Tom Cruise has been around the movie world once or twice, and it seems he’s in the midst of yet another renaissance. Just when you start to think his best days might be behind him, there he is starring in a big-budget blockbuster, or landing another major film franchise. Cruise will be 55 in July, but his schedule is packed with films like Top Gun: Maverick, M:I 6 – Mission Impossible, and Universal’s American Made, which debuted its first official trailer Monday.
Checking in at two-and-a-half minutes, the spot (embedded above) teases a film about an “all-American” pilot who ends up in league with the CIA, the DEA, and even Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. Needless to say, he quickly gets in over his head, but the trailer keeps things pretty lighthearted, and mixes in plenty of laughs alongside the nearly constant, death-defying drama. Here’s a snippet of the official synopsis:
“Tom Cruise reunites with his Edge of Tomorrow director, Doug Liman … in this international escapade based on the outrageous (and real) exploits of a hustler and pilot unexpectedly recruited by the CIA to run one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history.”
The pilot in question is one Barry Seal, a TWA airman-turned-drug-smuggler who was apparently the stuff of legend, for better or for worse.
This first trailer is a pretty wild ride and — right out of the gate — we get a midair collision between comedy and action. The clip begins with a DEA aircraft pulling up alongside Seal and ordering him to land his plane. To be fair, he does comply, but does so a bit hastily, setting it down on a residential street and losing a wing and a few kilos of cocaine in the process. Covered in the white stuff, Cruise bikes away on a borrowed ride, but not before handing a few rubber-banded rolls of bills to a young onlooker to cover the damages.
It’s not only time Mr. Seal gets one over on the authorities in the course of the spot … but he seems to cause plenty of trouble for the bad guys as well. From what we can tell, Cruise seems like a natural in the role, and he retains an effortless, aw-shucks charm while pulling off a whole host of wildly irresponsible stunts.
The film itself pairs the actor with director Doug Liman, who is best known for helming The Bourne Identity (2002). Liman also collaborated with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow (2014), which was a hit with critics and audiences alike.
American Made is slated for a September 29, 2017, release but — if you simply can’t wait until then to see TC in action — you can catch The Mummy in theaters June 9.
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?