As Christmas Day draws nearer, so too does the release of a film that may just put a damper on the NFL’s holiday cheer. Late last week, Sony Pictures released a second trailer for Concussion, the Peter Landesman-directed film about the fight of Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) to bring the destructive effects of repeated, football-related head trauma to light.
Early this summer, we reported that the NFL was already prepping its response to the film, and that was followed by news that its script may have been altered for fear of legal reprisals. Suffice it to say, this film could stir up some serious controversy.
The ramifications of tackling (pun very much intended) this issue are articulated perfectly at the 1:21 mark of this latest spot, as a skeptic tells Smith, “you’re going to war against a corporation that owns a day of the week.” So too is Sony Pictures, but if this film is successful, it could have a major impact on American society, and on the sport we watch on Sundays.
While some films are content to impartially explore these sorts of issues, Concussion seems to have the chutzpah to take a stance. From what we’ve seen, the movie seems openly critical of the NFL, and is even using the hashtag #ForThePlayers as part of its promotion.
Of course, none of that matters if it stinks. And it’s a difficult to know how effective a film will be just by watching a couple of trailers. Individual performances, on the other hand, can shine through — and Smith seems awfully convincing as Omalu. It wouldn’t surprise us in the least if the actor were to be nominated for some hardware come awards season.
Concussion is set to hit theaters Dec. 25, 2015, or, one week A.S.W. (after Star Wars).
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?