The Fast and Furious family feud lives on, and it may have a big impact on the hugely successful action film series. Dwayne Johnson recently chatted with Rolling Stone about his future in the franchise and he admitted that he’s “not quite sure” if he will return for the Fate of the Furious follow-up, Fast and Furious 9.
As Rolling Stone pointed out, Johnson showed a big sign of discontent in 2016 when he called out some of his male co-stars for not “[conducting] themselves as stand-up men and true professionals.” He also slammed those who were “too chickenshit to do anything about it,” describing them as “candy asses.” Naturally, speculation ensued, and fans soon noted that there were likely problems between Johnson and producer Vin Diesel, in particular, as the two stars were not in any scenes together.
Johnson recently delved into the topic with Rolling Stone, saying that he and Diesel had “a few discussions, including an important face-to-face in [Johnson’s] trailer.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like they found much, if any, common ground.
“What I came to realize is that we have a fundamental difference in philosophies on how we approach moviemaking and collaborating,” Johnson told the magazine. “It took me some time, but I’m grateful for that clarity. Whether we work together again or not.”
The WWE star-turned-actor clarified that he’s “not quite sure” whether or not he will appear in Fast and Furious 9. Right now, he says his focus is on the spinoff and making it “as good as it can be.” The film, Hobbs and Shaw, centers on his character, Luke Hobbs, alongside Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw.
Interestingly enough, the spinoff is another point of contention in the Fast and Furious family. Hobbs and Shaw was given a release date of July 26, 2019, which pushed back Fast and Furious 9 to 2020. That move upset Tyrese Gibson, who plays Roman Pearce; he wrote an impassioned Instagram post on October 4 claiming that the franchise has become about Johnson ever since his production company, Seven Bucks, got involved. The actor even threatened to exit the series via a November 1 Instagram post.
None of this fighting seems likely to be good for the franchise in the long run. In the end, the studio, actors, and fans could all lose out.
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?