■ The Pop Edition
October 4: Joker Opens, Sarandon Turns 80
Susan Sarandon
BORN 1946 · TURNS 80
She spent the '70s as a cult-movie fixture in The Rocky Horror Picture Show before Bull Durham, Thelma & Louise, and Dead Man Walking made her one of the defining leading women of the '90s. The Oscar for Dead Man Walking in 1996 arrived after three prior nominations, and she has kept working steadily in the decades since without ever settling into a single lane.
Christoph Waltz
BORN 1956 · TURNS 70
A working actor in German and Austrian television for decades before Quentin Tarantino cast him as Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, a role that won him an Oscar and turned him, at 52, into an overnight American star. He repeated the trick with Django Unchained and has spent the years since alternating between blockbusters and smaller character work.
Alicia Silverstone
BORN 1976 · TURNS 50
Clueless made her the face of 1995 practically overnight, a role she landed at 18 that turned Cher Horowitz's vocabulary into the way a generation of teenagers actually talked. She's kept a lower profile since, but that one performance never stopped circulating.
Rachael Leigh Cook
BORN 1979 · TURNS 47
She was the glasses-and-overalls answer to a decade of teen makeover movies in She's All That, a part that made her a fixture of late-'90s multiplexes. She's since moved comfortably into television and Hallmark-style romantic leads.
Liev Schreiber
BORN 1967 · TURNS 59
A Scream franchise regular who built a parallel career on stage and in prestige drama, he found his widest audience yet as Ray Donovan, the fixer whose problems were never actually solvable. His voice work and stage credentials never got the same headline treatment, but they're just as substantial.
OPENING WEEKEND
Joker opened in wide US release on October 4, 2019, and the debate around it had already been running for weeks — critics worried a comic book villain origin story shot like a gritty character study would inspire real-world violence, and theaters posted extra security. None of that stopped audiences. The film became the first R-rated movie to cross the billion-dollar mark worldwide, an outcome nobody predicted from a director best known for Hangover sequels.
Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Arthur Fleck, a failed clown and comedian unraveling in a decaying Gotham modeled openly on early-'80s Martin Scorsese films, won him the Best Actor Oscar the following spring. The movie itself picked up eleven nominations total, an unheard-of haul for a superhero-adjacent release, and it arrived without a single other Marvel or DC character on screen — no Batman, no cameo, just one man's collapse rendered as a character study that happened to wear a comic book name.
It reshaped what studios thought an origin story could look like, for better or worse, and the sequel that followed in 2024 couldn't replicate the moment — proof that some cultural landings only happen once.
PRESS START
Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, an event that got overshadowed within 24 hours when Steve Jobs died the next day — his first public product absence in years. The 4S looked nearly identical to the iPhone 4 on the outside, which led some to call it an underwhelming upgrade, but the actual headline feature was a voice assistant nobody had used before: Siri.
Siri wasn't Apple's invention originally — it came out of an SRI International spinoff Apple acquired in 2010 — but folding it into the iPhone as a built-in feature normalized talking to your phone for a mainstream audience that had mostly ignored earlier voice software. Within a year, competitors were racing to build their own versions, and within a few more, Alexa and Google Assistant had turned the whole idea into a category.
The 4S sold four million units in its opening weekend, a record at the time for any iPhone, and it stayed in Apple's lineup as a budget option for two more years — longer than any iPhone before or since.
1957Buddy Holly and the Crickets released "That'll Be the Day" in the US, the single that put them on the map ahead of a career cut brutally short two years later.
1976Rachael Leigh Cook's future She's All That co-star aside, this is also the year Freddie Prinze Jr. was born, another face of that late-'90s teen movie wave.
1982Actress Alicia Vikander's future Ex Machina co-star Oscar Isaac was still a toddler in Guatemala, born this same week of the year six years later — a small trivia thread worth chasing on your own time.
1989Dakota Johnson, future star of the Fifty Shades trilogy and daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, was born into a Hollywood family already three generations deep.
2011Steve Jobs made his final public appearance introducing the iPhone 4S, a bittersweet footnote that only became clear the following day.
2019Joker's opening weekend box office crossed $96 million domestically, a record at the time for an October release.