In the aftermath of Luigi Mangione’s story going viral, Dave Franco’s phone blew up. The actor told The Hollywood Reporter that anyone who knew him said he looked like the now infamous young man, who is accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City.
“I’ve never received more texts in my life about anything,” Franco said. “Not just friends — anyone who has my phone number has reached out about it.”
Franco, who was being interviewed alongside his wife Alison Brie, said that he had yet to receive any official officers to play the man, although Brie agreed that the resemblance was undeniable.
Comparisons between Franco and Mangione came almost immediately after his identity was revealed, but there’s one small hiccup in the fantasy casting happening now. Franco is 39, whereas Mangione is just 26. That’s not to say that older actors have never played younger characters before, but if Hollywood goes all in on telling the official version of his story, they might want someone who is closer to his actual age.
Franco was being interviewed to promote his new Sundance movie Together, which he co-stars in with Brie.
“I do my best work when I’m working with Dave because I can’t make a false move in front of him,” Brie explained. “He knows me better than anyone in the world, so there’s an inherent authenticity and comfortability when we’re working together. [In Together], we really have to go out on a limb for a lot of scenes, and we’re doing some crazy stuff, and there’s no self-consciousness because he’s seen me at my worst, he’s seen me at my best, and everything in between. So it was like, ‘Let’s just jump right in!'”
If an offer comes in for Mangione, it seems Franco might be interested. Until then, though, he’s got plenty to keep him busy.
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?