■ The Pop Edition
October 24: John Wick Opens, Kline Turns 79
Born On This Day
Kevin Kline
1947 · TURNS 79
Kline built a stage career at Juilliard and the Public Theater before Hollywood figured out what to do with a classically trained actor who could also do slapstick. A Fish Called Wanda got him the Oscar in 1989; the range never narrowed after that, from Sophie's Choice to In & Out.
F. Murray Abraham
1939 · TURNS 87
Abraham won Best Actor for playing Salieri in Amadeus, a role that could have been the whole career. Instead he kept working steadily for decades, most recently finding a whole new audience as Hera on The White Lotus and Hank Thompson in the Mythic Quest ensemble.
B.D. Wong
1960 · TURNS 66
Wong won a Tony for M. Butterfly before most Americans knew his face, then became a fixture of prestige and genre television alike, from Law & Order: SVU to Jurassic Park's Dr. Wu across two film trilogies.
Monica
1980 · TURNS 46
Monica hit the Hot 100 as a teenager with Don't Take It Personal and never really left, later teaming with Brandy for The Boy Is Mine, a duet built on a rivalry that turned out to be mostly marketing.
Wayne Rooney
1985 · TURNS 41
Rooney became Manchester United's all-time leading scorer and one of the most recognizable athletes of his generation, a teenage prodigy who turned into a tabloid fixture as much as a sporting one.
Opening Weekend: John Wick
John Wick opened in US theaters on October 24, 2014, and nobody involved expected it to become a franchise, let alone a genre reset. Keanu Reeves was coming off a run of mid-budget dramas and had spent years being politely written off as an action star with an expiration date. The film opened modestly, well behind that weekend's box office leader, and made most of its money through word of mouth once people realized the choreography wasn't the usual shaky-cam blur.
Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leach, both former stunt coordinators, built the fight scenes like dance numbers, wide shots, minimal cuts, and a hand-to-hand style borrowed from Hong Kong cinema and mixed martial arts. The plot, a retired hitman avenging a puppy, became shorthand for the whole thing: simple premise, relentless execution. It spawned three sequels, a spinoff, an expanded cinematic universe called the Continental, and a permanent shift in how Hollywood choreographs violence.
Twelve years later, the film's DNA shows up everywhere from Marvel fight scenes to video games built explicitly to feel like it. Reeves, for his part, went from washed-up to the industry's most reliable action leading man virtually overnight.
The Moment: Blue Jays Win the World Series
On October 24, 1992, the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Atlanta Braves in Game 6 to win the World Series, and did something no team had ever done before: won it while playing for a country other than the United States. The moment carried weight beyond baseball, arriving amid genuine anxiety about Canadian identity and free trade politics, and the win got treated as a national event rather than just a sports story.
The series had its own minor controversy before Game 6 even started, when a US Marine color guard carried the Canadian flag upside down before a prior game, an error that briefly turned into a diplomatic headache. Toronto's win the following year cemented the team as a back-to-back champion and turned the Jays into one of the most recognizable brands in the sport for a stretch that, in retrospect, Canadian baseball has never quite recaptured.
Thirty-four years on, it's remembered less for any single play than for what it represented: a championship parade that spilled across a border, and a reminder that sports-as-spectacle doesn't respect national lines.
Meanwhile…
1926Harry Houdini gives his final performance in Detroit, exactly a century ago, days before his death from a ruptured appendix.
1901Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, a stunt she pulled off at 63.
1987Michael Jackson's Bad reaches number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
1970The Jackson 5's I'll Be There holds at number one for another week.
2003Concorde makes its final commercial passenger flight, closing out an era of supersonic travel that pop culture had spent decades treating as the future.
2014Dracula Untold and John Wick open in the same theatrical window, though only one of them spawns a cinematic universe.