descendants

Outside of the meme-bating crossovers of Ralph Breaks the Internet and the IP-entwining weirdness that was Wish, Disney has refused to really unite its many animated classics in an interconnected shared universe. Which is surprising, given how much cinematic universes have dominated the culture for so long now. Nevertheless, although this has never happened on the big screen, Descendants has been delivering exactly this on TV since 2015. The Disney Channel original — as corny, cheesy and yet as full of annoyingly catchy…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeI think Oppenheimer is the biggest film I’ve ever made,” Christopher Nolan says without a hint of irony. It’s a striking claim from someone who has directed some of the most gargantuan blockbusters of the past 15 years – but it’s not inaccurate. At the heart of the biographical drama, which stars Cillian Murphy as the man who masterminded the birth of the atomic bomb, lies a truth of…

Descendants Of The Sun Actor Song Joong Ki and his UK-based wife, Katy Louise Saunders, were blessed with a healthy son in Rome on June 14. The news has been confirmed by his agency, High Zium Studio. Earlier this year, in January, the acotr announced his marriage to Katy, and at the same time, he also revealed that she was expecting their first child. In a statement released by Song Joong’s agency on Wednesday, it was revealed that Song Joong had become a father in Italy. The actor then shared the good news with his…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Social scientists worry that too often we think only of ourselves. "There's been an increasing recognition that over the last few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric," says Lily L. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeBrandy will be slipping into those glass slippers once more, this time for the forthcoming Descendant sequel. The singer’s reprisal of her role as Cinderella comes 25 years after she first made history as the first Black actor ever to portray the iconic Disney princess. Her original performance was in Walt Disney Television’s 1997 iteration of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s beloved…

Brandy is set to reprise her role from 1997’s live-action Cinderella for a new Disney+ film in the Descendants series, per Variety.The singer-songwriter and actress, who played the titular character in the 1997 Disney TV movie, will play Cinderella in The Pocketwatch, which will take place in the same universe of The Descendants franchise. In the 1997 musical film, Brandy starred opposite Whitney Houston, who played the Fairy Godmother. Brandy was the first Black Cinderella. Brandy isn’t the only musician to be cast in …

A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6597.Download PDF Zunil, Guatemala—As the Sun climbs over a hillside ceremony, Ixquik Poz Salanic invokes a day in the sacred calendar: T’zi’, a day for seeking justice. Before she passes the microphone to the next speaker, she counts to 13 in K’iche’, an Indigenous Maya language with more than 1 million present-day speakers in Guatemala’s central highlands. A few dozen onlookers nod along, from…