By now, the story of the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match is familiar to most casual sports fans. It pitted the 55-year-old former world No. 1 Bobby Riggs against 29-year-old pro Billie Jean King, after the former claimed that — despite being far past his prime — he could defeat any of the world’s top female tennis players. The match has been written about in books, discussed in documentaries, and soon, it will be dramatized on the big screen.
Variety is reporting that Hollywood darling Emma Stone recently closed a deal to play King in the aptly titled Battle of the Sexes and will act opposite co-star Steve Carell, who has been tapped to play the audacious, self-aggrandizing Riggs.
If you’re unfamiliar with this story, we won’t spoil the film by telling you how the match turned out, but suffice it to say that the result has been called into question and that this is far from a simple tale about a tennis match.
In fact, the details are juicy enough that there are two other dramatizations of the match currently in the works: HBO’s Proof, starring Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti, and Cherin Entertainment’s Match Maker, which has cast comedian Will Ferrell as Riggs.
There’s certainly some big-time talent revolving around this story and Searchlight reportedly considered casting rising star Brie Larson (Trainwreck) as King as well. For a time, it seems Stone was busy enough with other projects to call her availability into question, but the two sides eventually hammered out a deal.
Fans of Stone can catch the actress opposite Ryan Gosling in La La Land next summer. The Drive actor will also co-star in Carell’s next, The Big Short, which is set to hit theaters December 23, 2015.
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?