If you have listened to a popular song made over the last 25 years, there is a good chance either Andre “Dr. Dre” Young and/or former Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine had a hand and ear in it. Soon, you will be able to see just how deep that musical partnership goes. HBO will delve into how Iovine and Dre bucked conventions to become multi-millionaire music moguls in The Defiant Ones, a four-part documentary series.
Directed by Menace II Society co-director Allen Hughes, the documentary series will chronicle Dre and Iovine’s 25-year relationship. The Defiant Ones will include never-before-seen footage of the two producers working in the studio with legends like U2, Bruce Springsteen, and the gangster rap originators NWA, among a hall of fame list of others. To give you a glimpse into how far back the documentary will go, the trailer features grainy VHS footage of a young Dr. Dre behind the microphone in the early 1990s.
When you have been entrenched in the music industry for as long as the two men responsible for hundreds of millions of records being sold, you tend to have a few music icons ready to sing your praises. The Defiant Ones will feature interviews from Dr. Dre protege Eminem, Nas, Ice Cube, David Geffen, Tom Petty, and a litany of other legendary acts.
The trailer suggests The Defiant Ones will spend time on the pair’s historic $3 billion sale of its Beats Electronics, and subsequent move to Apple Music. However, the documentary will be premiered on HBO, instead of the pair’s burgeoning streaming platform. But HBO has a vastly wider reach with an estimated 134 million subscribers worldwide compared to Apple Music’s more than 20 million subscribers. Apple Music may not be premiering the retrospective doc on two of its biggest executives, but it will be the first to stream Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ documentary Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, a 25-year retrospective on his Bad Boy Records.
The Defiant Ones will air on HBO on four consecutive nights from July 9 t July 12 at 9 p.m. (ET).
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?