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After a steady streak of success over the last several weeks, which saw hits such as Obsession , Backrooms , and Toy Story 5 , the domestic box office hit a speed bump this past weekend. Toy Story 5 retained the box-office crown, but had a bigger second-weekend drop than expected. Meanwhile, the big-budget superhero movie Supergirl fell drastically short of expectations, prompting DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran to admit disappointment. The movie took the number two spot at the domestic box office in its opening weekend, grossing less than half of what the DC Universe's first installment, Superman , earned in its first weekend in 2025. Supergirl also fell short of two of the biggest box-office bombs of the DC Extended Universe and Marvel Cinematic Universe franchises, respectively.

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Atlus RPG series Persona could be getting a live-action Netflix adaptation, according to a new Variety report. The production company responsible for Stranger Things, 21 Laps, will be substantially involved, as will Story Kitchen, another production company with a focus on game-to-film adaptations like Sonic The Hedgehog, as well as forthcoming projects including Tomb Raider, It Takes Two and Vampire Survivors.

The writer and showrunner is Christopher Monfette, who has worked on a bunch of nerd stuff including the forthcoming VisionQuest (a Disney series featuring Marvel's Vision) and Star Trek: Picard. Joining the list of seven executive producers is Sega's Toru Nakahara who has also executive produced the Sonic film trilogy.

I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for a live-action Persona to materialize. Persona 5 has been an enormous success: the core game, taking in Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, had sold 10.46 million copies as of August 2025. It's released on three console generations since its initial launch in 2016, and spawned five spin-offs in Persona 5 Strikers, Persona 5 Tactica, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, Persona 5: The Phantom X and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Its success has led to remakes of Persona 3 and Persona 4.

Of course, there have already been lots of Persona screen adaptations: Persona 5 has its own animation series which ran between 2018 and 2019, as did Persona 4 in 2011. A Persona 3 anime miniseries also exists. And for those who want to go way back, the wider Shin Megami Tensei series was originally a novel trilogy, and crossmedia promotion is very much in the universe's DNA.

Still, this is the first live-action Persona series, and I'm pretty skeptical about how the overwhelmingly American production crews are going to handle it. I'd be surprised if it had a Japanese cast, equally so if it took place in a Japanese locale. Adapting a series so inextricably linked to anime is also going to require some careful tonal adjustments in its move to live action. Or they could just cast Jack Black or that Parks and Recreation guy and call it a day.

More exciting is the prospect of Persona 6 , which after a long wait was finally revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier this month. There wasn't any gameplay footage, or screenshots, nor even a release window, but Atlus does at least intend to release it one day.

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BMW is using Figure’s new humanoid robot to help with logistics at its plant.

The robots sort components arriving at the factory and place them in trolleys.

Humanoid robots can be especially useful in monotonous roles at the plant.

Roughly two years after BMW first put humanoid robots to work at its US plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a newer version has clocked in. The machines come from American firm Figure, and the resemblance to a person runs deeper than anything Tesla has managed with Optimus . This one looks less like a prototype in costume and more like something built to share a floor with workers.

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The new robot, known as the Figure 03, will play an important role in the plant’s logistics operations. Components arriving at the site currently land in large containers and are unsorted. It will now be the task of these robots to pick up each part and sort them into a sequencing trolley.

Read: BMW’s New Humanoid Workers Never Take A Break Or Get Paid

These trolleys will then be taken to a specified collection point for further transport. These parts will then be handed over to an automated tugger train or a Smart Transport Robot, which will shift them to the production line, where human workers will use them to assemble several new BMW models.

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The Figure 03 robots play a different role than the old Figure 02 bots used at the site. Through an 11-month pilot program, those old humanoids worked in the body shop, inserting sheet-metal parts for the welding process, helping to build more than 30,000 X3s over a ten-month period.

Helping Workers, Not Replacing Them

“Plant Spartanburg is the birthplace of humanoid robotics in BMW Manufacturing’s operational day-to-day activities,” Ulrich Wieland, vice president of production control and logistics at BMW Manufacturing, said. “Having already successfully completed a pilot with Figure 02 in our body shop, we are now looking forward to deploying Figure 03 for a sequencing use case in logistics.”

BMW refers to these humanoid robots as a “value-adding complement to existing automation” at its plant, which already uses AI to develop intricate virtual 3D simulations and a so-called ‘virtual factory’ to continually refine processes. BMW says robots like these are especially important for “monotonous, ergonomically demanding, or safety-critical activities,” and says it wants to “protect and most effectively utilize employees,” rather than replacing all of them with robots.

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Photos BMW

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Paris and Berlin push to make EU foreign policy great — somehow

Governments have differing views on what the EEAS should look like and what it should do. But France is taking the lead on opening the debate.

By JACOPO BARIGAZZI in Brussels and CLEA CAULCUTT in Paris

Illustration by Natália Delgado /POLITICO

The EU’s two most powerful countries want the bloc’s foreign policy wing to change. They just don’t agree on how to do it.

France is pushing for the role of the EU’s top diplomat, currently Kaja Kallas, to be strengthened, according to three officials who spoke to POLITICO. Germany’s view is far less fixed, but some of the country’s officials have floated the opposite: diluting her powers and giving them to the European Commission.

The debate between Paris, Berlin and Brussels encapsulates the challenges, questions and doubts confronting the European External Action Service that launched in 2011. Among governments and the EU’s most senior officials, there’s a sense that something must change. It’s just not clear what.

As POLITICO continues its series on one of the greatest issues facing the EU today — how to make the EEAS fit for the current era of global fragmentation — we explore how the governments that hold the key to reform aren’t sure which direction to pull in. While in Brussels a turf war between the EEAS and the more powerful Commission , as well as a series of high-profile departures, impacts the day-to-day running of the diplomatic service, capitals are taking a longer-term view.

“The first thing to do is to clarify who does what,” Josep Borrell, Kallas’ immediate predecessor as foreign affairs chief, told POLITICO. “To be more assertive on the world stage, the EU needs be clear on the roles of its institutions, … because, if you don’t know who is in charge of what, you cannot expect to be assertive.”

What nearly everyone agrees on is that the need is urgent: The U.S. and China are increasingly deploying every tool at their disposal to advance their interests, from trade and industrial policy to technology, but the structure of EU policymaking remains fragmented. While the EEAS oversees foreign and security policy, it’s left to the Commission to control many of the policy instruments and financial resources needed to project the EU’s influence abroad.

And although large-scale change generally remains a topic merely for informal chats outside official meetings, for France, in particular, it’s a conversation whose time has come.

Read more in our series on the battle over the EU’s diplomatic service:

Why the EEAS is fighting for its future

Strengthening not weakening

France has already settled on its preferred approach. It wants to expand the powers of the EEAS chief, according to three officials and a French discussion paper, seen by POLITICO.

It helps that incumbent Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, is from the centrist Renew political family — the same European party as French President Emmanuel Macron. Paris strongly backed her appointment in 2024.

The momentum has been building for a while. When Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot addressed the annual conference of EEAS ambassadors in March, he endorsed Kallas. He reiterated that support during a meeting with her in Paris on June 12, according to an EU official and a French official.

“France is in favour of strengthening the EEAS, and the minister’s position has not changed since he argued against weakening it at the ambassadors’ conference,” another French official said.

Jean-Noël Barrot walking inside the Elysee Palace in Paris France, during the Council of Ministers meeting on June 24 2026. | Henrique Campos/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

What that means in practice — and whether other key capitals, particularly Berlin, will ultimately back the proposal — is still an open question.

When the EEAS was set up, France — since the U.K.’s departure, the only EU country with a permanent U.N. Security Council seat or a nuclear weapon — invested heavily in it. It sent Pierre Vimont, a former ambassador to Washington and a veteran of European diplomacy, to serve as secretary-general. (The diplomat was the inspiration for a leading character in a cartoon and movie .)

In a sign that Paris continues to invest in the EEAS, France announced last week that another heavyweight at the Quai d’Orsay, David Cvach, will become deputy secretary-general in charge of defense. Cvach is currently France’s NATO ambassador and previously served as a director for European affairs at the French foreign ministry and was a presidential adviser.

The move allows Paris to retain a key post while also strengthening ties between NATO and the EU.

French authorities are torn over the pace of change. Macron’s government is rushing to shore up institutions before a presidential election next year which, opinion polls signal, might bring the Euroskeptic Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen to power. The French discussion paper suggests a timeframe that would conclude before the 2027 election.

But Paris is also mindful of not destabilizing the EU’s diplomatic arm given global uncertainties such as the war in Ukraine and conflict over the Strait of Hormuz, according to a French official with knowledge of the confidential discussions.

Conflicting signals

What Germany wants is less clear, primarily because of the nature of its government, a coalition between the center-right Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the center-left Social Democrats.

“There is not one Berlin vision for the foreign policy,” German Green MEP Hannah Neumann, who sits on the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told POLITICO. “I myself get conflicting signals from Berlin depending on to whom I talk.” Her party is in opposition in Germany.

But what seems certain is that Germany wants structural changes to improve EU foreign policymaking ― possibly by boosting Commission powers, according to two non-German EU diplomats, who spoke to POLITICO after talking to their German counterparts. This suggests a subtle but real difference from the French approach.

These diplomats were granted anonymity, like others interviewed for this article, to enable them to speak freely about confidential discussions.

A spokesperson for the German government in Brussels declined to comment.

“Foreign and security policy responsibilities in Brussels must be both clearly delineated and pooled,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in May in a speech at the Adenauer Conference. “The European External Action Service must be closely dovetailed with the Commission to this end,” he added.

In the same speech, Wadephul also called for quicker decision-making on foreign policy issues, through qualified majority voting rather than unanimity, while acknowledging that not even half of the EU’s 27 member countries are on board with that and pledging “to reach out to all member states, including those that remain skeptical” to push for it.

While major capitals such as Paris and Berlin have begun seriously weighing the Brussels issue, discussions elsewhere remain largely confined to the margins of meetings of foreign ministers and political directors, three diplomats told POLITICO.

Three possible models

For any changes to happen, EU leaders would have to agree to them, likely after Kallas herself has put a proposal on the table in a process that should be concluded before the French elections in April, diplomats said.

EU foreign ministers will start discussing the issue early September in the Irish east coast city of Wicklow .

The French discussion paper, described by officials and diplomats as a very early-stage document aimed at laying out scenarios, sets out options for reforming the EU’s foreign policy architecture.

It argues that the bloc’s external policy tools “are not necessarily used in an optimal way” and calls for strengthening the role of the Council ― which represents the capitals ― in their governance. The two-page document, first reported by the Financial Times, outlines three possible models: giving greater powers to the Commission, shifting the EEAS closer to the Council, or strengthening both institutions simultaneously.

Under the third option, Kallas would be significantly empowered within the Commission. She would become first executive vice-president, with authority over commissioners and directorates-general responsible for areas including foreign affairs, trade and development.

According to the paper, such a model, which is Paris’ preferred option according to diplomats and analysts, could also prove acceptable to the Commission — though that still could be tricky given the notoriously difficult relationship between Kallas and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

‘Inside the Commission’

The French do not want to give more powers to von der Leyen, said Guillaume Duval, a speechwriter for Kallas’ predecessor Borrell, who is now at the Jacques Delors Institute, a think tank, in Paris.

France wants “a clear hierarchical structure inside of the Commission,” Duval said.

The central point for Paris “is to have a very strong vice president for foreign affairs and security inside the Commission” he said. “It could make sense that EEAS becomes one of the DGs of the Commission, but not to be directed by the president of the commission, but by the [high representative] as vice president of the Commission and also as a member of the Council,” he said.

Kallas already wears two hats: she is both a vice-president of the European Commission and chair of meetings of EU foreign and defense ministers. But in practice, Duval argued, the high representative “has no real authority over the different commissioners.”

He pointed to the previous Commission as an example. During Borrell’s tenure, then-Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi took the lead on Israel policy “and did what he wanted without referring to Borrell,” Duval said.

And when Borrell complained, Várhelyi “had von der Leyen’s backing,” he said. A Commission spokesperson declined to comment.

Money talks

Already some changes to the way EU foreign policy operates have happened by stealth. With von der Leyen long arguing for a more “geopolitical” Commission, that fudge created when the EEAS was established in 2010 is under strain. During the Covid pandemic, von der Leyen showed she could expand the Commission’s role by coordinating the bloc’s vaccine procurement.

The option to give the Commission an even greater role in foreign policy, would be to build on that trajectory.

Some of that could be done simply by starving the EEAS of cash.

While the EEAS is responsible for much of the EU’s foreign and security policy, the money largely sits elsewhere. The EEAS budget, at around €900 million, is mostly administrative, for things such as staff, buildings and the EU delegations abroad. Development programs, by contrast, get around €11 billion but fall ultimately under the Commission’s remit

While it would be an exaggeration to link all the flaws in the EEAS structure to personalities, diplomats highlight the connection. The four politicians to hold the high representative position since the EEAS was created ― the U.K.’s Catherine Ashton, Italy’s Federica Mogherini, Spain’s Borrell and the incumbent Kallas ― have all come in for heavy criticism as they’ve tried to navigate the setup.

Several diplomats said that Kallas’ perceived missteps — including when she said that “the free world needs a new leader,” referring to U.S. President Donald Trump — make it more difficult for governments to argue for her role to be beefed up. Other officials have accused her of approaching the job as too much of a prime minister, rather than adapting to Brussels’ institutional constraints.

“To go from being the sort of number one person in the government and in the system, to one of a number of vice presidents of the Commission, may not be the easiest transition,” said Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a think tank based in London, Brussels and Berlin.

Nicholas Vinocur contributed to this article from Brussels.

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Guardian investigation exposes full links between a US business linked to baby deaths around the world and Australian ‘birth keeper’ Emily Lal, the central witness at the inquest into the death of a Melbourne wellness influencer

How a Melbourne woman’s death is shining light on the dangers of non-medical births – Full Story podcast

Find more from The birth keepers series here

During her time at the helm of a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world , Emilee Saldaya has always avowed one thing: she’s never heard of a woman dying after a freebirth.

“I’ve never heard of a mother dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world,” the Free Birth Society founder said in a December 2024 appearance on The Way Forward podcast, adding: “In the sovereign birth world we aren’t losing mothers.”

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