Dwayne Johnson has electrified audiences for three decades as The Rock in the WWE. Drawing from that experience in professional wrestling, Johnson will play former MMA fighter Mark Kerr in the A24 biopic The Smashing Machine.
“Winning is the best feeling in the world,” Johnson’s Kerr says in the official trailer. “It’s 40,000 people in there cheering you on. There’s no other high like it in the world.”
Kerr rose to prominence in the late 1990s after becoming a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion. Kerr fought some of the fiercest competitors in mixed martial arts. However, Kerr’s greatest challenge came outside the ropes, as he struggled with substance abuse and addiction. The real-life Kerr was the subject of the HBO documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.
Emily Blunt stars as Dawn Staples, Kerr’s then-girlfriend and future wife. Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, and Oleksandr Usyk also star.
Benny Safdie writes and directs The Smashing Machine in his solo directorial feature debut. Safdie is best known for Good Time and Uncut Gems, two movies he directed with his brother Josh. The Smashing Machine‘s producers are Johnson, Safdie, David Koplan, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, and Eli Bush.
The Smashing Machine is a shift in tone for Johnson. The soon-to-be 53-year-old has become known for his work in franchises and blockbusters, including Moana, Red Notice, Black Adam, Hobbs & Shaw, and Jumanji. Johnson’s last live-action movie, Red One, was a box office bomb before becoming a streaming hit on Prime Video.
The Smashing Machine is Johnson’s attempt at a prestige play. It’s a smaller, character-driven project with an awards season release. The Academy typically rewards physical transformations with heavy use of prosthetics. Having never been nominated, Johnson likely won’t receive an Oscar nomination.
However, Johnson clearly wants to change his career trajectory and start working with more auteurs. Johnson will soon star in a Martin Scorsese Hawaiian crime drama alongside Blunt and Leonardo DiCaprio.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.