For the past 15 years, Russell Crowe has been one of Hollywood’s steadiest A-listers but in a franchise-heavy movie business, he has somehow missed out on that particular gravy train. According to ScreenCrush, however, he may jump on board yet, albeit in a somewhat unlikely fashion.
The actor is reportedly in talks to play Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in Tom Cruise’s upcoming Mummy reboot. No, we didn’t get our headlines crossed, it appears that Universal is setting up a Marvel-style monster movie universe and that Crowe could even play the good/bad doctor in several different films. While no one has signed on the dotted line just yet, there is mutual interest after talks fell through with both Tom Hardy and Javier Bardem.
Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein projects are reportedly also in the works but it’s unclear at this point how the films will connect. After so many big-screen flops, it would certainly be nice to see a bit of life injected into Mary Shelley’s monster, but we’ll have to wait and see if Universal can pull this ambitious project off.
In the meantime, Alex Kurtzman is helming the Mummy reboot, which is currently filming in London with a cast that includes Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service), Jake Johnson (New Girl), and, of course, Tom Cruise. It’s not clear exactly how Crowe’s character(s) come into play in this film and whether he would portray the benevolent Dr. Jekyll only, the maniacal Mr. Hyde only, or both of them. Either way, he would certainly be an intriguing addition to the cast.
The Mummy is currently scheduled for a June 9, 2017, release and is a reboot of the late ‘90s/early 2000s franchise that starred Brendan Fraser.
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?