Glen Powell had a pretty good year in 2024. One of his big roles in 2025, though, will see him moving to the small screen. Hulu just released its first teaser for Chad Powers, a half-hour sports comedy that Powell co-created with Michael Waldron.
In the series, Powell plays Russ Holiday, a former star college quarterback bound for the NFL who ruins his prospects because of behavioral problems. In order to get another shot, he adopts a new identity and “walks onto a struggling Southern football team as the talented, affable Chad Powers,” per the official description.
The first teaser for the series gives us peeks at Powell as both characters. The series is based on a 2022 sketch from Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions and ESPN+ in which Eli Manning disguised himself as Chad Powers and participated in a walk-on tryout for the Penn State football team. That sketch was just 10 minutes long, though, so making a full series out of it will likely require quite a bit of fleshing out.
The cast also includes Perry Mattfeld as Ricky, Quentin Plair as Coach Byrd, Wynn Everett as Tricia, Frankie A. Rodriguez as Danny, and Steve Zahn as Jake Hudson, and the series is set to debut in the fall of 2025.
Powell’s star emerged fully formed in 2024 thanks to his starring roles in projects like Twisters and Hit Man, which proved that he has the charisma necessary to become a full-blown movie star. Powell seems to know, though, that unlike in decades past, there’s no shame in toggling between star vehicles on TV and those on the big screen.
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?