The Rundown: The Cadbury Creme Egg Heist Is The Only Thing That Matters

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 could vary, as could 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.

I have tremendous news: Someone stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs. This is probably not tremendous news for the people who make and transport Cadbury Creme Eggs, I suppose. It is tremendous news for me, though. I’ve been clicking on stories about it all week long. I’ll probably keep clicking on them all weekend. I must know everything about it. I must know how and why someone stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs. I must know what they intended to do with 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs. I must know what, exactly, 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs looks like. That’s a big one. I can’t picture it right now. It’s about 199,980 more Cadbury Creme Eggs than I’ve ever seen at once. I don’t think I would know what to do if I saw a collection of 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs. I feel like I would just stare at it for a while.

The caper involved breaking into an industrial unit in Telford, outside Birmingham, on Saturday and making off with about $37,000 worth of the eggs, the police in West Mercia said in a statement on Twitter that was riddled with attempted jokes about Easter.

Honestly, good for the official police Twitter account. I mean, it’s still a crime and you want to be a little careful about taking it too lightly, especially if you are the police, but I’m going to cut them some slack here. This is too good. They deserve to have a little fun after posting a bunch of tweets about murder and arson and stuff. Stealing these eggs was almost a public service in that way.

I said almost.

Officials said the theft was premeditated — one that involved chocolate eggs that are more typically treated as an impulse buy at the grocery store. The prosecutor, Owen Beale, told Kidderminster Magistrates’ Court that Mr. Pool had used a stolen truck cab to tow away a trailer full of the treats, according to The Guardian. The police soon spotted him on the road, and he gave himself up, Mr. Beale said.

Well, that settles it. I need a television show about this. A full-on limited series. Eight episodes, minimum. It doesn’t have to remain perfectly faithful to this exact crime, but it does have to be inspired by it. I’m thinking some sort of Fargo situation, where we take a real crime and fiction-up the backstory a little bit. Maybe get… I don’t know… let’s say Will Forte in there as the egg thief. I’m just spitballing here. I can be flexible. Jesse Plemons works. So does Statham, I guess, especially since this happened in England. Get Guy Ritchie on the phone.

“This is clearly an organized criminal matter,” he said in court. “You don’t just happen to learn about a trailer with that kind of value being available.”

“This is clearly an organized crime matter,” the prosecutor said about the theft of 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Yup, that settles it. This is the only thing I care about. I know I just said that two weeks ago about the theft of a huge Shrek sculpture but I mean it this time. I meant it that time, too. I especially mean it this time, though, because there appears to be an actual profit-driven motive for this one. Someone woke up with a plan to get a little rich by stealing Cadbury Creme Eggs and followed through with it all. If it was organized crime, that means there’s a scenario where a crime boss yelled “I NEED THOSE CREME EGGS” at an underling at some point last week. I feel like the crime boss should be played by Paul Giamatti.

If you see me out and about this weekend and I appear lost in thought a little bit, like my brain is cranking away on something and my eyes are fixed in an empty stare, there’s a very good chance I am thinking about all of this. Just leave me alone. I have a lot to process.

We are about a month out from the release date of the fourth John Wick movie. This means a few different things. It means I am getting very excited, for one, because one of the best movie franchises ever made about a legendary assassin going on a technicolor rampage because Theon from Game of Thrones murdered his dog is coming back on my freaking birthday weekend. It also means we’re getting a second trailer with lots of new footage, at least some of which features a dog leaping through traffic to disarm a gunman. Here, look at this very good boy.

But mostly, in the short term, it means we are going to find out both some of the technical details of the movie and a little bit more about the people responsible for making it. One of the technical details we learned this week is that the movie is going to be very, very long.

Time may be running out for John Wick (Keanu Reeves) but the upcoming fourth installment of the gun-fu franchise certainly isn’t short on time. Collider has learned that John Wick: Chapter 4 will clock in at 2 hours and 49 minutes with credits, making it the longest in the franchise. When we last spoke to the film’s director Chad Stahelski, he promised that it would be the longest in the franchise—and it looks like he followed through on that promise.

That is… it’s just a lot of minutes. Too many minutes , some would say, which puts me in a tough spot, as someone who just confessed to being very excited about it, because I am on the record as saying anything over 120 minutes is too many minutes for… anything. I do not appreciate when the things I love put me in a position to question my personal values. I will allow it, for now, but still.

Moving on. To the things we are learning about the people. Things like, for example, this thing about Keanu Reeves having a lot of stuff to say about deepfake technology.

What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency. When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much “data” on behaviors now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work.

This is all somehow both a little surprising and exactly what I thought Keanu would think about the whole thing. On one hand, it’s easy to forget he’s a deep thinker if you still have the image of him from Bill & Ted in your brain. But on the other hand, it’s a very Matrix-y stance on the whole thing, which feels… right. There’s a lot going on here. That’s what I’m getting at.

Hopefully, this second thing will keep me occupied long enough that I forget the thing about the runtime. At least for a while. I’m still not ready to think about that too much.

Okay, here’s what happened. In addition to the part of my job where I write hundreds of words about people stealing candy, I also edit some blogs. One of the blogs I edited this week was a very good one by my colleague Nina Braca about Paul Rudd telling made-up stories on Late Night With Seth Meyers. And one of the things I did while editing was look for a nice screencap from the clip to publish with the blog.

So, I clicked play and paused at random to see if I could get a decent representative image. But Paul Rudd was making a face. So I tried again. And he was making another face. Same thing the third time. And the fourth. And the fifth.

And then I started getting curious and hopping around and just grabbing screencaps of whatever I paused on. Guys, Paul Rudd does so many faces. Look at all of these.

There are two takeaways here, as far as I can tell:

To be fair, I think we all already knew those things.

Brie Larson has always struck me as a good egg. She seems like one of those people who is fun to hang out with, and not just in the “Hollywood star putting on a show about it” way that you see sometimes, where it stinks of effort. You know what I mean here. We don’t need to name names.

Anyway, my position on this matter was confirmed this week when Brie Larson tweeted about pizza.