The $2 billion acquisition of Africa’s MultiChoice Group boosted Canal+ Group’s first-half financials, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup contributing to strong subscriber growth at the pay-TV giant’s South African business.
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“Following the acquisition of MultiChoice, our increased scale is starting to deliver the benefits we expected,” Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada said on Tuesday in unveiling the results. “We have achieved half of our €250 million ($284 million) synergies target and remain well on track for the year, and we confirm our full-year and medium-term guidance.”
Canal+ touted that “subscriber acquisition [was] up 40 percent, compared to the first half of 2025 in MultiChoice countries,” adding that June was the “best subscriber acquisition month in South Africa in a decade.” In that context, the company also mentioned “successful content and marketing initiatives, including the World Cup advertising campaign featuring Idris Elba and the launch of the Novelas+ channel in South Africa.”
At the World Cup, the South African team advanced from the group stage but then lost to Canada in the first game of the knockout stage.
BNP Paribas analyst Nicolas Langlet was optimistic about the momentum at MultiChoice, writing in a report: “Trend at MultiChoice improved sequentially … driven by the success of FIFA World Cup and the first effects of the key initiatives implemented as part of the plan to boost growth. Thanks to the new strategy and reinvestment plan, we expect the subscriber base to improve in the second part of the year and support positive organic sales momentum exiting 2026.”
Meanwhile, at production unit StudioCanal, Saada lauded “excellent six months on and off screen,” mentioning such box-office hits as Guru in France and Pressure in the U.S. “With a slate including Paddington 4, Zack Snyder’s remake of Escape From New York, our first major South African film production, The Road Home, and Danny Boyle’s Ink, StudioCanal’s momentum looks set to continue,” he said.
Canal+’s “content production, distribution and other” segment, which includes StudioCanal and streaming service Dailymotion, saw first-half revenue jump 9.9 percent, but adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) dropped 3 percent.
Total Canal+ group revenue jumped 40 percent to €4.29 billion ($4.88 billion), driven by the MultiChoice takeover. Adjusting for the deal, growth came in at 1.4 percent. Adjusted EBIT jumped by 68 percent or, when excluding MultiChoice, rose 13 percent. %!s()
Games Workshop has made a number of significant announcements on the Henry Cavill Warhammer 40,000 Cinematic Universe, as well as new Amazon animations based on its tabletop games.
After concluding negotiations with Amazon to create Warhammer 40,000 movies and TV shows in December 2024, Games Workshop has now finally provided an update on the progress of the project. In a financial report, Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree said that Amazon had brought onboard United Artists (UA) and Mike Flanagan, who, having completed initial outlines, “should soon be moving on to script.”
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Vertigo and Warhammer 40,000 superfan Henry Cavill “remain involved as they have been for some time,” Rountree added, which will come as some relief to those who took the radio silence around the project as a sign that Cavill may have exited his role as steward and star.
What happens next? Well, it sounds like it will still be some time before we get firm details on the setting and characters, if work hasn't even begun on a script. And we don’t yet know if Flanagan’s work relates to a movie or a TV show. Rountree did say that “UA have been decisive and brought their renowned pace and quality to the project,” though, so hopefully news will start to pick up.
What does the decision to bring Flanagan in tell us about what to expect? He’s best known for horror, having created the Netflix shows The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, among others. He’s also behind the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series Carrie, and wrote the first draft of the script for the upcoming DC Universe film Clayface.
So, it stands to reason that whatever this Warhammer 40,000 TV show or film is, it leans into horror. If that’s true it could be hugely exciting for fans. The grimdark 41st millennium is most famous for bombastic battles between Space Marines and terrifying aliens, but Warhammer 40,000 has plenty about it that can be considered horror, even body horror, with the horrible Death Guard rotting themselves and everything around them and daemons of the Warp giving everyone nightmares.
Cavill, in a recent interview with Esquire, touched on the “complexity” and “trickiness” of adapting the Warhammer 40,000 IP. But, he insisted, he was loving the challenge. Bringing Warhammer to life "is a dream come true," Cavill said, "but it's different from what I've done before, in the sense I haven't had my hand on the tiller of things before. It's wonderful doing that. It is a tricky IP, and a very complex IP, and that's what I love about it. The challenges that come with putting this on the page in a way that is doing justice to that complexity, that trickiness, and that nuance, is a challenge I'm enjoying enormously."
When the Games Workshop / Amazon deal was announced, Cavill issued a statement on Instagram saying he’d been “working away in concept rooms, breaking down approaches to the enormity and magnificence of the Warhammer world."
He added: "Together, we've been sifting through the plethora of incredible characters and poring over old tomes and texts. Our combined efforts have led us to a fantastic place to start our Universe, which has been agreed upon by those up on high at both Amazon and Games Workshop. That starting place shall, for now, remain a secret. Watch this space, though — more to come in time!"
Who might Cavill play across the Warhammer 40,000 Cinematic Universe? Talking to IGN in 2021, Cavill expressed interest in playing one of the Primarchs or Captain-Generals, who are high-ranking key characters from the Warhammer lore. But does the Amazon project need to be more grounded than a big galactic epic to keep it within a realistic scope? We’re left with scraps to mull over, such as recent comments from Dan Abnett about NDAs and upcoming books.
The news doesn’t stop there, because Games Workshop also announced that it has almost completed an episode for Season 2 of Amazon’s animated anthology series, Secret Level, following the success of the Warhammer 40,000 episode in Season 1. This one, though, is set in the Warhammer: Age of Sigmar universe (fantasy). So don’t expect a follow-up to Titus’ adventures ahead of the release of Space Marine 3.
Fear not, because Games Workshop announced it has begun work on a full animated Warhammer 40,000 series featuring the Deathwatch. This series will be written by John Orloff, with Blur again animating, and released through Amazon. “We can’t wait to see it!” Rountree said.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].%!s()
This aerial image shows the damaged AEON Mall following an earthquake in Kashima, Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Credit: Kyodo News via AP
A 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook Japan 's southern main island of Kyushu on Tuesday, leaving dozens of people injured or missing after part of a shopping center and a huge chimney at a paper factory collapsed, officials said. A tsunami advisory was issued but quickly lifted.
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There were fears that at least two people were dead.
In Kashima Town, the quake collapsed the second floor of the Aeon Mall shopping center, trapping an unknown number of people there, according to the fire department in the prefectural capital of Kumamoto.
Four people were pulled out with injuries and taken to a hospital, while 10 others were unaccounted for, the Kumamoto prefectural emergency response team said. It said the extent of the damage was still being investigated as the search and rescue effort continued.
At the Nippon Paper Industries Co.'s Yatsushiro factory, where a chimney collapsed and the building was damaged, 11 people were trapped underneath the debris, the Kumamoto emergency team said. Two of them were later found without vital signs, while the conditions of nine others were unknown, the team said.
A map showing the location of an earthquake in southern Japan. Credit: AP Digital Embed
The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said more than 260,000 people were advised to evacuate, most of them in Kumamoto prefecture, but also in the neighboring Nagasaki prefecture.
The affected area is about 900 kilometers (540 miles) southwest of Tokyo, the country's capital.
A tsunami advisory for the Ariake and Yatsushiro Seas on the western coasts of Kumamoto prefecture and three neighboring prefectures was lifted within two hours, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told journalists that there were reports of damage to roads, bridges and buildings, as well as blackouts and fires, though details were unclear.
The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said major public facilities or infrastructure were not damaged. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority said no abnormalities were found at three nearby nuclear power plants.
Kyodo News said a hospital in the city of Yatsushiro took in about 40 people with injuries and about 50 others were taken to a hospital in the city of Kumamoto.
A part of the stone wall of the Kumamoto Castle is seen damaged after an earthquake in Kumamoto in the Kyushu island, southern Japan, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Credit: Kyodo News via AP
The quake also affected a number of major manufacturers in Kyushu.
Toyota Motor Corp. said it has suspended the operations at three of its factories in Kyushu in part because of safety issues, and that they will reopen on Wednesday. Toyota said there were no reports of injuries to people or damage at the plants, though the company was still assessing the situation.
Honda Motor Co. and Nippon Paper also suspended operations, and Yamato Transport Co. has also stopped delivery services in and out of Kumamoto, the Nikkei business daily said.
Shinkansen bullet trains and local trains in Kyushu were suspended for safety checks, and the runway at Aso Kumamoto Airport was closed, with "no prospect of resuming operations" anytime soon, according to a notice on the airport's website. There were no details.
The Japanese Defense Ministry said it dispatched military aircraft to the area to assess the situation.
This aerial image shows a partially collapsed bridge after the earthquake in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, on Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Credit: Kyodo News via AP
A store sign of a restaurant is seen fallen on the ground after an earthquake in Kumamoto in the Kyushu island, southern Japan, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Credit: Kyodo News via AP
A train derailed and fell on its side at Yatsushiro station, and stone walls were damaged at Kumamoto Castle, a main tourist destination that was badly damaged in the 2016 quake and is still being repaired, Kyodo said.
"The shaking reminded me of the Kumamoto quake (10 years ago) and I was frightened," said Hiroki Shimoda, an official at Mifune town hall, who saw roof tiles of nearby homes crash to the ground. Kumamoto was hit with a deadly quake in 2016 that killed at least 50 people.
Shinji Kiyomoto with the Japan Meteorological Agency urged residents to be cautious over the next two to three days.
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The components of protac drugs combine to better target proteins
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Science Photo Library/Alamy
I think we will look back at 2026 as a landmark in medicine, the year in which the first protac drug was approved. What’s special about protacs? Well, while most drugs simply block their targets, protacs utterly demolish them. Per molecule, protacs are far more potent, and they can also do things other drugs just can’t.
To put it in sporting terms, existing drugs tackle their opponents one-on-one, and sometimes that opponent evades them. Protacs are like a referee who red-cards an entire team, taking them off the field altogether – a game changer.
I first got excited about protacs in 2005 when I was a features editor at New Scientist, and promptly commissioned a piece about them. At that time, it was far from clear whether a brilliant idea could be turned into practical drugs, so it’s fantastic to see decades of hard work finally bearing fruit.
To understand why protacs are so revolutionary, we need to start with conventional drugs. Almost all the pills you pop – ibuprofen, say – contain drugs that consist of small molecules. The shape of these molecules allows them to bind to specific proteins, to block or stimulate them. For instance, ibuprofen binds to and inhibits enzymes that produce chemicals that promote inflammation.
Small-molecule drugs have some big advantages. They’re cheap to make, can get inside cells and can be taken as a pill because they can also pass through the gut lining and into the bloodstream. But their small size means they’re not that specific. They tend to bind to other molecules besides the one they are supposed to target and thus have undesirable side effects.
And in many cases, it simply isn’t possible to find a small molecule to block the activity of a protein. The issue is that each drug molecule can’t just bind to any part of a target protein. To have an effect, it must bind to the active site of the protein – the workface – but sometimes small parts of the active site don’t have a distinctive enough shape. Such proteins are referred to as undruggable.
That’s why many newer drugs consist of large molecules, most commonly proteins known antibodies. (Any drug whose name ends in “-ab” is an antibody.) The large size of antibodies means they can bind to targets with exquisite precision, making them highly effective and safer. To create them, you get immune cells to generate antibodies to the desired target and then pick the best one. It sounds easy, but it took many decades to perfect.
The downside of antibodies is that they are really expensive because they can be made only in living cells. Their large size also means they must be injected because they can’t get through the gut. Nor can they get into cells once they’re in the bloodstream. So, while antibodies could bind to many undruggable proteins, they can’t get into cells to reach them.
The other thing to mention is that both small-molecule drugs and antibodies must be in contact with the target to work – the one-on-one part I mentioned above. Protacs work differently. Essentially, they stick a “recycle me” label on a protein in a cell. That means just one protac molecule can label and get rid of tens or hundreds of molecules of that protein. And because they’re not blocking or stimulating the target protein, they don’t have to bind to the active site. Anywhere on the target will do, making many undruggable targets druggable.
Craig Crews and Raymond Deshaies came up with the idea for protacs when they met at a conference in 1998. They knew that cells have waste disposal factories, called proteasomes, that break down and recycle faulty or excess proteins. They also knew that the “recycle me” label on proteins consists of a short chain of ubiquitin molecules. Add this label to a disease-causing protein and the proteasome will destroy it.
But how? The “recycle me” labels are usually added to specific proteins by enzymes known as E3 ubiquitin ligases. Maybe it could be done by bringing an E3 ligase into close contact with the target protein by creating a molecule that binds to both, Crews and Deshaies speculated.
Within a few years, they had shown the answer was yes, it works. They called their creations proteolysis targeting chimeras, or protacs – the proteolysis bit of the name refers to the destruction of proteins, and the chimera bit to the fact that protacs are made by joining two parts that each bind to a different thing.
Moving outside the lab
The first protacs were an academic exercise, Crews told me in 2020. The molecules were so large they had to be injected into cells – a non-starter for a drug.
In 2008, Crews set out to create small-molecule protacs. This is a challenge because each protac must bind to two molecules – the target protein and an E3 ligase – whereas conventional small-molecule drugs need bind only to one. While he succeeded in making protacs small enough to behave like small molecules, they are still somewhat larger than conventional drugs. “I call them large small-molecules,” he told me last week.
By 2013, Crews was confident enough to found a company called Arvinas. For its first products, Arvinas played it safe. Rather than going for undruggable proteins, it targeted hormone receptors in cancer cells. For instance, the growth of some types of breast cancer is driven by receptors that respond to oestrogen. There are already several drugs that work by targeting these receptors, but resistance can develop.
One way that cancers become resistant is by making more receptors, until even the highest tolerable drug doses can’t block all the receptor molecules – the one-on-one problem. “Since we’re actively degrading the receptor, we don’t have that limitation,” Crews said in 2020. In trials, people with advanced breast cancer that had spread around the body survived more than twice as long when given the protac drug vepdegestrant, compared with those given a conventional drug. As a result, vepdegestrant was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in May.
Protacs have improved outcomes for people with breast cancer
Alex Burstow/Getty Images
“The approval is a milestone for the field,” says Crews. There was already huge interest in the idea of targeted protein degradation, with around 100 companies working on it and around 80 trials under way, he says. The approval will boost this even further. Increasingly, companies are starting to target undruggable proteins, too.
All sorts of variations on protacs are also being explored. For instance, simply linking two proteins together with a protac-type molecule can be a powerful tool. Crews himself recently developed “riptacs”, or regulated induced proximity targeting chimeras. Riptacs link a protein abundant in cancer cells to a protein essential for cell survival, blocking the function of both and killing the malignant cells. Riptacs performed so well in an initial trial against prostate cancer that US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson acquired the technology.
Of course, protacs are far from the only game in town. There are now a bunch of approaches based on stopping proteins being made in the first place, including CRISPR gene editing and epigenetic editing. These techniques are very promising, too, but they have limitations. For instance, delivery is a major challenge because of the large molecules involved. Nor do they get rid of existing proteins, says Crews, which can be important. “We’ve been able to show that a protac can degrade half of a protein population [in a cell] within 2 hours.”
So, I’m hopeful we will be seeing all kinds of new treatment based on protacs, ultimately helping billions of us. The approval of vepdegestrant may have received barely a headline, but if it is indeed the first of many, we will look back at it as a major milestone. %!s()
The tracks come off the singer’s latest album, Dirty Blonde, which marks her first independent release
July 28, 2026
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Bebe Rexha performs on ‘The Tonight Show’
Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images
Bebe Rexha appeared on The Tonight Show to perform a rousing medley of her recent singles “New Religion” and “Sad Girls.” The pop singer was joined by a group of dancers for the club-ready performance, which featured a clip of “New Religion” before focusing on “Sad Girls.”
Rexha dropped “Sad Girls,” a collaboration with David Guetta, in May. Both tracks appear on Rexha’s most recent album, Dirty Blonde, which marks her debut release as an independent artist. “New Religion,” released in March, was notably her first single on her own label.
“‘Sad Girls’ is for anyone who has ever been on a dance floor with a broken heart and refused to let it win,” Rexha shared in a statement. “You’re not okay, but you’re still dancing and showing up for yourself. That’s one of the most powerful things you can do in those moments.”
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Rexha enjoyed a string of successful pop EDM hits and collaborations in the mid-2010s, but in January she revealed that her longtime label, Warner Music, had decided to part ways with her. Her Instagram post announcing the news included a tearful video recorded earlier this year, in which she reacted to the devastating news and expressed uncertainty about what was next. After parting with Warner, Rexha signed a deal with Empire, an independent distribution company, that also offers some label and publishing services.
“Dirty Blonde became so much more monumental to me than I ever expected,” Rexha said of the LP. “Making this album independently reminded me why I fell in love with music in the first place. I had the freedom to trust my instincts, take risks and create something that feels completely mine. Dirty Blonde is me in my truest form: honest, unapologetic and free.”
