The murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. are coming back into the spotlight (again), and Johnny Depp will be there at the center of it all. The actor is set to star in Labyrinth, a film about the murder investigations, reports Screen Daily.
Depp will reportedly play Russell Poole, the Los Angeles detective who worked on the cases in the late 1990s. The former police officer is known for uncovering ties between law enforcement, the music industry, and gangs, and then going on to work on the cases of the two slain rappers. He believed that cops may have been involved in their murders, but neither case was ever officially solved.
Poole’s investigation became the focus of Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal. The film will be based on the book, with Christian Contreras having used it to pen the screenplay. The thriller will be directed by Brad Furman, who is known for The Lincoln Lawyer and The Infiltrator.
Producer Miriam Segal of Good Films reportedly headed to the Toronto Film Festival this week to get buyers on board. That doesn’t seem like a difficult task considering how the mystery of Tupac and Biggie’s murders has mystified and fascinated the public for nearly two decades. Depp’s involvement, of course, helps, especially coming off his acclaimed performance in Black Mass.
While there are some conflicting reports over whether the actor is officially attached to the project or still in talks, according to THR, assuming all goes as planned, Labyrinth could begin shooting later this year.
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?