Netflix grabbed our attention in 2015 when it paid $30 million for the rights to the upcoming Brad Pitt film War Machine, and we’re finally getting closer to seeing if the investment was a good one. The film is due out this spring, and the streamer released the first teaser Wednesday.
Billed as “an absurdist war story for our times,” the film is inspired by journalist Michael Hastings’ 2012 nonfiction book The Operators. Written and directed by David Michod, the movie fictionalizes real-life events, resulting in sharp satire. The teaser hints at this, with Pitt’s four-star general character at one point casually saying, “No, finish your phone call. The war can wait.”
Pitt plays Dan McMahon, a confident and charismatic general who leads NATO troops in Afghanistan until a journalist’s exposé leads to his dramatic fall from grace. His character is based on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who faced backlash after Hastings reported that he and his staff had mocked government officials, including Vice President Joe Biden. The general ended up resigning from his post and retiring from the Army not long thereafter.
The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Sir Ben Kingsley, Anthony Michael Hall, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Lakeith Stanfield, Emory Cohen, John Magaro, R.J. Cyler, Alan Ruck, Scoot McNairy, and Meg Tilly. The lineup certainly looks bankable, but we’ll have to wait for the movie to start streaming before we know for sure.
At the time of the deal, War Machine was Netflix’s most high-profile acquisition. The streamer has since paid even more for other projects, including the forthcoming Will Smith film Bright, which cost a whopping $90 million. In comparison, War Machine may be a bargain.
The film premieres on Netflix on May 26.
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?