Star-studded cast, Golden Age glamour, slapstick shenanigans — there’s a lot to like about Hail, Caesar!, the Coen Brothers’ upcoming comedy. Set in 1950s Hollywood, it’s the dynamic duo’s first film since Inside Llewyn Davis, and their first comedy since A Serious Man. The first trailer for the film promised the same sort off-beat hilarity we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from these prolific brothers and, since then, we’ve seen a steady drip of promotional material for the project.
The first TV spot for the film debuted earlier this month and Screen Crush reports that yesterday, Universal followed that up with a second TV spot, which featured some new footage and a few more slaps for George Clooney (Baird Whitlock). You can check out the first below, while the second is embedded above.
Both spots are dripping with glitz and glamour and capitalize on movie fans’ nostalgia for a bygone era, while simultaneously skewering the excess and self-importance that was so pervasive in the industry at the time.
Hollywood loves poking fun at itself, and it loves the Coen Brothers, so you can bet this film will be a hit with insiders, but we’ll have to wait and see if it can put enough butts in theater seats to justify its acclaimed (and undoubtedly expensive) cast.
Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, David Krumholtz, Tilda Swinton, Emily Beecham, Josh Brolin, and George Clooney all star in the film, which tells the story of a 1950s Hollywood fixer (Brolin) as he scrambles to locate a kidnapped movie star, whose absence throws a major film production (Hail, Caesar!) into disarray.
A new, noir-style poster for the movie (below) has also been released and depicts the Emperor Clooney’s abduction, along with a clever play on an old Hollywood trope.
If you’re a fan of the Coen Brothers, satire, or both, this is a film that should probably be on your radar.
Hail, Caesar! hits theaters on February 5, 2016.
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?