Joe Paterno coached Penn State’s football program for 45 years, amassing 409 wins, 37 Bowl appearances, three Big Ten titles, and two National Championships. That said, questions about the long-time coach’s role in the infamous Jerry Sandusky sex scandal have since tarnished what once seemed a rock-solid legacy. Paterno died in January of 2012, shortly after he resigned as head coach of the Nittany Lions, and — while many in the Penn State community continued to support him until the end — the public at large was less forgiving.
Call it a cautionary tale, a parable about misplaced priorities, or just a sports story, but the story of Paterno’s rise and fall was closely watched by folks both inside and outside of the football world. In fact, it generated so much interes, that HBO Films is currently filming an untitled biopic about the legendary coach, and we just got our first look at the legendary actor that is portraying him.
As reported by ComingSoon, we got our first look at Al Pacino as Joe Paterno earlier today and the actor looks completely unrecognizable. The side-by-side comparisons of the two men are uncanny and it’s a reminder of the magic that costume and makeup departments can work and their importance in bringing stories to the screen.
The photo shows Pacino donning Paterno’s characteristic thick-rimmed specs, along with a PSU windbreaker slipped over a white shirt/navy blue tie combo. It’s a look that will be familiar to college football fans, many of whom saw it hundreds of times in the nearly 50 years that Paterno patrolled the sidelines.
Barry Levinson — who directed the much-talked-about Bernie Madoff biopic Wizard of Lies — is helming the film and he and Pacino also paired for the 2010 Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don’t Know Jack, which was also produced by HBO.
Formerly entitled Happy Valley, the film also stars Annie Parisse, Kathy Baker, and Greg Grunberg, among others. The film will be released on HBO in 2018 and will not receive a theatrical engagement. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated as more information on the project becomes available.
Those looking for more Pacino will be able to catch the actor as Jimmy Hoffa in the upcoming, Scorsese-directed The Irishman some time next year.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?