Like Entourage before it, HBO’s Ballers is an unapologetic, stereotypical melange of manliness. But, like Entourage before it, it sometimes offers pointed, insightful criticism of that machismo as well. Still, if you thought that the trailer for the upcoming season 3 wasn’t going to feature models, monster trucks, and money, then you were sorely mistaken.
Via ComingSoon, you can check out the entire trailer above, which teases a trip to Las Vegas for Spencer Strasmore (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and Co. as they try to bring an NFL franchise to the City of Lights. Ironically, reality beat fiction to the punch on that one, as the Oakland Raiders finalized plans for a move to Las Vegas earlier in 2017.
The city has long been bandied about as a possible destination for a pro sports franchise and it will be interesting to see how these fictional characters deal with some of the real-life challenges that kept many franchises from capitalizing on the so-called “Entertainment Capital of the World.” With all of the vice’s of Sin City close at hand, you can be pretty sure that Spencer’s quest to focus on business and walk the straight and narrow will be challenged early and often.
As for the trailer, while it is long on the sex, drugs and partying, it’s conspicuously short on actual balling, Whether that means this season will spend an even greater share of its screen time on the circus surrounding the field remains to be seen. In the spirit of Las Vegas, however, we are betting that will be the case.
Ballers Charles Greane (Omar Benson Miller), Ricky Jerret (John David Washington), and Vernon Littlefield (Donovan W. Carter) are also back for season 3 and we will have to see if one or more of them end up joining Spencer in the Nevada desert.
We will know for sure in short order, as Ballers is set to premier on July 23 on HBO. Aside from those mentioned above, the show stars Troy Garity (Sunshine, Gangster Squad), Rob Corddry (Hot Tub Time Machine), Arielle Kebbel (Entourage, John Tucker Must Die) and Richard Schiff (The West Wing, Man of Steel).
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?