Watch the full episode from yesterday’s show below!

Today was the first day of Scarlett guest co-hosting Today with Jenna and Friends. A few photos from the episode with Nicole Scherzinger have been added into the photo gallery and you can watch the full episode below!

Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb attend 92NY on Friday night.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – The A-list actor will co-host the new version of the fourth hour of NBC’s staple morning show for one week this month.
Scarlett Johansson has conquered the superhero franchise, been nominated for several prestigious awards and years ago made her way into Saturday Night Live’s prestigious Five-Timers Club. Now, she’s set to enter the morning show wars with a gig as guest co-host of Today with Jenna & Friends on NBC.

Johansson is set to join Jenna Bush Hager on the morning show as a guest co-host on Tuesday, Jan. 21 for a week-long gig. Hager broke the news to People on Tuesday, gushing about booking the A-list star, who is one of several rotation celebrity guest co-hosts who will join her to fill the void left by Hoda Kotb’s departure; in addition to Johansson, stars already set for co-hosting slots are Taraji P. Henson, Eva Longoria and Keke Palmer.

“It’s just a wild dream. But that’s what I’m saying, the fact that she’s coming to give us a week of her time, she could be doing anything, is a testament to the show that we have built. So I am beyond thrilled. I cannot wait,” Bush Hager told the news outlet. “We’ve never seen Scarlett Johansson host a daytime show before!”

Bush Hager said on Tuesday’s show that she has “so many fun things planned” with the Avengers star; Kotb agreed and recalled her co-host’s excitement about asking Johansson to take the job.

“First of all, you guys had a great click. She is an awesome person,” Kotb said. “And right away, I still remember, right when she was here, you were like, ‘Can she do it?’ You know when you know someone’s gonna be good at something?

“I think we’re gonna have a blast,” Bush Hager replied. The two have one key thing in common — both the host and the Hollywood star have a twin sibling and their first daughters are around the same age at 11 and 10 years old.

Today with Jenna & Friends is scheduled to launch Jan. 13 as the new version of the fourth hour of NBC’s Today. The show was the top morning show outright for the third quarter of 2024, besting ABC’s Good Morning America in total viewers and in the key demographic. The show was also the top morning show in the key demo for the 2023-24 season.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY – “It’s a giant love letter to Steven Spielberg,” director Gareth Edwards tells EW of the Scarlett Johansson-, Mahershala Ali-, and Jonathan Bailey-fronted film.
To Gareth Edwards, the closest thing you can get to a real Skull Island on planet Earth is Thailand. The director of Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) ferried Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, and the rest of his cast to shoot Jurassic World Rebirth in Southeast Asia. He describes the variety of geography as “very primeval,” which is what you want for a movie filled with dinosaurs.

“I’m allowed to say this now that we’re on the other side of it, but we shot in rivers and these mangrove swamps,” Edwards tells Entertainment Weekly. “When we were scouting them, we saw poisonous water snakes, massive ones that we had to catch. We kept it quiet from the actors as they spent a whole day wading through the same area. And there were giant spiders that were poisonous and stuff on the edge of the trees. You just wouldn’t point them out if you saw them. Just keep going!”

For the scenes shot on the ocean, they then went to Malta. The filmmaker mentions “some water stunts” they needed to accomplish in a tank, but then they filmed boatloads (pun intended) on the Mediterranean. “It’s probably the last film I ever shoot in the ocean because it was very difficult,” he admits. “I’m glad we persevered, but I think everybody, all the actors, went through as crazy a journey as the characters in the film, these very physically demanding, sometimes near-death experiences that had these high-reward factors if you managed to succeed.”

These locales were part of the “back to basics” approach to the movie. As the title suggests, the next Jurassic World sequel, hitting theaters July 2, 2025, is a “rebirth” of sorts for the franchise. Not that it necessarily needed one. People still flock to theaters to see dinosaurs on the big screen; the last three each crossed $1 billion at the global box office. Still, since 2015’s entry, which began a new trilogy starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, critical acclaim drifted downwards incrementally. The last installment, 2022’s Dominion, with its reunion of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, made about half as much as the first Jurassic World in the U.S. alone, but at the end of the day, it still skirted over the billion mark worldwide. The team behind Rebirth hopes to recapture the magic of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic with real filming locations, less blue screen, and a pretty simple but compelling story with fresh leads.

“I can’t speak for Universal, but it did feel like a new trilogy, in a way,” Edwards says. “I’m not sure what their plans are, but it felt like the beginning of a brand-new chapter in this franchise. To me, it’s a giant love letter to Steven Spielberg and his earlier films. There are moments in this movie that remind me very much of Jaws. It’s like little greatest hits of all those aspects of his films that I loved growing up as a child. It’s essentially a little adventure odyssey across this island, a survival story, really.”

Johansson, Ali, and Bailey are essentially the new faces of Jurassic World. Five years after the events of Dominion, in which dinosaurs mingled with humans all over the globe, these creatures are now dying out. The present-day planet proved to be inhospitable to the prehistoric ilk, except for a small region in the tropics around the equator, where many of them now congregate. The three most colossal dinosaurs of land, sea, and air within this biosphere hold genetic material precious to a pharmaceutical company that hopes to use the dino DNA to create a life-saving drug for humanity.

Zora Bennett (Johansson), who Edwards describes as “a special-ops, ex-CIA type,” is contracted by said company to infiltrate the region and extract the DNA from these monoliths. She has a sibling-like bond with Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala), her most trusted ally who captains their team’s ship — “He’s kind of like the Ahab of our movie,” Edwards says. Bailey is the paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis. “He’s out of his depth in terms of the military element of the mission,” the director explains. “He’s very comfortable on digs and expeditions but not the life-and-death risks that Kincaid and Zora are getting into.”

Edwards likens the trio’s dynamic to Brody, Hooper, and Quint from Jaws, played in that 1975 Spielberg classic by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw — disparate individuals hunting a prehistoric creature. “It’s that kind of triangle between three different overlapping characters,” he says. “There’s a lot of fun between the three of them that really popped out to me. It’s less of a love triangle and much more of a competitive ‘who’s the alpha in the group?’ kind of way.”

And that guy walking through wetlands in a white collared shirt? That’s Martin Krebs (Friend), a representative of Big Pharma, on-site to ensure his company’s interests. But even he, Edwards points out, isn’t the cliched corporate figure. “Rupert’s got a little bit of James Bond about him,” he says. “They all tried to play a little bit against type slightly.”

The curveball to the story, written by original Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, is that Zora’s team receives a mayday signal from a civilian boat that capsized from an attack. So, on top of pulling off this dangerous mission, the crew now has to worry about the safety of the Delgado family, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (The Summer I Turned Pretty), and Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs. Lopez).

“Obviously, it all goes wrong and becomes a situation that you enjoy watching as a Jurassic fan,” Edwards remarks. “Once you’re on the adventure, the film doesn’t let go until the end credits. The enjoyment of it is in the moment-to-moment chase, escape, scare, horror, curve balls in the whole plotting of the set pieces and the dinosaur moments.”

Edwards is on a mission of his own: to capture the essence of what he loved about Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, a crucial piece of cinema that had an immediate impact on Edwards’ career as a filmmaker; he decided to work in visual effects partly as a result of his viewing experience. “Jurassic Park did lead the way with computer graphics, but I feel like we got lost along the way with the arms race to a spectacle,” he elaborates. “Jurassic actually only had just a few dozen VFX shots in it, and it’s such a powerful film. So, it was trying to go back to all those tricks and ideas that tease the audience, that creates suspense and tension that get you on the edge of your seat. I just wanted to create that feeling I had when I was young of being in awe of these things.”

And if that means trekking through poisonous snake-infested waters to get the shot, so be it.

Scarlett and Colin were in attendance for the Museum of Natural History’s 2024 Gala last night in New York City. High quality photos from the gala have been added into the gallery.