As a woman of color, director Ava DuVernay is a rare bird in Hollywood, where women and minorities are both chronically underrepresented. That said, lots of folks have taken an active interest in the trajectory of her career.
Last month, we found out that the Selma director and Black Panther almost-director would be taking on the A Wrinkle in Time adaptation for Disney, and yesterday brought more news for DuVernay watchers.
According to Deadline, DuVernay has been tapped by HBO to direct and executive produce its upcoming film The Battle of Versailles, which tells the story of an epic fashion face-off in France that brought recognition for both American designers and black models.
The film is an adaptation of Robin Givhan’s 2015 book about the 1973 Palace of Versailles fashion show which saw five top French designers (Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Marc Bohan, and Emanuel Ungaro) pitted against five up-and-coming Americans (Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Halston, Stephen Burrow, and Anne Klein with her assistant Donna Karan in tow). Despite being massive underdogs, the Americans trumped the French team’s over-the-top presentation with a simple, soul-music backed show that featured 30 models, 10 of whom were African American. At the time, the United States was less than 10 years removed from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the show was a big step toward equality in the industry and in the country generally.
HBO has a history of producing socially conscious films and shows, while DuVernay has a history of handling the issue of race powerfully and tactfully. As a result, this feels like a pretty natural fit.
DuVernay will also co-write the project with Michael Starrbury (The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete). We don’t yet know when production will begin or when the film will debut, but we’ll keep you updated as information becomes available.
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?