After bursting onto the scene with his low-budget 2004 sci-fi flick Primer, director Shane Carruth didn’t release a film for the next nine years, and had everyone worried that he was going to be Terrence Malick reincarnate. But a little more than two years after Upstream Color (2013), it looks like all systems are already go for the director’s next.
THR reports that The Modern Ocean is already courting buyers and has several high-profile actors and actresses attached. If Carruth himself wasn’t enough to get you excited about the film, just let this big-name ensemble cast wash over you: Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, Chloe Grace Moretz, Tom Holland, Asa Butterfield, Jeff Goldblum, and Beasts of No Nation breakout star Abraham Attah are all on board for the adventure drama.
Here’s how rights holder FilmNation describes the project:
The Modern Ocean’ centers on the competition for valuable shipping routes, the search for the hidden cache of priceless material and the powerful need for vengeance will converge in a spectacular battle on the rolling decks of behemoth cargo ships. This epic tale, fraught with danger and intrigue, takes us from the ancient trading houses of Algeria to the darkest depths of the ocean floor.
Starting today, FilmNation will be shopping the film at the American Film Market, a Santa Monica, California, conference of thousands of indie industry leaders that includes screenings, seminars, parties, and of course, plenty of wheeling and dealing.
We’d imagine that the attached cast pretty much sells itself, but we’re excited to see who (if anyone) emerges with the rights to what looks like one of the most unique projects going.
While this is being billed as an indie film, A-listers and epic battles between behemoth cargo ships don’t exactly come cheap.
We’ll keep you updated as the details filter in, but for those of you who’ve grown tired of all the reboots and reimaginings floating around Hollywood, this is one to keep an eye on.
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?