Apple is entering the film world with a splash. On the Rocks, the tech giant’s first original feature film, will reunite Oscar-winning director Sofia Coppola with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray. Parks and Recreation‘s Rashida Jones will also star in the film.
On the Rocks, which Coppola also wrote, is about a young mother who tries to reconnect with her wealthy father, Variety reports. Production is scheduled to begin in February with filming taking place on location in New York City.
The upcoming film is the first project co-produced by Apple and A24, the studio behind Moonlight, Ex Machina, Room, Hereditary, and plenty of other award-friendly features. The two announced an ongoing partnership in 2018 that involves a “multiyear agreement” and multiple film projects. Currently, it’s not clear if On the Rocks will be released theatrically, or head straight to Apple’s upcoming streaming service, or some combination of the two.
On the Rocks will be the second time that Coppola, Murray, and Jones have worked together. The trio previously collaborated on A Very Murray Christmas, which hit Netflix in 2015. Coppola and Murray also worked together on 2003’s Lost in Translation, which nabbed Coppola three Academy Award nominations and a win for Best Original Screenplay, and scored Murray a Best Actor nod.
The feature marks another big push by Apple to break into the competitive entertainment industry. In 2018, Apple acquired the rights to a nature documentary and an animated feature, signed a wide-ranging production deal with Oprah Winfrey that includes both television and film projects, and commissioned a number of original TV series. Those include an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels and a drama about a morning news show featuring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jones’ The Office co-star Steve Carell.
Apple isn’t A24’s only tech-friendly partner, either. The studio has deals with DirecTV and Amazon in addition to its non-exclusive Apple partnership. In 2013, A24 released Coppola’s celebrity crime-caper The Bling Ring.
Jones currently appears in TBS’ cop spoof Angie Tribeca and recently lent her vocal talents to the animated holiday hit The Grinch. Murray will next appear in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and the upcoming Zombieland sequel — if he’s not too busy chucking fans’ smartphones off of rooftops, that is.
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?