Apparently, Wall Street isn’t the only place where people do shady things with enormous sums of money. THR reports that, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against several Wolf of Wall Street financiers, alleging that hundreds of millions of dollars were embezzled during the production of the film.
United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch has called this complaint the “largest single action” in the history of the DOJ’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and the filing outlines asset seizures of more than $1 billion, along with the civil forfeiture of rights to The Wolf of Wall Street. Allegedly the film was financed, in part, by money misappropriated from a Malaysian investment fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
Although lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio is not specifically implicated, he is referred to several times as “Hollywood Actor 1” and is believed to have witnessed the use of embezzled funds in gambling activities during a 2012 trip to Las Vegas’ Venetian casino.
According to the complaint, DiCaprio joined Malaysian businessman Jho Low, and Red Granite Pictures co-founders Riza Aziz (stepson of Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak) and Joey McFarland for a night of gambling financed by $1.15 million in funds siphoned from 1MDB, which is owned by the Malaysian government.
DiCaprio has reportedly been close with Low for quite some time, and the two have partied together frequently, even attending each other’s birthday celebrations. The actor thanked “Joey, Riz, and Jho,” specifically in his Golden Globe Acceptance speech, after winning the Best Actor (Drama) award for his Wolf of Wall Street role.
It has also been reported that Low introduced DiCaprio to Aziz, who created the production company Red Granite Pictures with the specific aim of funding Wolf of Wall Street, which was then a passion project in need of financial backing.
You’ll have to stay tuned to see if DiCaprio is questioned further about any potential wrongdoing, but either way, this sounds more like a story about Jordan Belfort than one of the most respected actors in Hollywood.
Let the bidding for the movie rights begin!
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?