The holidays are coming, so that means the time has come for yet another high-profile film with an all-star ensemble cast. This year, we get Collateral Beauty, a drama starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kiera Knightley, Michael Peña, Naomie Harris, Jacob Latimore, Kate Winslet, and Helen Mirren.
Warner Bros. Pictures dropped the latest trailer Thursday, providing another look at Smith as Howard, a man who finds an unusual way to try and cope with the loss of his daughter. His coping strategy involves writing letters, not to people but things, including love, time, and death. Shockingly, he gets responses — in the form of visits from each. They are played by Knightley, Latimore, and Mirren, respectively. (As he says, “turns out death is an elderly white lady.” Who knew?)
The trailer shows how the people in Howard’s life react to his unique brand of grief, and it’s clear they’re more than a little worried about him. He is, too — in fact, he questions whether some of the people he sees are actually there.
The film looks like it will ultimately be about hope and healing, which is fitting given the time of year it will be released. There are plenty of poignant moments throughout the preview, but we’ll have to wait and see whether it manages to come across as powerful rather than melodramatic. Either way, with its star-studded cast, Collateral Beauty should have wide box office appeal this holiday season.
The film is written by Allan Loeb (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) and directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada). Collateral Beauty hits theaters on December 16.
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?