More than 40 years after its release, Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest remains a landmark film, a classic story of a battle of wills between Jack Nicholson’s small-time criminal Randle McMurphy, whose actions land him in a mental institution in rural Oregon, and Louise Fletcher’s controlling Nurse Ratched.
Screenwriter Ryan Murphy — one of the most prolific TV writers of the 2010s, having masterminded series such as Glee and American Crime Story — is heading up a prequel series, titled Ratched, which will focus on the villainous nurse. According to Deadline, Netflix has picked up the series for 18 episodes split over two seasons.
Starring as the eponymous lead character will be Sarah Paulson, who has worked extensively with Murphy on several shows, including American Horror Story (which Murphy co-created with Brad Falchuk), American Crime Story, Nip/Tuck, and Feud.
Ratched is the brainchild of Evan Romansky, who wrote the script fresh out of film school. CAA agent Joe Cohen sent the project to Murphy, who spent a year working to acquire character rights and facilitate the participation of the Saul Zaentz estate. Zaentz produced Cuckoo’s Nest, which won several Academy Awards in 1976, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Ratched in particular became a well-known character, and is considered one of the most iconic villains in American cinema.
Michael Douglas, who was also a producer on the original film, will executive produce the project alongside Murphy, Aleen Keshishian, Margaret Riley, and Jacob Epstein of Lighthouse Management & Media. Romansky will serve in a co-executive producer role.
Paulson, the recipient of an Emmy Award for her role as prosecutor Marcia Clark in American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, is currently appearing in a starring role in Cult, the seventh season of American Horror Story. She’ll have a lead role in American Crime Story: Katrina — due to begin filming in 2018 — and will appear in both Ocean’s Eight and Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming historical drama The Post.
A&E’s Bates Motel offered a similar look into the background of an infamous villain — namely, Norman Bates, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho — though it had to be somewhat PG-13 since it was airing on basic cable. Ratched will have no such restrictions, though we don’t expect the nurse to be murdering people left and right.
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?