Supporters of a federal film incentive are preparing an all-out push to pass the legislation by the end of the year, looking to take advantage of momentum before Congress potentially changes hands next term.

A bipartisan group of senators and representatives unveiled the bill on Thursday. It would provide a 20%-30% federal incentive for films and TV shows that would stack on top of state incentives, instantly making states like California, Georgia and New York among the world’s most generous film locations.

“Windows of opportunity to pass legislation open and close very quickly,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., at a press conference on Thursday. “You have to really strike while the iron is hot.”

The House of Representatives is out of session, and will not return until after the November election. But lawmakers expect that the lame-duck session will include a significant tax bill, into which the U.S. film incentive could be incorporated.

“It is the goal and it is realistic,” said Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, in an interview. “When the right opportunity strikes, you’ve gotta jump at the opportunity. The stars have aligned where we have bicameral, bipartisan support, and we have a president who is very supportive of this.”

The bill introduced on Thursday has yet to get a cost estimate. As proposed, the incentive would cover a wide range of productions, including animation and reality shows. It would also cover salaries for actors and other above-the-line talent. A separate visual effects and postproduction credit would also apply to projects that are filmed abroad but completed domestically.

Asked whether the bill is a starting point for negotiations, or whether it may pass in something close to its current form, Moran said that time will tell.

“There is a long way to go,” he said. “One of the things that’s important is to get a score on the bill, to look for pay-fors that might offset any cost associated with the bill … Whether or not it changes a little bit or a lot will be determined by the feedback we get.”

The proposal includes a benefit for rural areas like Moran’s district — a 5% bonus for rural “opportunity zones” — as well as something for Los Angeles, in the form of a 5% bonus for filming in a federal disaster zone. (Due to last year’s fires, L.A. County qualifies through January 2030.)

“It was important for me to have that in there,” said Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Calif. “Film is very unique in terms of its ability to stand up a lot of jobs quickly.”

As written, the credit would stack on top of state-based incentives — with no reduction in qualified spend due to state credits — which would push the total subsidy into the 50% range in several states.

“The state tax incentives are separate and apart from the tax incentives here,” Moran said. “We see this as an additional incentive for the companies to benefit from to stay here.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democratic sponsor of the bill, said he is eager to get it done this year, rather than let the momentum flag.

“The iron is very hot right now,” he said. “We’re all very focused on this, the president is focused on this. I wouldn’t want to see that bleed into next year.”

Still, Friedman cautioned, it’s not a sure thing.

“There’s a lot that has to happen for that to be a reality,” she said.

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” the Season 4 finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,“ now streaming on Paramount+.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” brought its fourth season to a close this week, with an episode that firmly sets up the show’s fifth and final season and teases the show’s entry into “Star Trek: The Original Series” territory. (Or as Trekkies call it, “TOS.”)

The finale is anchored by the newly promoted Lt. Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). She returns to the Enterprise after a Starfleet conference as the ship is preparing to observe a white hole, which is believed to be the counterpoint to a black hole.

Uhura hears music coming from the white hole, when in true “Star Trek” space phenomenon style, a sudden energy burst strikes the ship. Uhura is knocked to the ground, but then hears what sounds like her own voice trying to save Scotty (Martin Quinn) from some kind of emergency.

As it turns out, she is not going crazy. We see that on the other side of the white hole, the Enterprise, one year in the future, is investigating a black hole. In this future timeline, Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) is now the captain, Spock (Ethan Peck) is his first officer, Pike (Anson Mount) has been promoted to admiral, and La’an (Christina Chong) is mysteriously absent for … reasons.

Future Uhura is in a romantic relationship with Scotty, and the two fly out on a shuttle with Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who is now a flight instructor at the Academy, to investigate the black hole. But the same sudden energy burst hits the shuttle. This Uhura manages to make an emergency transport back to Enterprise, but Scotty is killed. Uhura is then told that Scotty had died a year earlier, setting up some fun “Star Trek” timey-wimey paradox stuff.

The episode establishes that “Strange New Worlds” Uhura and “TOS” Uhura are able to communicate across time, but perhaps most importantly the episode sees Gooding rocking the classic “TOS” Nichelle Nichols hairdo. According to Gooding, it took her a bit of adjusting to settle into the new look.

“I was a little insecure about it at first, because I thought I looked just different, and the human brain takes a minute to understand that different doesn’t mean danger,” Gooding tells Variety.

The two Uhuras (Two-hura?) must work together to save Scotty without disrupting the timeline any further. That proves to be tricky, especially since “TOS” Uhura has to guide her past self without getting into too much of what is to come in the intervening year.

“The hardest part was making them talk to each other and having ‘TOS’ Uhura speak on experiences that ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura hasn’t had yet, and to live in that sort of liminal space,” Gooding says. “As a recovering control addict, it was hard for me to live in that space and not immediately feel like I need a a point in ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura’s mind to leap off of and talk on.”

“I crave an answer, and to be met with yourself saying, ‘Hey, that’s not going to help you,’ it was a struggle for sure in the character,” she continues. “She had a hard time being told, ‘You’ve just got to trust me. You have to trust the me, that is you.’”

Past and future Uhura figure out a way to balance out the timeline using a dilithium diamond, but just when they are set to use it, another energy pulse sends them the opposite Enterprises. Meaning “TOS” Uhura is back in the past, while past Uhura is now in the future.

But past Uhura in the future is able to unlock the secret of the music she heard at the beginning of the episode. It turns out it was an alien entity within the white hole/black hole, telling the Enterprise to stay back, because a child is about to be birthed from it. The energy blasts, in other words, have been “contractions.”

The two Uhuras will be able to rebalance all that has gone awry if they can successfully birth this “space baby” using specialized drones that they can control from outside the ship. They both venture out and end up meeting each other face to face in space as the birth is happening — and Gooding says that shooting that was a mind-bender in and of itself.

“There were three different Uhuras on the call sheet at any given time,” she says. “It was me, my stand-in Lisa, and my stunt double Sammy. There were times in which I was having a conversation with a tennis ball on a stick, and there were times where I was having my conversation with Lisa, but we recorded my dialogue so mt stand-in wasn’t saying it — it was me having a conversation with my voice so the timing was right. So it was me looking at her, but hearing the voice of God, as we call it, as my voice.”

The space baby is successfully born, and the two Uhuras are transported to the bridge of the Enterprise and thanked by the alien midwives. They also get a chance to talk to each other, which Gooding calls a “passing of the torch” between “Strange New Worlds” and “TOS.”

“‘Strange New Worlds’ has done all the work that we are gonna do,” she says. “We have told the stories. They are written, recorded, edited. ADR is done. All we have to do is share it with the world. And I think what we have done with the series finale of ‘Strange New Worlds’ is tee up a series of opportunities. We could veer off and have more conversations about Kirk’s captaincy, or we can launch right into the original series.

“We found a way to close this chapter for the legacy characters, but we’ve also been able to say goodbye to characters that only exist in ‘Strange New Worlds,’” Gooding says. “And we’ve done it in a way that I think is really satisfying.”

New, mysterious and cryptic clips of Dakota Johnson flanked by another woman and man have taken rhe internet by storm, but this time, they aren’t part of her latest movie, “Verity”; they’re part of a Taylor Swift music video. Swift announced Thursday that she will unveil the music video for “Patient Zero” at the MTV VMAs on Sunday, and in the meantime, gave Swifties a very short (13-second) sneak peek, revealing Johnson as one of the stars.

Johnson opened about her role in the video at the “Verity” red carpet premiere in London on Thursday.

“Working with your friends is like the most fun thing on the planet because we’ve known each other for so long, we respect each other’s creative minds, and to be able to work alongside her and support and assist and be a person whom she tells what to do is wonderful,” Johnson said.

Johnson emphasized her excitement on Ambar Lee and Leah Briars’ Fangirl Nation podcast on Thursday.

“Taylor and I have been friends for a really long time and we’re very close, and we decided to work together and it’s great,” Johnson said. “Normally I would say ‘Don’t work with your friends,’ but we work really well together. It was so fun. So fun. It was the best. We just had the best time.”

Their decades-long friendship was further confirmed with Johnson’s attendance at Swift’s star-studded wedding at Madison Square Garden this July.

Swift announced the single on Tuesday, followed by the news of “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” on Wednesday. The album, an expanded version of last year’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” includes four new tracks: “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon.”

“About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing,” Swift wrote on social media. “Something that completely blew my mind… You gave ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ the biggest first week for an album in history. I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really, we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs. I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made. ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’ including four new songs, is out on Friday and available to preorder and save now.”

A bidding war may be in full flower for Letterboxd, the popular film-reviews and social service that has been fielding inbound acquisition offers for several months.

Indie studio A24 and the New York Times are the latest to express an interest in buying Letterboxd, according to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources. Any deal is “expected to value Letterboxd at more than $300 million,” per the report. That would be about 20 times its projected earnings in 2026 of roughly $15 million, according to the Times.

There’s been broad interest in Letterboxd: Those said to have explored a possible acquisition include Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Skydance, private-equity giant TPG and Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian.

Asked for comment, Katie Hill, the New York Times’ SVP, global head of communications and external affairs, said, “The company regularly reviews potential investments, and it’s our policy not to comment on speculation about potential acquisitions or divestitures.”

A24 declined to comment. Reps for Letterboxd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If a studio or streamer acquired Letterboxd, it would introduce at least the perception of a conflict of interest, as users might wonder if such an owner would favor its own titles on the service. Rotten Tomatoes was part of NBCUniversal for years, raising questions of its independence from the entertainment division. (Rotten Tomatoes is now part of Versant Media, which spun off from NBCU earlier this year.)

In a statement in July, a Letterboxd spokesperson said about reports of potential buyers: “As Letterboxd has grown, it’s natural there will be interest in what we do next. There’s nothing specific for us to share at this time. Any decision about Letterboxd’s future would involve the founders.”

Letterboxd, founded in 2011 and based in New Zealand, has been shopping itself to interested parties in recent months. It is majority-owned by Canadian holding company Tiny, which acquired a 60% stake in Letterboxd in 2023 at a valuation of $50 million-$60 million. Letterboxd co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow own the remaining 40% share.

Letterboxd has more than 30 million members globally and serves a passionate base of movie lovers. The company also has launched an online video-rental service stocked with indie films including previously unreleased titles.

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame Encore,” now playing in theaters.

In the lead-up to “Avengers: Doomsday,” Marvel has re-released “Avengers: Endgame” in theaters with four brand new scenes that tie directly into the sprawling team-up film releasing on Dec. 18. Retitled “Avengers: Endgame Encore,” this slightly longer version of the 2019 blockbuster adds four minutes of new footage with characters like Robert Downey Jr.’s mega-villain Doctor Doom, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner to the already jam-packed movie.

Marvel started building the hype for “Doomsday” a year ahead of its release with four short teasers attached to last year’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” The first revealed that Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) have a son; the second focused on Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his adopted daughter; the third showed Prof. Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Cyclops (James Marsden) from Fox’s “X-Men” universe crossing into the MCU; and the fourth brought together Black Panther (Letitia Wright) and the Wakandans with the Fantastic Four, who traveled from their universe.

These new “Endgame Encore” scenes were shot during “Doomsday” production and added to the re-release to bridge the two massive “Avengers” stories. The first scene takes place during Steve and Peggy’s dance in the closing of “Endgame.” As fans saw in the original movie, Steve has hung up his Captain America costume, passed the star-spangled shield down to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and finally settled down with his long-lost love Peggy after traveling back in time. But now, they get a surprising knock at their door from none other than the Norse trickster god, Loki. The last time we saw the reformed villain was in the finale of “Loki” Season 2, where he resigned himself to holding up the entire multiverse for the rest of time. But before that, it seems that Loki, in his Time Variance Authority uniform, pays Steve and Peggy a visit, perhaps to discuss how they’ve created an unstable branch in the multiverse with Steve’s time travel.

“Loki” gets another look with a fellow scene that takes place in the Time Variance Authority with Mobius (Owen Wilson), Casey (Eugene Cordero), Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). They notice that two Earths are about to collide in an incursion and begin firing on each other. More alternate worlds start colliding and terminating, and it’s revealed that the entire multiverse is collapsing. Could those two Earths be Fox’s “X-Men” universe and the mainline MCU world? We already know that Prof. Xavier, Magneto, Cyclops, Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Gambit (Channing Tatum) will cross into the MCU, so this may set up their clash with the Avengers that was teased in the “Doomsday” trailer.

Another new scene with Bruce Banner pops up during the credits and takes place after he’s apprehended in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” In this summer’s record-breaking blockbuster, Bruce loses control and is unable to stop from transforming into the Hulk when his mind is controlled by Jean Grey (Sadie Sink). Spider-Man (Tom Holland) beats the super-strong, green giant, and Bruce is taken to a secure medical facility. In the new “Endgame Encore” credits scene, Bruce is in an underground bunker tinkering on a serum to suppress his Hulking out. All of a sudden, Doctor Doom breaks into Bruce’s facility and Bruce turns into the roaring Hulk to face him, but we don’t see what happens next. Does this mean Bruce and/or Hulk will reappear in “Doomsday, and will he be under Doctor Doom’s control?

The final new scene appears at the very end of the credits, when the original “Endgame” had a mysterious, metal-clanging sound in the closing moments. When “Endgame” first released, diehard fans realized that the noise was from “Iron Man” when Downey Jr. was forging his powerful suit of armor. Now, we see a flashes of Doctor Doom making his metal mask with the same sound being played. It’s a dark twist and seems to hint that Doom and Iron Man, while both played by Downey Jr., may also have their origins mirrored.

“Avengers: Doomsday” hits theaters on Dec. 18 — the same day as “Dune: Part 3,” setting up a “Dunesday” showdown. With all of the new scenes, advance teasers and year-long countdown clock, Marvel and Disney are hoping “Doomsday” ends up being another smash hit in the wake of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s” record-setting run.