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Beyoncé's Performance Highlighted Netflix's NFL debut on Christmas Day

32-time Grammy winner Beyoncé. (The AP/File Photo)
32-time Grammy winner Beyoncé. (The AP/File Photo)
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Beyoncé's Performance Highlighted Netflix's NFL debut on Christmas Day

32-time Grammy winner Beyoncé. (The AP/File Photo)
32-time Grammy winner Beyoncé. (The AP/File Photo)

Beyoncé provided more excitement than either game during Netflix’s NFL debut on Christmas Day.

Riding into her halftime appearance on a white horse, the 32-time Grammy winner rocked her hometown Houston crowd with a nearly 13-minute performance on Wednesday.

She surprised fans by bringing along Shaboozey to perform “Sweet Honey Buckiin” and Post Malone joined her for “Levii's Jeans.”

The action on the field didn't live up to expectations as the NFL showcased four of the AFC's top five teams, The AP reported.

Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce exposed a glitch in Pittsburgh's defense during Kansas City's 29-10 rout in the first game.

The broadcast itself went off just fine, quickly becoming the second-most popular live title on Netflix to date, according to NFL Media.

Lamar Jackson and the Ravens led C.J. Stroud and the Texans to 17-2 at halftime before Beyoncé stole the show.

Mariah Carey opened Wednesday’s doubleheader with a taped performance of “All I Want for Christmas is You” and then the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs trounced the Steelers to clinch the No. 1 seed in the AFC.

There were no signs of any major streaming issues during the game after Netflix experienced minor blunders at the start of the pregame show. The broadcast opened with roughly 10 seconds of silence because it appeared studio host Kay Adams’ microphone wasn’t turned on.

Beyoncé's live performance at NRG Stadium was supposed to be the biggest test for the streaming giant and it seemed to go off without a hitch.

Mahomes threw for 320 yards and three touchdowns and Kelce had eight catches for 84 yards and one score as the Chiefs (15-1) earned a first-round bye and home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. The Steelers (10-6) have lost three straight games and may have to settle for a wild-card spot instead of an AFC North title.

Netflix agreed to a three-year contract in May to broadcast Christmas Day games. The NFL is expected to give the streaming service one of its biggest days since the site launched in 1998.

Netflix’s 282.3 million subscribers in more than 190 countries could stream the games, marking the first time one outlet distributed an NFL game globally. Netflix had the games available in five languages — English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.

Netflix had problems streaming the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Nov. 14. The bout peaked at 65 million concurrent streams, including 38 million concurrent streams in the United States. According to the website Down Detector, nearly 85,000 viewers logged problems with outages or streaming leading up to and during the fight.

There were fewer complaints on Wednesday.

According to NFL Media, viewers in all 50 states tuned in within minutes of the pregame show going live and viewers from nearly 200 countries watched the first game. Before the Ravens-Texans kicked off, Netflix reported that it eclipsed its peak concurrent viewers of any Christmas in the past four years.

The NFL was playing its first games on a Wednesday since the Steelers and Ravens were forced to play on Dec. 2, 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The only other time the league played on a Wednesday since 1948 was in 2012 when the Giants and Cowboys met in the season opener.

Commercials Netflix promoted its own programming in addition to the usual slew of advertisements. The first teaser trailer for “Happy Gilmore 2” was released before kickoff. Adam Sandler is back as Happy Gilmore for the sports comedy that hits the streaming service in 2025. Travis Kelce also was featured in a trailer filled with cameos by celebrities, including Bad Bunny and Kid Cudi.

New Christmas tradition The NFL played its first games on Christmas Day in 1971 with a pair of divisional playoff games. The league avoided playing on Dec. 25 from 1972-88 and shifted its full slate of games to Saturday if Christmas fell on a Sunday. Since 1989, there have been 30 games on Christmas, never more than three on that day. But the NFL went out of its way to schedule two games on Wednesday to accommodate its $150 million deal with Netflix.

Broadcasting teams J.J. Watt, a three-time AP Defensive Player of the Year and brother of Steelers four-time All-Pro edge rusher T.J. Watt, and former NFL wide receiver Nate Burleson shared analyst duties for the Chiefs-Steelers game, with Ian Eagle on play-by-play.

“I’m extremely proud of him and also slightly concerned he’s getting close to a lot of my records,” J.J. Watt said of his younger brother at the start of the broadcast.

Noah Eagle, Ian’s son, was on play-by-play for the Ravens-Texans game, with former NFL tight end Greg Olsen in the analyst seat.

Not a first This wasn’t the first time NFL games aired exclusively on a streaming service. The league’s Thursday night games are in their third season on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock streamed the Packers-Eagles game in São Paulo, Brazil, in Week 1 and Prime Video will stream a wild-card game. Also, the “Sunday Ticket” package moved to YouTube TV last year.

The largest audience for a streamed-exclusive NFL game was 23 million on Peacock for last season’s AFC wild-card game between the Miami Dolphins and the Chiefs.

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Entertainment

Kylie Minogue Looks Back on Life in Pop Music in New Documentary

Kylie Minogue arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party after the 96th Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, in Beverly Hills, California, US, March 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Kylie Minogue arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party after the 96th Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, in Beverly Hills, California, US, March 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Kylie Minogue Looks Back on Life in Pop Music in New Documentary

Kylie Minogue arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party after the 96th Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, in Beverly Hills, California, US, March 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Kylie Minogue arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party after the 96th Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, in Beverly Hills, California, US, March 10, 2024. (Reuters)

Kylie Minogue opens ‌up about her life in pop music for new documentary "KYLIE", looking back on her career as well as the personal challenges she has faced, such as the scrutiny when she was starting out and overcoming breast cancer.

The three-part series, which premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, sees the "Spinning Around" and "Padam Padam" singer share videos and photos from her personal archive and talk about her rise to stardom.

“Oh, there were surprises ‌left, right and ‌center, like 'Ooh, er, no, yes, ‌that ⁠was good. That ⁠should never have happened'. Like, there was worlds within worlds within worlds of the archive," Minogue told Reuters on making the docuseries.

"A nice surprise is that I can kind of recognize myself from the beginning ... I don't know that I've changed that ⁠much. My level of experience has changed... ‌But I can see ... ‌the seed of who I was and I think that's ‌really moving."

Minogue, 57, first starred on Australian ‌soap "Neighbours" in the 1980s before kicking off her music career with hits such as "The Loco-Motion" and "I Should Be So Lucky". She has gone on to sell more than 80 ‌million records worldwide and has won numerous awards, including two Grammys.

In the docuseries, she ⁠talks ⁠about success but also about the scrutiny and criticism she faced early in her career, being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, as well as her personal relationships. There are also interviews with her sister, singer Dannii Minogue, her former "Neighbours" co-star Jason Donovan and singer Nick Cave.

"I just go with my gut. I go with what's inspiring me at the time. I think whatever I do depends on what I've done previously," she said on reinventing herself during her career.

Entertainment

Blockbuster ‘Hope’ Shows S.Korea’s Growing Movie Muscle

Director Na Hong-jin and cast members Hwang Jung-min, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell and Hoyeon pose on the red carpet during arrivals for the screening of the film "Hope" in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 17, 2026. (Reuters)
Director Na Hong-jin and cast members Hwang Jung-min, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell and Hoyeon pose on the red carpet during arrivals for the screening of the film "Hope" in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 17, 2026. (Reuters)
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Blockbuster ‘Hope’ Shows S.Korea’s Growing Movie Muscle

Director Na Hong-jin and cast members Hwang Jung-min, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell and Hoyeon pose on the red carpet during arrivals for the screening of the film "Hope" in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 17, 2026. (Reuters)
Director Na Hong-jin and cast members Hwang Jung-min, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell and Hoyeon pose on the red carpet during arrivals for the screening of the film "Hope" in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 17, 2026. (Reuters)

Acclaimed director Na Hong-jin has unveiled South Korea's biggest budget film ever: a blood-splattered sci-fi thriller featuring killer extraterrestrials played by real-life couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.

"Hope" by Na, whose low-budget horror movie "The Wailing" became a huge hit in his home country, was able to give free rein to his dark imagination in this gory tale of alien invasion.

"It's the most expensive film in the history of Korean cinema," Na told AFP in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival where the film premiered on Sunday night.

"It's a film that really required a very, very large budget because of the special effects, the design, the actors."

Despite having a genre-defying concept that was hard to sell initially -- it skips between thriller, sci-fi, horror and comedy -- he received backing from Korea's Plus M Entertainment and a budget of around 30 million euros ($35 million).

The cost of "Hope" underlines the increasing resources available to South Korean directors whose hit films such as the quadruple Oscar-winning "Parasite", as well as TV series like "Squid Game" have turned the home of KPop music into a global entertainment center.

Reviews for "Hope" were broadly positive, with Screen magazine calling it "a thunderously entertaining genre mash-up" while The Hollywood Reporter said it had "instant cult classic written all over it".

But others such as IndieWire slammed the quality of the special effects -- suggesting the budget was "not enough" for Na's grand ambitions, while its run-time of 160 minutes was described as "over long" by Variety.

Although married acting couple Fassbender and Vikander, stars of films from "12 Years a Slave" to "Ex Machina", are listed on the film's cast, many fans might struggle to recognize them.

Their acting has been transformed by special effects, with all the recognizable lead roles performed by bankable Korean stars including Hwang Jung-min, as well as Hoyeon from "Squid Game".

- Korean wave -

The all-action film, full of bodily fluids and gunfire, revolves around a clash between the residents of a remote town close to the frontier between South and North Korea and terrifying visitors from another planet.

With its themes of conflict and the incompetence of local officials, Na said he had "the wars that we know at the moment and the political situation that we had" at the time in his mind as he was writing the screenplay.

"Hope", intended as the first film in a series, is one of 22 films competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or prize for best film in Cannes.

It is the first by Na in 10 years since "The Wailing", which also focused on a remote location struggling with a mystery arrival.

The Cannes jury this year is headed by a South Korean director for the first time, Park Chan-wook, the maker of arthouse classics such as "Oldboy" and "The Handmaiden".

"Korea is playing a role as one of the central hubs of the film world, and I believe this is a movement befitting the time," he told AFP last week.

"It makes me think of a lot of the (Korean) predecessors who were truly outstanding but never had the opportunity to be recognized internationally," he added.

Park insisted that he would not favor his compatriot, Na.

"Some even joked that I might go out of my way to be harsher on a Korean film, because it wouldn't look good if I appeared to be favoring it," he told AFP. "I intend to judge everything as fairly and objectively as possible."

Entertainment

Spanish Court Orders 55 Mn Euro Tax Refund to Shakira

Colombian artist Shakira attends Global Citizen NOW in New York, New York, USA, 14 May 2026. (EPA)
Colombian artist Shakira attends Global Citizen NOW in New York, New York, USA, 14 May 2026. (EPA)
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Spanish Court Orders 55 Mn Euro Tax Refund to Shakira

Colombian artist Shakira attends Global Citizen NOW in New York, New York, USA, 14 May 2026. (EPA)
Colombian artist Shakira attends Global Citizen NOW in New York, New York, USA, 14 May 2026. (EPA)

A Spanish court has ordered the tax authority to refund Colombian pop star Shakira more than 55 million euros ($64 million) improperly collected in a dispute over her 2011 taxes, according to a ruling seen Monday.

The National Audience said tax authorities had failed to prove that the "Hips Don't Lie" singer spent more than 183 days in Spain in 2011, the legal threshold requiring residents to pay personal income tax in the country.

"On the contrary, the court found that Shakira spent 163 days in Spain and that the tax authorities had therefore failed to prove that the singer had the center of her economic interests in Spain," according to the ruling issued last month which was seen by AFP on Monday.

The court ordered "the reimbursement of the sums paid, together with legal interest", cancelling the tax assessments and multi-million-euro fines imposed by the tax authorities, which had considered the singer a tax resident in Spain in 2011.

The ruling comes as Shakira is set to wrap up her record-breaking "Women Don't Cry Anymore" world tour with a concert residency in Madrid starting in September.