The daily gossip: Mariah Carey says you can't listen to her Christmas music yet, a COVID-19 thriller is getting dunked on for being 'pure bad taste,' and more

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1. Mariah Carey confirms it's too early to start listening to 'All I Want For Christmas Is You'
2. COVID-19 thriller Songbird trailer slammed as 'pure bad taste'
3. Selling Sunset's Chrishell Stause was almost the Bachelorette
4. Sandra Oh and Awkwafina team up for a sister comedy
5. Hugh Grant cracked a very British joke to a bunch of confused Americans

published 29 October 2020

1. Mariah Carey confirms it's too early to start listening to 'All I Want For Christmas Is You'

Google searches for "Mariah Carey All I Want For Christmas" are starting to trend upward, signaling the start of the annual Mariah Carey Christmas Spike, but the singer swiftly shut down anyone who might be jumping the gun with holiday music this year. "Not yet," Carey wrote in reply to Mike Nicolella, a Twitter user who shared the Google search results for the song creeping up, despite it being only late October. So when will it be okay to finally let loose and blast the 1994 banger? Carey has historically allowed for the song to begin playing on Nov. 1. Go ahead and mark your calendars: that's Sunday.

If the current pandemic hellscape isn't cutting it for you, the first trailer for the COVID-19 thriller Songbird, produced by Michael Bay, just dropped. The film is set four years in the future as the planet is ravaged by "COVID-23," a mutated version of the virus with a 50 percent mortality rate. "[Producer] Adam [Goodman] would say to me, 'You can't have a curfew, that's too dystopian," filmmaker Adam Mason told Entertainment Weekly. "Literally the next day there were helicopters flying over my house with loudspeakers saying, 'Everyone in their homes. Curfew's starting.'" Based on reactions to the trailer, though, some are unimpressed by its premise: "Talk about pure bad taste," tweeted one, while another remarked, "This is not the movie we need right now…"

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On Tuesday night's episode of The Bachelorette, Season 11 Bachelorette DeAnna Pappas made a guest appearance to listen to current Bachelorette Clare Crawley gush about Dale. But in an alternate universe, it might have been Selling Sunset's Chrishell Stause giving Clare advice about how "when you know you know." Stause was reportedly considered to be the lead of Season 11, even having lunch with ABC executive Robert Mills to discuss the opportunity, Mills revealed on Nick Viall's podcast. "I was convinced," he said. "I'm like, 'This is the Bachelorette.'" But there was a big push to pick DeAnna instead, with even Ellen DeGeneres calling to recommend her as the lead of the 2008 season. Still, as Cosmopolitan points out, "Chrishell is single right now and there's always next season."

Can you say dream team? Awkwafina and Sandra Oh are teaming up for a sister comedy for Netflix, Deadline reports. Though the movie doesn't yet have a title, the script is reportedly being written by Jen D'Angelo (who is also working on a Hocus Pocus sequel for Disney+), and it will be produced by Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum. Want to know more? Same, but there isn't much out there just yet, only that the film "centers on a lonely recluse whose life is upended when her train wreck of a sister vows to mend their relationship by helping her fulfill her lifelong dream: to be a contestant on her favorite game show." Can't. Wait.

Hugh Grant made a raunchy joke at a drive-in screening of his new HBO series, but it sounds like it mostly left Americans confused about British slang. The London-born actor appeared in the Hamptons with Nicole Kidman, his co-star in The Undoing, which was showing as part of the event. "Hello, Hamptons. I think you're going to watch two episodes in your cars, which is … really weird," Grant said by way of introduction. "Maybe you'll do some necking, or some dogging … whatever people do in cars in the Hamptons." Page Six reports that the remark left Kidman "blushing" while "we wonder whether attendees … even understood the British slang (which means to have sex with strangers in cars in secluded places)." The more you know!

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.