If La La Land’s enormous success proved anything, it’s that show business still loves a good love letter to … show business. This Christmas, 20th Century Fox will try to parlay that fact into box-office success for the upcoming, The Greatest Showman.
The first official trailer for the film arrived today and — over the course of its 2:20 run-time, titular showman P.T. Barnum goes from rags to riches, and the music builds to a crescendo as he unveils “the greatest show on Earth.”
Directing newbie Michael Gracey is helming the film and Hugh Jackman stars as Barnum. Like La La Land, this film is a musical, adding another to a Jackman resume that already includes Oklahoma! and Les Miserables.
While we badly want to be excited about this film, this spot raises a couple of red flags. It teases a kitschy, somewhat juvenile exploration of the life of P.T. Barnum and feels almost like watching an ad for a made-for-TV Disney special. Barnum has a complicated legacy, one that this trailer oversimplifies by eschewing the edgier, more cynical side of the man who famously said things like: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” and “The common man, no matter how sharp and tough, actually enjoys having the wool pulled over his eyes, and makes it easier for the puller.”
Jackman’s romantic reverence for the stage and screen has always been apparent, but it feels like the team behind this film is assuming that the average moviegoer shares his sentiments, which may be a miscalculation. We’re not ready to write this one off by any means, but suffice it to say that the greatest salesman of his day doesn’t have us reaching for our wallets just yet.
For us, the silver lining is the visuals, which are imbued with a level spectacle and splendor befitting of the film’s subject matter. That makes sense as Gracey got his start in visual effects, working on such films as The Magician and Double Vision. This trailer really makes if feel like “all the world’s a stage” and pulls you in almost immediately.
We’ll have to wait and see how this one turns out, but it’s certainly on our radar.
The Greatest Showman also stars Rebecca Ferguson, Zac Efron, and Michelle Williams. It’s set to hit theaters on Christmas Day.
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?