Happy Holidays, movie fans! Nearly 12 years after the release of the original Bad Santa 2 is finally loading up its sleigh and Billy Bob Thornton’s alcohol-swilling, expletive-hurling con-man Willie just got a co-pilot.
According to Variety, Miramax and Broad Green Pictures have cast the great Kathy Bates (Titanic, Misery) as the con-man’s mother, and while we don’t have any details on the character yet, you can bet that she won’t be polite, soft-spoken, or particularly maternal.
The first Bad Santa was a certified cult hit, and hauled in an impressive $60 million domestically, against a budget of only $15 million. This time around, Mark Waters (Mean Girls) will direct a screenplay co-written by Doug Ellin (Entourage) and it’s safe to assume we’ll see plenty more vulgarity and bad behavior from this long-awaited sequel.
As for Bates, we’ve seen her play intimidating, larger-than-life matriarchs many times before and it’s a character she excels at. This being a comedy, her turn as Bobby Boucher’s mama in The Waterboy comes to mind (“Mama says that, happiness is from magic rays of sunshine that come down when you’re feeling blue.”). Her character in Bad Santa 2 is likely to be less of a helicopter mom, but still someone to avoid trifling with.
While this seems like a pretty perfect casting decision to us, it’s interesting to note that the 67-year-old Bates is actually only six years older than the 60-year-old Thornton. Not exactly the typical mother-son age gap, but we’re willing to roll with it.
For the time being, Bad Santa 2 is still in preproduction, and the film isn’t expected to hit theaters until sometime next year. Still, fans will be heartened to see that this project is finally moving forward.
In the meantime, you can catch Billy Bob Thornton in Our Brand is Crisis and Kathy Bates in FX’s American Horror Story.
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?