Amy Poehler can write and she can act, and now it is time for her to prove that she can direct, too. On Tuesday, March 20, Netflix announced that the actress is set to make her feature directorial debut with Wine Country, an upcoming comedy for the streaming service with a star-studded ensemble cast. The film’s stars include Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, and Emily Spivey, while Tina Fey will have a role as well.
The comedy centers on a group of friends gathering in wine country for a 50th birthday weekend, and we can only assume it won’t be your average wine-tasting celebration. Netflix hasn’t revealed much so far, but the streamer did share a video of the film’s stars on Twitter. They’re gathered together in a low-key environment doing some karaoke. They look like they could be any group of friends … if those groups were composed solely of Saturday Night Live stars and writers.
https://twitter.com/netflix/status/976179141006393344
The news was met with enthusiasm on Twitter, which is understandable considering the track record the group of women. Aside from SNL, the comedians have teamed up, in different combinations, numerous times over the years. The 2015 comedy Sisters, for example, was written by Pell and it starred Poehler, Fey, and Rudolph. Meanwhile, Rudolph had Poehler, Gasteyer, and Fey as guests on her 2016 variety show, Maya & Marty.
Spivey and Liz Cackowski, yet another SNL vet, penned the Wine Country script, Variety reports. Like the others, they have worked together beyond the world of SNL. Cackowski wrote an episode of the NBC series Up All Night, which Spivey created and Rudolph starred in. Additionally, they each worked on episodes of Fox’s The Last Man on Earth.
Wine Country will be produced by Paper Kite Productions, while Carla Hacken of Paper Pictures produces alongside Morgan Sackett of Dunshire Productions. Principal photography is reportedly set to begin in late March in Los Angeles and Napa, California. Netflix’s announcement promises that the comedy will be “your new favorite movie,” so it sounds like we should all get excited.
The film does not yet have a release date.
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?