Johnny Depp is set to star as John McAfee in King of the Jungle, an upcoming dark comedy from directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Ficarra and Requa have written several dark comedies, including Bad Santa and Bad News Bears, and their directorial portfolio includes Focus and I Love You Philip Morris.
The film is based on John McAfee’s Last Stand, a Wired magazine ebook by Joshua Davis, and chronicles the exploits of the ex-tech magnate. In 1994, McAfee — creator of the eponymous antivirus software — resigned from his position and set up shop in rural Belize, where he ran “a Colonel Kurtz-like compound of guns, sex, and madness.”
In King of the Jungle, a journalist finds himself in over his head after accepting an invitation to interview McAfee at his new place of residence. The film is from Condé Nast Entertainment, Zaftig Films, MadRiver Pictures, and Epic Entertainment.
The script was penned by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (American Crime Story), and the film is being produced by Condé Nast’s Dawn Ostroff and Jeremy Steckler, among others; executive producers include Epic’s Joshuah Bearman and MadRiver’s Marc Butan.
Depp’s involvement in the project will follow a busy 2017, during which the actor is slated to appear in a number of blockbuster films, including Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2.
McAfee, once referred to as “bonkers” by the Belizean prime minister, is notorious for his interests and investments in burgeoning technologies and his political activism. In 2016, he sought the Libertarian Party nomination for the U.S. presidency, eventually losing out to Gary Johnson. McAfee even wrote a few articles for us a few years back! To get a better idea of McAfee’s personality, check out this video on YouTube.
McAfee himself retweeted reports of Depp’s casting, which could indicate his approval.
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?