Something about the way Matthew McConaughey says “Gold!” just makes us tingle. Fortunately, he says it quite a bit in the teaser for his upcoming film named after the precious metal.
Gold tells the story of a prospector named Kenny Wells (McConaughey, who shed a good deal of his hair to play the balding main character), who goes searching for wealth — and a new lease on life — deep in the heart of the Indonesian jungle in the late 1980s.
The film is inspired by true events, and a new teaser for it was released Thursday. We can’t help but see a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its premise. As it does in that film, we expect that the eponymous precious metal will create plenty of greed and moral corruption in this one.
It certainly looks that way in this nearly two-minute spot, as McConaughey speaks of “Gold!” like a man possessed, pointing out that “a little gold can just change everything.”
The trailer takes us from the jungles of Indonesia to the New York Stock Exchange and back again, all as Wells looks back on the experience. “What a goddamn ride it was!” he says. Considering that the trailer ends with Wells befriending an ornery wild tiger, we’ll take his word for it.
Also of note here is the presence of veteran screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic). Gaghan will be directing this time around, rather than writing. That duty is entrusted to the duo of Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who previously collaborated on the television series The Blacklist and Friday Night Lights.
The film also stars Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones), Toby Kebbell (Warcraft: The Beginning), and Edgar Ramírez (Joy). Gold is scheduled to hit theaters on Christmas Day.
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?