The Rundown: It’s Nice That Joel Embiid Didn’t Decapitate Regina King

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items will vary, as will the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday and we are here to have some fun.

Watchmen is built on a foundation of altered history. In the series (and the comics the series is based on), Richard Nixon served multiple terms in office like FDR after the United States won the Vietnam War. Robert Redford became president after him and instituted a whole slew of liberal reforms. It’s an interesting premise for a work of fiction and it gets us to an important (kind of) and relevant (kind of!) point: There is an alternate real-life timeline where Watchmen star Regina King got decapitated by Sixers center Joel Embiid.

You remember this happening, yes You remember when Joel Embiid almost accidentally kicked Regina King’s head off of her shoulders I hope so. I think about it constantly. Perhaps you will after this, too.

The background is important. In the third quarter of a regular-season game between the New York Knicks and my beloved Philadelphia 76ers, Joel Embiid flung himself into the crowd while trying to save a ball that was bouncing out of bounds. He ended up in the second row, in the lap of a man who had just been on the receiving end of a very large shoe to the sternum. It was fun. Everyone had fun. Everyone was okay. But look closely at what almost happened.

— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) February 14, 2019

Regina King, beloved American actress and current star of Watchmen, came *thisclose* to taking the foot that ended up in that man’s sternum square to the forehead. Seriously, look how close it came. His shoe clipped the bun she had she hair up in. It clipped the bun! If Joel Embiid had been slowed down a tiny bit on the play, or even if he just skipped leg day once or twice in the offseason, he might not have had the lift required to clear her skull. We’re talking inches here. A maximum of four. Four inches from tragedy.

It’s important to note how big Joel Embiid is. Joel Embiid is so big. He’s listed at 7’0, 250 lbs, but if he weighs less than 275 I’ll eat an entire basketball. He moves really well for someone that size, too. He builds up a head of steam. There’s a terrifying amount of momentum involved. Other NBA players — professional athletes, themselves also really, really large humans — usually get out of his way when he’s barreling toward the basket. Regina King is 5’3, according to the Google search I just did. She was sitting down. It would have been a disaster.

It’s also important to note that the Oscars ceremony was held just five weeks after this happened and that Regina King took home the trophy for her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. This alternate history I’m discussing, the one where tragedy struck in Madison Square Garden, could have resulted in, among other things, Regina King winning an Oscar and then the presenter saying “Regina King could not be here tonight because she is at home recovering from getting kicked in the head by Joel Embiid at a basketball game.” That’s a lot to think about, you know

I’m not saying I want to live in this alternate history, for the record. I do not. Regina King is awesome and I do not want bad things to happen to her. But… man. This close.

In conclusion, please watch this video a few dozen times and try to focus on a different thing each time. I like to look at the faces of everyone in the crowd as they realize what is happening. I recommend starting with these two.

I feel you, lady on the left. That is the appropriate reaction to All-Star NBA center Joel Embiid nearly killing Regina King with a flying kung fu kick during a basketball game.

One thing about me: I love a little chaos. Not too much, not so much that people are throwing flaming trash cans through the windows of department stores, but enough to create a little bedlam. That’s why, I am pleased to report, I absolutely adore this little Filmmakers vs. Marvel mudfight we have going on right now.

You know the outline of it all already, I imagine. Martin Scorsese kicked it off on the Irishman press tour by comparing Marvel movies to amusement park rides. Comics nerds got mad at him, film dorks got mad at them. Then Francis Ford Coppola looked up from his vineyards and swooped in with an utterly delicious and borderline unnecessary take, calling the films “despicable.” Comics nerds got mad, film dorks got mad. A bunch of Marvel-adjacent actors and directors came out with very delicate “I loved Raging Bull and The Godfather, I wish everyone could get along”-type two-steps. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, legitimately one of the most powerful people in the world given Disney’s ridiculous dominance of the modern film market, the man in charge of the people in charge of both Marvel and Star Wars, catapulted himself into the fray, too.

“I reserve the word ‘despicable’ for someone who committed mass murder,” Iger said at the conference. “These are movies.”

He continued, “They want to bitch about movies, it’s certainly their right” before saying he would be happy to put Scorsese and Coppola’s films against MCU movies helmed by Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther).

And I love it. I love every piece of it. I even love how hopelessly exhausting it is. That’s part of the fun. I hope we keep asking people for their opinions about this until the end of time. Give me a five-paragraph Tarantino answer that namechecks 40 different Spaghetti Westerns that no one has seen. Ask Vin Diesel about it and see how quickly he compares the Fast & Furious franchise to The Godfather. (“Family is everything.”) Find an old woman wearing a dozen or more scarves and ask her to hold a seance to get a quote from Orson Welles. I want everyone squirming and on the record.

Let’s not stop at film people either. Ask people at the next presidential debate. Let’s watch that circus. I mean, if you thought people were mad before, hoo boy. Give me two numbskull pundits shouting over each other about the political ramifications of a candidate saying the Marvel movies are “fun, but fluff.” I won’t watch any of it, not for a single second, not even by accident because I am very vigilant about these things, but I will still be sitting here cackling like a supervillain anyway.

John Le Carré — legendary spy novel author, the man responsible for the books that brought us the film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the television adaptions of The Night Manager and Little Drummer Girl — has a new book out. Jeremy Irons is in Watchmen, which, again, premiered this week. That is more than enough of an excuse to share this anecdote from a 2013 profile of Le Carré.

Le Carré likes to hash through actors and their performances. The old spy in him still seeks to size people up, probing for strengths and vulnerabilities. He praises Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “artistic intelligence about his own body.” He recalls opposing Jeremy Irons for the lead role in the 1990 film of his novel “The Russia House” — the part went to Sean Connery — on moral grounds, because of an incident in a London park. “Irons’s vicious dogs,” le Carré said, “attacked my smaller dogs. He never stooped to apologize.” (Irons says that they may have had an altercation but that he does not remember any of the dogs being hurt.)

I’m sure things like this happen all the time in Hollywood. Maybe not the dog-on-dog violence of it all, but definitely the petty and/or personal beefs spilling over into the work. It happens everywhere else in the world. There are million-dollar business mergers tossed in the toilet every year because of Hamptons-related grievances. What I love about this, though, is that Le Carré has held onto it for over 20 years to such a degree that he’s out here bringing it up on the record to reporters from the New York Times when he had zero obligation to do so. He’s just like “Anyway, Jeremy Irons is a weasel who can’t control his dogs” and throwing a fresh tire into a fire that had appeared to be burning out. The Times called Irons for a comment! Imagine getting that call. Imagine a New York Times reporter calling you out of nowhere for a statement about a fight your dogs were in 20 years ago. Imagine the face Jeremy Irons made.

It’s beautiful. Please make a note, entertainment journalists: Always ask your interview subjects if they were ever involved in a dog-related kerfuffle with another celebrity. It won’t always bear fruit. You’ll get a lot of confused looks. But you might also get “I refused to let Jeremy Irons play a part in my movie because his dogs attacked my dogs and he was kind of a jerk about it.” You can’t risk leaving that stone unturned.

Well, guess what: Somebody stole donuts from the set of Law & Order: SVU. I know this because the police — the real police! — were called about it. Here, look: “Police are responding to a report of a man stealing donuts from a Law & Order shoot (an update incorrectly stating that DVDs were stolen has been corrected here).”

I don’t have much to add here. Some would even say, perhaps, that I just wanted an excuse to type the words “DONUT HEIST” in all-caps and then post this tweet that Ice-T sent out into the world this week.