In August, two-time Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain gave audiences a glimpse of the shrewd, fast-talking poker boss she will bring to life in Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Molly’s Game. Now a second trailer has been released for the STXfilms movie that tells the story of Molly Bloom, a real-life skier turned high-stakes poker queen, aka the “Poker Princess.”
After narrowly missing her shot at the Olympics, Bloom finds herself running an underground poker ring for her boss at the notorious Viper Room in Hollywood. As her operation grows, Bloom breaks out on her own and begins hosting lavish games in New York City with incredibly high stakes — in more ways than one. When Russian mobsters infiltrate the scene, she is arrested in an FBI raid. The film follows her subsequent newfound fame leading up to her trial.
The first trailer, which debuted several months earlier, had a Martin Scorsese-esque feel to it with cryptic, story-building voiceovers.
“The humiliation had given way to blinding anger at my powerlessness. I wasn’t going to wait before I put a plan in place,” Chastain’s Bloom tells us in that debut trailer. The sharp lines, combined with images of flowing champagne, red-sequined cleavage, and giant wads of cash all paint an intriguing debut for renowned writer-turned-director Sorkin.
As Chastain riffs cleverly with her lawyer (played by Idris Elba), shots flash of sprawling poker chips and talk of $250,00 buy-ins. “Families, lives, careers will be ruined,” Chastain declares prophetically, giving the sequence the feel of a Sorkin-influenced Goodfellas.
The film, produced by Mark Gordon, Amy Pascal, and Matt Jackson, was purchased last year by STX at the Cannes Film Festival to the tune of $9 million. The script is Sorkin’s adaptation of Rachel Bloom’s book Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker. He apparently decided to make the film after a friend of his represented the real-life Bloom after she was arrested and Sorkin read her book.
In addition to the Golden Globe-winning Chastain, Molly’s Game stars Elba, Kevin Costner, and Michael Cera. It was screened last month at the Toronto International Film Festival and is scheduled for a wide release in theaters November 22.
Update: We added the second trailer for the film.
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?