Hollywood wants to go beyond fake Tinder profiles to create a stronger bond between itself and the dating app. The technophobic film industry is finally jumping on the digital matchmaking bandwagon with a rom-com that revolves around Tinder — hell, it even has Tinder in the title, in case you weren’t sure what it’s about.
Warner Bros. has nabbed the rights to The Worst Tinder Date Ever, an original romantic comedy (yes, they still make those) from writers Keith Merryman and David A. Newman. The duo behind the project are also responsible for the Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis snore-fest that was Friends with Benefits, and the Think Like a Man franchise.
The Tinder-centric film will involve two people — both, we’re guessing, straight and white, and certainly over the age of 18 (since younger teens are no longer allowed to use the app), who meet via the matchmaking service and go on a date. Set in L.A., the film will involve rom-com and action elements, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
It ultimately sounds like Date Night for millennials — the demographic Hollywood wishes would put down their damn smartphones and go to the movies. A fly on the wall during the board meeting where this dreamed up might have witnessed someone draw an allusion to Nora Ephron’s ode to email (and Starbucks) You’ve Got Mail, which has actually aged pretty well. Unfortunately, it sounds more like My Dinner with Andre, if you replaced the humanism with an algorithm, and the improvisation with choreographed action set-pieces. Or maybe just a dog’s dinner.
Perhaps we’re being a tad bit harsh. After all, there have been some films that have bucked the technophobic trend of Hollywood movies. Recent examples include Spike Jonze’s Her, and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. And many problems can be solved or forgiven with a likeable cast. All the project needs is a sprinkling of Michael B. Jordan and Emma Stone in order to win many of us over.
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?