After Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag underperformed at the domestic box office despite a strong critical response, the director reflected on the movie’s public reception. In speaking with The Independent, Soderbergh said that the muted reception for his movie is a bad omen for Hollywood more generally.
“This is the kind of film I made my career on,” he said. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theaters — if that’s truly a dead zone — then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”
“I know for a fact, having talked to somebody who works at another studio, that the Monday after Black Bag opened, the conversation in the morning meeting was: ‘What does this mean when you can’t get a movie like this to perform?’ And that’s frustrating,” he continued.
Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as two British spies who begin to do some clandestine work on one another. The movie was released by Focus Features, and Soderbergh said that the studio told him the movie will turn a profit.
Still, “the bottom line is that we need to figure out a way to cultivate this audience for movies that are in this mid-range, that aren’t fantasy spectacles or low-budget horror movies,” the director said. “They’re movies for grown-ups, and those can’t just go away.”
Soderbergh added that many of his most famous movies might not get made today: “Erin Brockovich wouldn’t get made today; Traffic wouldn’t get made. Unless you get Timothée Chalamet who, god bless him, seems to be interested in doing different kinds of movies. But that window is getting smaller and smaller for filmmakers to climb through.”
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.