As elevator pitches go, “Jamie Foxx in a Taken-style kick-ass-and-take-names thriller set in Las Vegas” is pretty darn compelling. If you’re wondering what the heck we’re talking about, the first trailer for the upcoming Sleepless hit the interwebs Wednesday, and its leading man spends most of the spot going all Liam Neeson on Sin City’s infamously seedy underworld.
Embedded above, the nearly three-minute long trailer follows Vincent Downs (Foxx), a cop with underworld ties who pursues his kidnapped son through one sleepless and blood-soaked night. The film is a re-imagining of a 2011 French film entitled “Nuit Blanche” (“Sleepless Night”), directed by Paris-born helmer Frédéric Jardin.
While some will certainly write it off as a mindless shoot-em-up-style action flick, there are plenty of reasons to be intrigued by this one. First off, Jamie Foxx seems to be one of those rare Hollywood leading men that never lose their star power and his charisma alone can carry a film. Second, its Swiss director, Baran bo Odar (Who Am I), though little-known in the U.S., is a star overseas. Third, breakout Stranger Things star David Harbour (aka, Jim Hopper/Hop) is on board.
Punctuated by explosions and the click-clack of reloading firearms, Drake’s Energy blares in the background of this trailer and the song’s “I got enemies, got a lot of enemies” refrain seems to sync up perfectly with the plot of the film itself. Unfortunately for the enemies in question, it looks like Foxx is — a la Neeson — always a couple of steps ahead.
Sleepless also stars T.I. (Ant-Man), Gabrielle Union (Bad Boys II), Dermot Mulroney (The Grey), and Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone, Source Code). The film is set to hit theaters February 24, 2017.
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?