Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t interested in fluff roles. In fact, it seems the actor is at a stage in his career where he’s only interested in challenges — and big ones at that. He dove head first into his role as the revenge-obsessed Hugh Glass in The Revenenant and he’ll soon play perhaps the most notorious serial killer in American history, but that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about what infamous and/or complicated characters he might play in the future.
In an interview with German publication Welt am Sonntag (translated by The Guardian), the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin came up, and the actor called the pugnacious autocrat ““very, very, very interesting,” adding: “I would love to play him.”
He went on to add that he’s something of a student of Russian history and that there are many stories from the country that intrigue him. “I think there should be more films about Russian history because it has many stories worthy of Shakespeare. That is fascinating for an actor. Lenin also would be an interesting role. I would like also like to star as Rasputin.”
We’re just spitballing here but how about an art-house project where he plays all three in the same movie? It would take some talented people to pull that off but, these days, it seems like anything’s possible for The Revenant star, who is riding a wave of positive press in his quest to notch his first-ever Best Actor Oscar.
Fans may remember that Putin famously called DiCaprio a “muzhik” or “real man” for his perseverance during a difficult and oft-deterred visit to the country, and Leo has reportedly described himself as “half Russian” in the past.
We’ll be sure to let you know when/if there is any effort to actually make this happen, but if nothing else, it’s a glimpse into the mind of one of biggest actors on the planet right now.
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?