Following a very off and unexpected year, the ecosystem of Hollywood is slowly returning to a semblance of normalcy. You may remember that before March 2020 we lived in a world that saw the release of a massive movie practically every couple of weeks, and now it seems like that pattern is returning. After all, it was only at the end of last month that Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong made a big splash on its five-day opening weekend, and now Simon McQuiod's Mortal Kombat is getting all of the big blockbuster attention. The new video game movie has taken over the top spot at the box office – though what makes the news a tad stranger than expected is that the film had some serious competition from a surprising new title. This weekend (and while also being available to HBO Max subscribers), Mortal Kombat earned $22.5 million from domestic ticket sales, which is solid, but not quite a match for the dominating figures put up by Godzilla vs. Kong a few weeks ago (the MonsterV
In Houston, election officials found creative ways to help a struggling and diverse work force vote in a pandemic. Record turnout resulted. Now the G.O.P. is targeting those very measures. HOUSTON — Voting in the 2020 election presented Zoe Douglas with a difficult choice: As a therapist meeting with patients over Zoom late into the evening, she just wasn't able to wrap up before polls closed during early voting. Then Harris County introduced 24-hour voting for a single day. At 11 p.m. on the Thursday before the election , Ms. Douglas joined fast-food workers, nurses, construction workers, night owls and other late-shift workers at NRG Arena, one of eight 24-hour voting sites in the county, where more than 10,000 people cast their ballots in a single night. "I can distinctly remember people still in their uniforms — you could tell they just got off of work, or maybe they're going to work; a very diverse mix," said Ms. Douglas, 27, a Houston native. Twenty-four-hou