There have not been very many onscreen depictions of Vladimir Putin, perhaps in part because he is still Russia’s leader, and so the story of his reign is not yet over. In a recent interview with Deadline, though, Jude Law revealed that he’ll be playing the Russian leader during the first part of his governing career in Olivier Assayas’s new film, The Wizard of the Kremlin.
“I say that hesitatingly because I haven’t really started work on it yet,” Law explained. “I mean, I have, but at the moment, it looks like an Everest to climb, so I’m in the foothills looking up thinking, ‘Oh Christ, what have I said?'”
Law continued by saying that he often feels intimidated by roles early on: “That’s often how I feel whilst I say yes. I was going, ‘Oh God, how am I going to do this?’ But anyway, that’s for me to sort out.”
The news that Law had been cast in the film was first announced in the spring of 2024, but there was no word on who he would play at the time. The film is an adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s novel of the same name and follows a young filmmaker who unexpectedly becomes an advisor to Putin as Putin rises through the ranks of the Russian government.
In addition to Law, the film will also star Zach Galafanakis, Alicia Vikander, and Tom Sturridge. We have no word yet on when the film might be released, but based on Law’s comments, it sounds like the film is still in fairly early stages.
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?