Every time a new music biopic hits theaters, people make some sort of joke about how Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story should have killed the genre completely. Director James Mangold should take those comments more personally than most, given that the movie Walk Hard is most directly parodying his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.
Instead of taking the suggestion to heart, though, Mangold has made another music biopic with A Complete Unknown. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mangold explained why he didn’t want to let all the Walk Hard jokes deter him.
“I found Walk Hard hilarious,” Mangold explained. “But I also never understood why satire would negate making the real thing anymore. I wasn’t frightened off any more than Robert Eggers should be frightened of making a monster movie in the face of Young Frankenstein or if another filmmaker might be frightened of making a Western in the face of Blazing Saddles. It’s unfair to say that if someone makes a satire of a genre, it somehow has put a tombstone in the genre for all time. That seems a little ludicrous to me.”
Mangold did acknowledge that the genre became slightly less popular in the wake of Walk Hard, but he didn’t think that was because of the movie.
“That was just that they had run their course for that moment,” he said. “It takes so long to make a movie that I don’t think things operate in quite the instantaneous fashion where everyone suddenly stays away.”
Ultimately, what bothered Mangold the most about Walk Hard wasn’t the jokes but the fact that it got a much bigger budget than the movie it was making fun of.
“I was more unnerved that the studio who made the movie paid twice as much for Walk Hard and refused to pay half as much for Walk the Line,” he said.
He added that no filmmaker should take satire of their work too seriously. He clearly doesn’t. “We live in an age of such irony that sometimes there are good cliches to avoid, but there are also some things that we should hold on to,” the director explained. “Trope is not a negative word if you look it up.”
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?