If a Danny Boyle-directed Aaron Sorkin-penned film about an abrasive, eccentric, and massively popular business icon doesn’t sound like a hit to you … you’re smarter than we are. You’re also smarter than Universal, which just pulled its highly-anticipated Steve Jobs biopic from more than 2,000 movie theaters.
Collider reports that — despite the film receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews and even a bit of Oscar buzz — it has earned just $16.7 million against a production budget of $30 million and is being pulled out of a huge swath of cinemas.
Set backstage during the launch of three separate, iconic Apple products, the film’s approach was perhaps a bit too arthouse for mainstream audiences and didn’t resonate with as many theatergoers as Universal thought it would. By all accounts, both Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) and co-star Kate Winslet (Joanna Hoffman) shine, but evidently, not quite bright enough to save this film from the scrap heap.
In fact, THR points out that Steve Jobs is scarcely outperforming the 2013 indie biopic Jobs, in which Ashton Kutcher portrayed the tech magnate. This despite the fact that the latter received very poor reviews and lacked the backing of a major Hollywood studio.
These are the sort of failures that studio execs have in mind when they decide to reboot a comic book franchise for the umpteenth time, but with riskier propositions continuing to crash and burn, it’s getting harder and harder to blame them.
Given the glowing reviews it received from critics, it’s still possible that Steve Jobs could puts its stamp on the upcoming awards season, but history has shown that, as these films fade out of sight, they also fade out of award committees’ minds.
We’ll see soon enough, but if you were looking to catch Steve Jobs on the big screen, act fast. You may be running out of time.
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?