Latest news with #ThePhantomMenace
The Sun
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Star Wars film slapped with new trigger warning 26 years after it was first released
STAR Wars has become the latest iconic film to be slapped with a trigger warning - 26 years after it was first released. Episode I: The Phantom Menace became a hit upon release in 1999 but now film bosses have been forced to add a new warning amid the growing trend in slapping classic hits with refreshed warnings for 2025. 3 3 Starring Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley and Samuel L. Jackson, the movie became a runaway box office hit. But now new warnings have been added as well as a re-classification understood to be provoked by an aggressive fight scene. The British Board of Film Classification have decided that a 'U' certificate, which stands for universal and means suitable for all ages, is no longer appropriate. It has instead been rated PG - often used to suggest films suitable for those aged eight and above or with parental consent - as a result of brief "bloody detail" and "non-graphic" shots of a dissected body. The film's starship dogfights and use of laser weapons were also used as a reason to upgrade the movie's classification. All these were attributed as the reason why the film must carry a new classification plus an updated warning. It is the latest in a long-line of films and TV shows from years gone-by to face a new warning added for broadcast in 2025. ITV show Inspector Morse found itself slapped with a warning last week as a result of its "crime scenes". ITV bosses fear viewers may get offended or upset while the mild-mannered Oxford detective solves his mystery of the week. Streaming service ITVX even warns of 'Satanic images' in one episode of the crime drama, which ran from 1987 to 2000. Viewers must click past a parental control screen to watch series seven's 'Day of the Devil'. Many other episodes also have crime and violence warnings. The Fast Show has also found itself hit with a warning last month. The classic series on iPlayer was flagged for using 'discriminatory language'. In February, Channel 4 was branded 'humourless' for flagging a series of Father Ted episodes on its streaming service. Regulators also hit Graham Linehan's Bafta-winning sitcom The IT Crowd with advisories, with one telling sensitive viewers: 'This episode was made in 2006 and contains strong, strong/offensive derogatory language and adult humour.' 3
Metro
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Star Wars is getting a new trigger warning 26 years later
It's been 26 years since Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, and now the hit sci-fi flick has been hit with a new trigger warning. Boasting a mighty cast comprising Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley, and Samuel L. Jackson, the epic space opera was a phenomenal hit with cinephiles in 1999. Against a $115million (£86m) budget, it grossed an astonishing $1.047billion (£780m), breaking numerous records and becoming both the highest-grossing film of that year and the second-highest of all time. But fast forward almost three decades, and it's all change, as The Phantom Menace has been reclassified due to an aggressive fight scene. The film was originally classified as universal (U), but this has now switched to parental guidance (PG) in a decision by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), citing 'moderate violence' in a lightsaber fight as the reason. Its reclassification was revealed in the BBFC's 2024 annual report, which said the film's starship dogfights, use of laser weapons, and the battle, which shows brief 'bloody detail' and a 'non-graphic' shot of a villain's dissected body, had led to it being labelled PG for its cinema re-release last year. PG means the film should not unsettle a child aged eight or above, but some scenes may be unsuitable for more sensitive children, while U means a movie is suitable for all. And Star Wars wasn't the only film to have its classification changed this time, as another film that fell victim to it was 1937's A Star Is Born. The American drama, which tells the story of a young woman who aspires to Hollywood greatness but becomes entangled with a leading man and his alcoholism, went from U to 12. This means it is not generally suitable for children aged under 12, because of the implied suicide of one of the film's characters, which was described as 'visually discreet'. A Star Is Born has, of course, been adapted several times since the original was released, most notably in 1954 with Judy Garland and in 2018, with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Meanwhile, TV-wise, the phrase 'son of a b***h' and drug references saw US comedy series Frasier go from a PG to a 12, over a change in the guidelines for classification. In contrast, both The Crow (1995) and Fight Club (1999) also saw their classifications lowered from 18 to 15 because of the updated guidelines. It comes as last year saw the BBFC classify the highest number of films in its 112-year history, with new guidelines regarding the classification of sex scenes at the 12/15 border, violence across the categories, and certain depictions of drug misuse. More Trending Natasha Kaplinsky, president of the BBFC, said: '2024 was the BBFC's 112th year of helping people across the UK view what's right for them —and what a remarkable year it was. 'We classified more cinema features than ever before, and we have made significant progress towards extending the coverage of trusted BBFC age ratings on streaming services through new deals with Prime Video and Netflix.' She added: 'We launched our revised Classification Guidelines—ensuring that the standards we apply when classifying content continue to reflect the views of UK audiences. 'Perhaps most exciting of all, we have continued our pioneering work with AI, ensuring that the BBFC remains at the forefront of film and digital content regulation. It has been a genuine privilege to lead the organisation at such an exciting and transformative time.' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Games Inbox: Is there a secret Nintendo Switch 2 Christmas game? MORE: Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft's best game and you should get it now it's cheap – Reader's Feature MORE: All Neighbours spoilers for next week as 90s legend returns to Ramsay Street
The Independent
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Star Wars movie reclassified due to this classic scene
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace has been reclassified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) from a universal (U) rating to parental guidance (PG). The change was made due to "moderate violence" in a lightsaber fight, starship dogfights, and laser weapons, including a scene with brief "bloody detail". The reclassification was revealed in the BBFC's 2024 annual report and applied to the film 's cinema re-release last year. Other films also saw rating changes, with A Star Is Born moving from U to 12 due to implied suicide, and US TV comedy series Fraser from PG to 12 for language and drug references. These updates coincide with the BBFC classifying the highest number of films in its 112-year history in 2023, following new guidelines on sex scenes, violence, and drug misuse.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
300 people in line? How hard-to-find bourbons made Buffalo Trace Distillery a cult favorite
FRANKFORT — By the time the doors opened at 9 a.m. on a recent Friday, at least 300 guests were already waiting outside Buffalo Trace Distillery. As people snaked through the queue, my mind wandered to the excitement around the midnight release of "The Phantom Menace" in 1999 or the seventh "Harry Potter" book in 2007. Make no mistake, this is a cultural phenomenon for bourbon lovers. But it was also just another day at the Kentucky bourbon distillery. Without fail, a few hundred people appear every morning at Buffalo Trace, 113 Great Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, eager to purchase a bottle of Blanton's ($74.99), E.H. Taylor, Jr. Small Batch ($59.99), Eagle Rare ($42.99) or Weller Special Reserve ($30). All four bottles are difficult to find on liquor store shelves, but if you head to the distillery gift shop in the morning, usually at least one of them will be available for purchase. Lately, they've had more than one available, which up until the last six months or so would have been like scoring tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and the Superbowl in the same day. Amid a heatwave in late June, I spotted a strong mix of license plates in the parking lot. Some folks had traveled from as far as Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida for a chance to purchase four relatively hard-to-find bottles of bourbon. One man lugged a camp chair and a laptop from his car and he settled into a spot about 30-deep into the line. He'd clearly done this before. Josh Crom, who works at a liquor store in Madison, Wisconsin, was posted up at the front of the line with five of his buddies from college. Even with his connections in alcohols sales, he told me he can't find a reasonably priced bottle of Blanton's in Wisconsin to add to his personal collection. The best way to nab one is to travel 500 miles to Buffalo Trace, and hope it's one of the allocated spirits while he's in town. This was the group's second bourbon trip together, and they had one bourbon enthusiast with them who knew this line phenomenon well. But there are rules to this ritual. Each Buffalo Trace shopper is only allowed one bottle of each of these allocated spirits per visit. There are plenty of digital tools that guess what might be for sale on the day you're going, but you'll never really know for sure until the morning of your visit. Once you buy one of these rare yet attainable bourbons, in most cases, you must wait another 90 days to purchase that label again from Buffalo Trace. The gift shop staff scans driver's licenses to ensure no visitor is taking more than their fair share. More: The 'Pied Piper of bottled-in-bond' bourbon is retiring. Here's what his legacy means And the more I've watched this phenomenon and, candidly, even participated in it myself over the years, the more I've wondered, why? Chuck Guglielmo, the owner of Unfiltered KY Tours, told me that 'it's a big deal to take something home from Buffalo Trace.' The Frankfort distillery is by far the most frequently requested among his bourbon clients. There's something different about Buffalo Trace that breeds an undeniable loyalty. While the line ebbs and flows in size along with the bourbon tourism season, it's become a staple at the distillery. This summer I decided to figure out why. Why is Buffalo Trace bourbon so hard to find? One thing that's even more remarkable than the daily spectacle is that Buffalo Trace never set out to have a line like this at all. 'This is a making of the consumers own desire,' Matt Higgins, Buffalo Trace's director of guest experiences, told me. 'We didn't encourage anybody to line up.' The fandom really began picking up in 2013 alongside the Kentucky bourbon boom, Higgins explained. The launch of the period drama "Mad Men" in 2007 gave bourbon an air of sophistication, and a dynamic marketing push in the beginning of the 21st century boosted the bourbon travel industry. Up until that point, Buffalo Trace could usually keep some aged spirits on the shelf throughout the day. That year, Higgins specifically recalls a customer who tried to buy a whole case of Eagle Rare. He realized that if every guest tried to do that, more and more people would leave the distillery disappointed. So that's how the one bottle per day rule was born. 'We implemented daily limits, and that wasn't enough to handle the demand verse the supply we were getting,' Higgins told me. 'There were days where we'd sell out of every bit of aged product we had.' More: Here are 6 new Kentucky bourbon, whiskey releases you need to know about this month In 2015, Buffalo Trace launched a decade-long, $1.2 billion expansion project aimed at ramping up its inventory to meet consumer demand. All the while, more and more fans began calling the distillery trying to pinpoint what day that week Blanton's would be on the gift shop shelves. When the distillery staff noticed that they were seeing the same faces day-after-day, they implemented the 90-day rule on Blanton's in early 2020. The crowds had been coming to Buffalo Trace for years at that point, but it was really the COVID-19 pandemic that created the formality of the line. The 90-day rule eventually expanded to include Eagle Rare, E.H. Taylor and Weller, too. If Higgins had it his way, no one would ever leave Buffalo Trace without their favorite bottle of bourbon, but since the aged spirits take years to complete, it's taken more than a decade for the supply to even closely reach the demand inside the the gift shop. 'You're starting to see the impact of that investment show up on the shelves,' Higgins told me. 'This is the very start of that shifting tide.' In the last six months or so, Higgins told me, they've had enough of a supply to occasionally offer 'holidays' from the 90-day rule. As the stock has increased, most days guests have a chance to purchase at least two of the allocated spirits, if not three or all four. Lately the highly sought-after bottles are available into the early afternoon. Somedays, the aged bourbon stays on shelves all day, which would have been unthinkable just two years ago. 'I'm the head of hospitality and I hate saying no to people,' Higgins told me. 'So now we're seeing the flip side of it, and a lot of surprise and delight opportunities.' What bourbon is available today at Buffalo Trace? There is no shortage of Buffalo Trace fan groups on the internet, but perhaps one of the most well-known is Buffalo Trace Daily. Its website and social media pages announce the spirits available each day and use an algorithm to break down the odds on what might be on the shelves the next day. For example, the morning The Courier Journal visited the distillery in June Buffalo Trace Daily projected a 53.27% chance for Weller, 34.35% for E.H. Taylor, 11.69% for Eagle Rare and 0.69% for Blanton's. Mike Danhauer of Lexington is the mastermind behind the method, and he has about four years of data driving his predictions. Danhauer is not a social media enthusiast by any means, he said. He's more of a numbers guy. Most days he can't believe that his data project annually draws in hundreds of thousands of visitors to his website and more than a million views. People are really into the culture around Buffalo Trace, though. More: International Wine & Spirits Competition says these are the best North American whiskeys 'Pretty much the only way you can find Blanton's and E.H. Taylor is either a secondary person or going to the distillery and getting it at retail price,' he told me, when we spoke over the phone in the days before my visit. 'There is definitely a thrill of the hunt.' Blanton's — with its elegant, round bottle and eight gold collectable toppers, which spell out B-L-A-N-T-O-N'-S — tends to be the big prize among visitors, Guglielmo told me. So much so, that he takes extra precautions with his tour vehicles in the hottest months of the year to ensure the regal wax seals don't melt and ruin the bottle. 'All the (allocated) products are entry level to becoming a bourbon connoisseur, they have name recognition,' he explained, as he talked me through what he has learned from his tour guests. 'They've heard so many people say that Blanton's is their favorite kind of bourbon, that it turns into a bit of an echo chamber.' A few weeks ago, I unwittingly found a reference to Blanton's in Season 1 Episode 7 of NBC's "Blindspot." After a character is freed from FBI detainment, he turns to his girlfriend and says 'Well, I think it's time we open that Blanton's your uncle gave you." That off-hand comment subtly nods to the celebratory and rare nature of the spirit. That same level of intrigue builds when bourbon newcomers hear their friends talk about trying to collect all eight toppers. Many of Guglielmo's tour guests have friends and family who encourage them to bring home a bottle of Blanton's. That rhetoric adds to the elusiveness of the products and the appeal of the brand. 'They've done such a good job with marketing and with word of mouth,' Guglielmo told me. 'It's built such a cult following that people know what to do.' 'It's so exciting' The Buffalo Trace cult following hasn't entirely shifted its habits to match this relatively new surge in supply. Even though the shelves tend to stay stocked into the early afternoon, a couple hundred people or so still line up most mornings in the summer. Many folks make Buffalo Trace their first stop in a day packed with bourbon tours. The distillery rarely offers the same allocated spirit two days in a row, which can encourage one final stop at the distillery as visitors head out of town. Some, like Chris Russey, are relatively local and build in time to stop by the distillery on their way to somewhere else. He lives in Lexington, but this summer he's teaching college algebra and pre-calculus at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He's waited in the line at least 30 times over the years, he told me as he sat in a camp chair and worked from his laptop. He's already collected all eight Blanton's toppers. Once he drinks his way through those bottles, he's eligible for a coveted prize. If he returns his toppers to the distillery, Buffalo Trace will mount them on a handsome looking bourbon stave and ship it to his home. The stave is a tell-tale sign of a Buffalo Trace fan. More: 5 industry-shaping names will join the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. Meet the 2025 class Needless to say, he already had enough Blanton's in his collection, he told me, smiling. His stock is large enough at this point that he'd had the chance to buy the highly sought-after product the day before and opted not to. The morning we met, he was hoping for Eagle Rare. A little further back, Richard and Lyndsi McDermitt of Grove City, Ohio, were three-time veterans of the line, and this time they'd traveled with their aunt and uncle, Rosemary and Mark Weiher. The reason for the trip was simple. 'It's superb,' Mark Weiher said excitedly. 'It's perfect. It's the best.' 'I like the whole drop thing,' Lynsdi McDermitt continued, referring to the mystery behind the availability. 'It's so exciting, it's like 'what are we going to get?'" They'd been hoping for Eagle Rare in the days leading up to their trip, but the ever-growing rumor mill among fans at the campground where they were staying had tempered their expectations. Perhaps, rightfully so. A few minutes later, word trickled down the line that E.H. Taylor and Weller Special Reserve were the allocations for the day. I grinned as I heard this. Buffalo Trace Daily's prediction for that morning was spot on. The Grove City Group wasn't too disappointed, though. They only know of one liquor store back home that sometimes has Buffalo Trace products, and those don't last long on the shelves. They were going to come home with more Buffalo Trace products from one day of waiting in line than they'd be able to find all year. Although, candidly, they expected at least one of the bottles wouldn't make it back to Ohio. 'We'll probably be sharing it around the campground,' Mark Weiher said. As the doors opened and the line started moving at 9 a.m., I followed the crowd past the check-in and into the gift shop. This part of the ritual is always a little jaw-dropping for me. Having only ever found one bottle of E.H. Taylor outside of the distillery, it's almost jarring to stand in a room packed with hundreds of its signature yellow canisters. A bourbon fan could check every liquor story in the state and still come up empty handed. But here at the distillery, you're right in the center of the motherload. More: Looking for something to do? Check out 11 events in the Courier Journal's Late Summer Guide And while Higgins says the growing supply will eventually make the line at the distillery and the culture around it obsolete, for the moment, the die-hard fandom is evident every day on the distillery grounds. When I left the distillery at 9:45 a.m., there were still more than 100 people waiting. Hundreds more would trickle into the gift shop throughout the rest of the day. It's like Guglielmo said, 'it's a big deal to bring something home from Buffalo Trace.' And as I watched clearly thrilled fans stream out of the distillery and load those coveted yellow canisters into cars from Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin, I couldn't help but agree with him. Reach features columnist Maggie Menderski at mmenderski@ This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Buffalo Trace bourbon whiskey for sale at Kentucky distillery Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Superman' Star Has Unusual Approach to Watching 'Star Wars' Movies
The star of the new Superman movie, David Corenswet, recently revealed that he's a big Star Wars fan, and so much so that he would prefer to take on the role of a Jedi over a role in a sequel to Superman. Corenswet took part in Vanity Fair's Lie Detector Test interview along with co-star Nicholas Hoult and was asked if he would rather do a Superman sequel or play as a Jedi Knight in a Star Wars film. Corenswet, who also admitted he has a tradition of taking part in a Star Wars marathon every New Year's Eve, showed his true allegiance by choosing the latter. The Superman star has also revealed he has an unorthodox approach for watching the Star Wars films, at least when it comes to introducing them to people who haven't watched the movies before. Corenswet doesn't recommend watching them in order. Instead, here's his preferred method, according to Brittany Broski's Royal Court. 1. A New Hope 2. The Empire Strikes Back 3. The Phantom Menace 4. Attack of the Clones 5. Revenge of the Sith 6. Return of the Jedi This is nearly the famed "Machete Order" (The Phantom Menace is not included in that order) for watching Star Wars movies, which further cements how big of a fan Corenswet is. Corenswet went on to explain the reasoning behind his preferred lineup. "You preserve the twist of — spoiler alert — Darth Vader is his father… and then you watch One through Three as a flashback essentially," Corenswet said. "And then Six, it's not as strong as Four and Five as a film, but it's a great culmination to the whole thing. It brings it all together. The stakes are bigger if you've seen One through Three, it feels more like a saga." While that lineup might feel odd to some, Corenswet's explanation for it is a strong one. We'll give him two thumbs up.'Superman' Star Has Unusual Approach to Watching 'Star Wars' Movies first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 15, 2025 Solve the daily Crossword
