Lindsay Lohan

You may not have realized it, but the actress Lindsay Lohan has been quietly orchestrating a comeback over the past few years. In 2022, she signed a multifilm deal with Netflix that led to such forgettable pieces of fluff as the Oirish romantic comedy Irish Wish, and now she has returned in her highest-profile film in years, the Freaky Friday sequel, Freakier Friday. Lohan stars opposite the Oscar-winning Jamie Lee Curtis in what is clearly (and cynically) intended as a piece of four-quadrant fluff, and Disney will be hoping that the sequel recaptures some of the 2003 original’s box-office alchemy; it grossed $160 million worldwide on a $26 million budget.

It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid. Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor.

I was reprimanded by my parents for talking during the minute’s silence at Princess Diana’s funeral. In my defense, I was six years old at the time. Almost twenty-five years have passed since that fateful night in Paris, when the People’s Princess was pursued by the press one last time. In the years since, Diana’s legacy has hung over not just the British royal family, but the relationship between society and celebrity. Her death marked one of the first real moments of global introspection: was our paparazzi too invasive, our press too dogged? We now look back at the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Lindsay Lohan and ask the same questions. But it all goes back to Di.