NBC wants in on the true crime trend. The network is working with Law & Order creator Dick Wolf to create a new anthology drama series, reports Deadline. The show will kick off with Law & Order: True Crime — The Menendez Brothers Murders, which will focus on a high-profile 1989 crime and the legal hullabaloo that followed.
Like FX’s recent hit American Crime Story, the NBC series will be a scripted drama that re-enacts the stories surrounding real-life criminal cases. The first installment will consist of eight episodes centering on brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 of their parents’ brutal murder at their Beverly Hills home. They were 21 and 18 years old, respectively, in 1989, when their parents were killed.
The legal drama featured in The Menendez Brothers Murders should be particularly intriguing given that it will combine elements of the series’ Law & Order predecessors with an unusual case. The brothers weren’t convicted until their third trial because the first two resulted in hung juries. Ultimately, however, the men received life sentences without the possibility of parole after the jury concluded that they had killed their parents for their money.
“This case captured the public’s attention like nothing before it as it examined taboo issues such as patricide and matricide in gruesome detail, all against a backdrop of privilege and wealth,” said Jennifer Salke, President of NBC Entertainment, according to Deadline. “We will re-create the cultural and societal surroundings of both the murders and trials when people were not only obsessed with the case, but examining how and why these brothers committed these heinous crimes.”
Wolf, who is set to executive produce, also focused on the attention-grabbing story. “There is no shortage of compelling real-life criminal cases, and the Menendez trial was more scintillating than most crime fiction,” he said.
It seems there is no shortage of true crime series, either. Between the Serial podcast and series like American Crime Story and Netflix’s Making a Murderer, there are plenty of options for those interested in actual cases and criminal justice. NBC apparently wants to tap into that audience and may have picked just the case to do it.
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?