. It has run in multiple countries. And every time, it took me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high. It turns out that I love power. This was an ugly thing to discover, and there's an ugly feeling about watching a show like Squid Game – which is, to be clear, wildly entertaining. Voyeurism is participation, and the compulsive thrill of watching human beings hurt each other for money creates its own complicity. The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.