Like LeBron James and other pro basketball players before him, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant has dunked himself into the waters of movies and TV. The actor recently teamed up with Apple and Imagine Television’s Brian Grazer for a scripted drama series loosely based on his life, Deadline reports.
The idea for the series, Swagger, came about after Durant met Grazer, who executive produced the sports-focused drama series Friday Night Lights. Grazer told Deadline that he’d been wanting to return to that world when he happened to meet Durant. The two were both attending The Camp, an annual summer gathering hosted by Google that welcomes heavy hitters from a variety of fields. (Past attendees have included Prince Harry, Rihanna, and George Lucas, according to Forbes.) Grazer and Durant made plans to get together in Los Angeles, and when they did, they discussed what the basketball star’s childhood was like after scouts and brands started calling when he was just 12 years old.
The idea for Swagger — a series centering on young basketball players and their families — was born out of that conversation.
“He created a beautiful world that the Friday Night Lights essence could inhabit,” Grazer said, according to Deadline. “It has the same things. The fragility of how you were as a kid, and how these kids — 12 to 13 years old — are presented with money, real money. … It’s a fascinating universe of possibilities.”
Friday Night Lights was football-centric, so Swagger will differ in that respect, but there will be numerous common themes. The series will reportedly show the kids’ families navigating the “youth-sports economy,” as Deadline puts it. We saw that in Friday Night Lights during its run from 2006 to 2011, and although the series never was a ratings giant, it did maintain a loyal fan following and critical acclaim.
Durant and Grazer seem like a good fit for a partnership with Apple. The company is investing heavily in original programming, and has been doing so with the help of big names. Reese Witherspoon, Octavia Spencer, Steven Spielberg, and Dr. Dre are just some of the technology and entertainment giant’s uber-successful collaborators.
Swagger does not currently have a season order, but we hope to see it on our screens before long.
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?