We’re less than two weeks from the release of Ron Howard’s whale tale In the Heart of the Sea and less than a year away from his take on Dan Brown’s Inferno, but the director has wasted no time finding his next project.
According to Deadline Hollywood, Howard is set to captain an adaptation of The Girl Before, an as-of-yet unpublished thriller novel from J.P. Delaney, which is believed to be a pseudonym of best-selling author Tony Strong (The Death Pit, The Decoy). Universal has secured the film rights for the book, following a competition with TriStar, Paramount, and several other studios.
The novel won’t be published until the fall of 2016, so you’ll have to wait until then to find out if it’s worth all of the attention it’s attracting, but some basic plot details have emerged that should help you get a picture of the source material.
The book follows the story of a damaged woman who falls for a peculiar house and for the man who designed it, but when she learns that a woman died there three years prior, she begins to worry that she’ll share the fate of The Girl Before.
Sounds a bit like the plot of a Hitchcock film — not the sort of story we’re used to seeing from Howard, whose directing resume includes films like Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, and Rush.
No word yet on when this film will hit theaters or who will be cast as the girls before and after, but we’ll keep you posted as details filter in.
In the meantime, Howard fans can catch the director’s adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. The film — which is entitled In the Heart of the Sea — hits theaters December 11, 2015 and stars Chris Hemsworth, Tom Holland (The Impossible), and Cillian Murphy (The Dark Knight Rises).
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?