Plenty of films have personified death — Brad Pitt’s pretty boy version from Meet Joe Black comes to mind — but the upcoming Collateral Beauty has a couple more nouns-turned-humans it would like you to meet.
The trailer for the film (embedded above) made its debut Wednesday. In addition to death (Helen Mirren), the film throws physical manifestations of love (Keira Knightley), and time (Jacob Latimore) into the mix for good measure. The trio comes to life in response to letters from Howard Inlet (Will Smith), the poor sap who has to wrap his head around the whole thing.
Here’s the quick-and-dirty synopsis: “When a successful New York advertising executive (Smith) experiences a deep personal tragedy and retreats from life entirely, his colleagues devise a drastic plan to force him to confront his grief in a surprising and profoundly human way.”
What better place to set such a tale than the Big Apple — a harsh, unrelenting city that intermittently awes you with its collateral beauty? The latter is on display often in this spot, and the aerial shots of the city are so stunning that they sort of steal the show from the Hollywood stars.
The trailer pulls no punches when it comes to melodrama, and its marquee cast should have no problem guiding viewers through this tearjerking maelstrom of emotion. The film also stars Naomie Harris, Edward Norton, Michael Peña, and Kate Winslet — can you say “Oscar or bust?”
Like most awards-seeking projects, Collateral Beauty could easily stray into sappiness, and/or fall victim to heightened ambition. We’ll have to wait until at least December 16 to find out. That’s the film’s projected release date, but the trailer ends with the words “coming soon,” which could foreshadow a delay.
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?