This week’s letter includes: Sundance’s final year in Park City after 43 years and $13 million in losses, Netflix asking filmmakers to repeat the plot “three or four times” because they know you’re on your phone, an AI anxiety documentary premiering at a festival having its own identity crisis, and a $9,000 handbag that requires charging.

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Over half of Indian moviegoers now routinely skip theatres: With theatrical windows shrinking to 4–8 weeks, over half of Indian moviegoers now routinely skip theatres and wait for streaming, hollowing out an ₹18,000 crore industry already struggling with screen shortages and falling per-screen revenue.

Kathleen Kennedy leaves Lucasfilm after 14 years: She hands over day-to-day control to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan while returning to producing, framing AI as the next Jurassic Park–scale inflection point rather than an existential threat.

Apple Creator Studio rolls Final Cut Pro, Logic, Pixelmator, Motion, and Compressor into a $12.99/month subscription, signaling Apple’s intent to own the end-to-end creator workflow rather than just the hardware.

Anthropic targets Hollywood’s invisible workforce: As reported by The Ankler, Claude doesn’t need to replace writers or stars to upend the industry; by automating development analysis, and internal decision-making, it hollow-outs the assistant and junior executive layer that studios actually run on.

TikTok launches PineDrama as a standalone app: The company is betting that cliffhanger-driven, one-minute microdramas can succeed where Quibi failed, pushing short-form serialized storytelling toward a projected $26B market by 2030.

Netflix asks filmmakers to make movies for people who aren’t watching movies.

Matt Damon appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast revealing Netflix executives are asking filmmakers to restate the plot “three or four times in the dialogue” because they know viewers are on their phones.

Damon explains: traditional filmmaking builds to a big set piece in act three. But now Netflix wants the big action scene in the first five minutes “to make people stay.” And they want characters to repeat the plot constantly because they assume people are scrolling Instagram.

Which, we probably are.

But playing devil’s advocate here: if you create lazy, formulaic storytelling that treats viewers like idiots, aren’t you giving them a reason to check their phones?

Just a thought.

The HPA awards normalize AI in the pipeline: The 2026 Innovation & Technology nominees read less like a future forecast and more like a workflow diagram, with AI fully embedded across pre-production, post, and distribution rather than isolated as a novelty or side bet.

Dreame enters the action-cam race with an 8K modular camera: The Leaptic Cube pushes headline specs and long-range wireless monitoring, but the real play is ecosystem control. Rings, and control surfaces point toward ambient capture rather than incremental GoPro upgrades.

​​Final Park City Sundance

Sundance officially begins on Thursday and it used to be where scrappy filmmakers with maxed-out credit cards premiered movies shot on borrowed cameras. Now it’s Burning Man for people whose Amazon Studios deals fell through.

So here we are. The last dance.

The festival is relocating to Boulder, Colorado for 2027, which means this is Park City’s final hurrah. Forty-three years in Park City ending, and everyone’s showing up to either mourn the loss or celebrate the escape; depending on whether you’re a nostalgic cinephile or a local sick of fighting tourists for a table every January.

Park City’s isolation was supposed to be the point. Like Burning Man, the difficulty of getting there created exclusivity and community. And like Burning Man, it outgrew its humble origins the moment someone realized it could scale.

Despite this, Sundance has lost over $13 million in the last five years.

Sundance Institute CEO Amanda Kelso recently said:

hosting a film festival in a mountain town is extremely expensive.

Which, yeah it is when your festival location requires attendees to:

• Book cabins up to a year in advance

• Or don’t book a year in advance but stay 1 hour away from the actual festival

• Pay Park City prices (read: tech bro ski weekend prices)

• Navigate a town built for 8,000 people suddenly hosting 80,000

• Rent cars to get anywhere

I’m part of a few WhatsApp group chats where you can find a sofa in a cabin at Sundance being offered for $150 a night. No joke.

It’s not a surprise that a change needed to be made.

Before Robert Redford died in September 2025, he’d already started advocating for the move to Boulder. Which feels significant, considering Redford was Sundance for most people.

But what many don’t realize is that before Sundance, there was something else.

The Utah/US Film Festival started in 1978, founded by John Earl (the Utah film commissioner), Sterling Van Wagenen, and Cirina Hampton Catania as a scrappy celebration of American indie cinema.

Redford took it over in 1984, moved it to Park City (his Sundance Resort was nearby), and completely transformed it; rebranding it as the Sundance Film Festival and building the infrastructure that made it legendary. The Sundance Institute, the labs, the grants, the year-round support system, that was all Redford’s vision.

So while he didn’t create the original festival, he created Sundance as we know it.

So why Boulder?

As a city it has a few things going for it that Park City doesn’t.

• Bigger than Park City but still has the “artsy mountain town” vibe

• More infrastructure (hotels, venues, actual space for tens of thousands of people)

• Direct flights to a major airport

• More affordable for emerging filmmakers

• Colorado’s creative scene is booming

Basically, it’s Park City without the problems that made Park City untenable.

This AI Doc

One of the most buzzed-about films this year is a documentary about AI anxiety.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist comes from Daniel Roher (Oscar winner for Navalny). The setup: Roher’s about to become a father and is spiraling about AI. Will his child grow up in a world where humans are obsolete or will AI solve all our problems?

What’s interesting is the title: “Apocaloptimist.” I felt that. That exhausting state of being simultaneously terrified and hopeful about the future.

We’re all apocaloptimists now, doom-scrolling while also believing things might work out.

The timing is perfect. Sundance’s final year in Park City; a festival struggling with its own identity crisis about what “indie” even means, is premiering a film about a guy having an existential crisis about whether humans will remain relevant.

CryptoMondays

Nothing says “indie film festival’s final year” quite like a CryptoMondays event discussing Film3 and “on-chain systems.”

CryptoMondays, heralded as “the largest in-real-life Web3 community in the world” is hosting an event about how blockchain and AI are “reshaping the future of creative industries.” The organizer, Alizah Whitney Johnson, pitches it as: “Many of the challenges we’re experiencing around trust, ownership, and value creation are directly related to how our systems are structured.”

But is the solution blockchain?

Viltrox brings AI autofocus to PL cinema lenses: The NexusFocus F1 uses Sony bodies to add autofocus, and zoom control to manual cinema glass, narrowing the gap between solo operators and traditional focus-pulling setups without altering optical character.

ARRI dominates the 2026 Golden Globes: Winning films overwhelmingly leaned on the Alexa 35 and Mini LF, reinforcing that despite constant camera churn, high-end narrative production remains conservative where it matters most.

Ricoh launches a black-and-white-only GR camera: The GR IV Monochrome rejects color entirely, betting that creative constraint itself is the feature and positioning single-purpose image making as a deliberate counterpoint to all-in-one hybrid cameras.

Insta360 upgrades its webcam into a utility camera: The Link 2 Pro won’t replace cinema rigs, but its 1/1.3” sensor, and gimbal tracking show how “webcams” are absorbing features once reserved for mirrorless cameras.

Cut of the Week: 17 Months of Editing Frankenstein

Evan Schiff (editor of Frankenstein) posted a time-lapse showing every timeline iteration from March 2024 through final delivery in August 2025.

Seventeen months compressed into 90 seconds.

The timeline slowly accumulates into layers: production footage from Toronto, London miniatures, Scottish location shoots. 51 audio stems. Then 51 music tracks. Orange VFX temps stacking on top. Alexander Desplat’s score demos getting replaced by Abbey Road final mixes.

Mesmerizing and exhausting in equal measure.

Retail Therapy

TDM Neo headphones twist into a Bluetooth speaker with one motion

A new audio brand called TDM is selling $249 headphones that physically twist into a Bluetooth speaker with a flick of your wrist; engineering a modular design that eliminates the need to own both headphones and a portable speaker. You can now turn personal listening into a group jam session by literally transforming the device in your hands.

French brand PEUTY launches $9,000 handbag with built-in OLED display

French brand PEUTY is selling a $9,000 handbag with an OLED screen embedded in the leather. A luxury purse that turns into a glowing, phone-controlled display, transforming a simple accessory into a Bluetooth-enabled fashion statement that requires charging.

Who’s going to Sundance this year? Let us know in the comments

This week’s letter includes: A deep dive on CES 2026 where AI was slapped on everything from robot butlers that can’t do laundry to cameras that actually work, Vimeo’s corporate team overriding its curators and why two filmmakers rejected their apology, and an AI service that lets you clone yourself to avoid meetings.

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Aivanta buys Brand Storytelling The AI-first holding company acquired Brand Storytelling and Elevate, absorbing Sundance’s most influential brand-funded content forum into a year-round events platform.

Animation workers win big at DreamWorks, Netflix, and Ted Workers at DreamWorks Animation, Netflix, and the animated series Ted all voted to unionize. Rare triple win for animation labor in an industry that’s been fighting this hard.

IMAX had its biggest year ever, without Hollywood They closed 2025 with $1.28B at the global box office, up 40% from last year. The top performers were local-language films from China and Japan. Hollywood wasn’t carrying the load.

Warner Bros. Discovery tells shareholders to reject Paramount WBD urged shareholders to vote no on Paramount’s $30-per-share offer, calling it riskier than the agreed Netflix merger. Too much debt, too much exposure, and too much operational paralysis

Sundance 2026 goes big on discourse The Institute unveiled an expanded Beyond Film lineup featuring filmmakers, authors, and cultural figures, plus a new Story Forum on art and innovation. Olivia Wilde, Richard Linklater, Billie Jean King are all showing up.

Women directors hit a seven-year low USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found only nine women directed the top 100 grossing films of 2025. Sharp drop from recent years. The numbers keep getting worse.

CES 2026: AI Everything, Useful TBD

CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) happens every January in Vegas, where tech companies showcase their latest products and make their biggest bets on what we’ll all be buying next year.

And this year, as expected, AI was the main star.

The show floor was packed with AI-powered everything, from Samsung’s 130-inch TV that can strip commentary from soccer broadcasts to LG’s robot butler that handles laundry and communicates with your appliances.

Some of it felt genuinely innovative.

Other announcements leaned heavily on buzzwords with vague promises about how their AI will transform daily life. Time will tell which of these were just tech demos that looked impressive on a showroom floor.

The humanoid robots were particularly telling. There was one sad bot that took what felt like several minutes to place a single towel into a washing machine, demonstrating that despite the hype, practical home robotics still has a ways to go.

Multiple companies showed AI-tracking cameras for sports and wildlife that solved real problems. The XbotGo Falcon automatically follows game action for $599 with no subscription, making it accessible for parents and youth coaches who previously couldn’t afford the $2,000-plus annual cost of professional systems like Veo.

The RocX from ex-DJI engineers tracks subjects at 50x zoom which is genuinely useful for long-distance recording.

These aren’t exactly revolutionary technologies though. AI tracking has existed for years. But they represent practical applications that work reliably and serve clear use cases for video creators.

CES also showcased plenty of bizarre products nobody asked for, though you have to admire the audacity it took to actually make them. More on those later.

Alamo Drafthouse introduces phone-based food ordering The cinema chain is replacing pen-and-paper ordering with a dark-screen mobile system. They’re betting controlled phone use reduces disruption rather than amplifying it. I’m not so sure.

Donut Lab claims the first production-ready solid-state battery The Finnish startup says its solid-state batteries are already shipping in Verge motorcycles, promising faster charging and longer life. If the claims hold, it’s only a matter of time before camera tech and mobile production feel the charge.

Talking Shorts’ Top 3 shorts 2025 The platform released its annual Top 3, crowdsourced from programmers and filmmakers across the global festival circuit.

​​Vimeo Corporate vs The Staff Pick

IndieWire broke this story in late December, and it’s worth paying attention to because it reveals how quickly corporate fear can override curatorial trust that took years to build.

Here’s what happened: Between October 1 and October 24, Vimeo’s Legal and Trust & Safety teams pulled six films from Staff Picks - the platform’s prestigious curation program that has launched careers for filmmakers like Kogonada, The Daniels, and David Lowery.

The films were rejected over political and sexual content concerns, completely bypassing the four-person curation team that’s spent years building Staff Picks into something that actually matters to the filmmaking community.

One pulled film was Phoebe Hart’s “Bug Diner,” a stop-motion short that won jury prizes at Sundance and SXSW. Another was Kara Grace Miller’s “My Neighbor’s Yard,” a documentary about divided Pennsylvania neighbors scheduled for Election Day.

The curators appealed to their corporate overlord unsuccessfully and sent apologetic emails to filmmakers, writing:

We’ve been fighting with them over sexual content but this escalation to censor political content is an unsettling development that we find unacceptable.

Timing matters here as on September 10, Vimeo entered an agreement to be acquired for $1.38 billion by Milan-based Bending Spoons.

Is it a coincidence that the videos got pulled just a month later?

Vimeo CEO Phillip Moyer said no, telling IndieWire neither the acquisition nor politics played a role. He apparently only learned about the problem when IndieWire reached out.

“My Neighbor’s Yard” was originally pulled over two images of Halloween skeletons restaging Trump’s Butler assassination attempt. “Bug Diner” was flagged because of..well, no one actually knows why.

Moyer personally apologized, inviting the films back as Staff Picks but Hart and Miller both declined.

Hart said:

Vimeo’s corporate side took my film down for the same exact reason they want to put it back up, risk management.

Vimeo’s reputation as the internet homebase for filmmakers dwindled dramatically in the past decade thanks to a hard pivot toward B2B corporate video hosting. They gutted their free tier, raised prices, and prioritized enterprise clients over the creative community that built them.

Staff Picks was one of the last things keeping filmmakers around, which makes this corporate interference even worse.

OWC launches the first Thunderbolt 5 portable SSD The Envoy Ultra promises 6000MB/s speeds in a rugged, bus-powered form. Thunderbolt 5 finally makes mobile 8K and VFX workflows actually plausible. The gap between studio and laptop editing just got even tighter.

Fujifilm’s instax camera prints video as QR codes The mini Evo Cinema prints QR-linked video clips onto instant photos. Pure novelty. It’s reframing video as a tactile, shareable artifact instead of another thing lost in the feed.

Cut of the Week: AI digital twin that promises to ease your workload on show at CES

A look into our immediate future.

MyPersona is a service that captures your voice, mannerisms, and expertise so colleagues can ask your digital twin basic questions instead of interrupting you with “What’s the policy on this?” for the hundredth time.

People will likely resist uploading their likeness to AI, but they’d probably resist another bullshit meeting even more, so this might actually work.

Retail Therapy - CES edition

GLYDE’s AI hair clipper does your fades for you

The smart clipper uses built-in sensors to track motion and angle, automatically adjusting the blade to keep fades smooth and consistent. It promises barbershop results at home without the skill level typically required.

Lollipop Star plays music through…a lollipop

@nypostCES, the annual shindig for techies in Las Vegas, has kicked off with the latest and greatest in robots, gadgets and toys coming in 2026. For a sweet treat and a sweet tune at the same time, try the LolliPop Star — a lollipop that plays music in your head once you bite down on the candy. Learn more at the link in bio.

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The $8.99 candy uses electronics hidden in the stick to send vibrations through your jaw to your inner ear as you eat it, with each flavor tied to a different artist…because apparently someone looked at lollipops and thought they needed a soundtrack.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there

A week of unsafe sets, collapsing creator economics, and a dog driving a truck that looks more real than half the internet.

Also, Public Domain Day happened: which may be the most useful story here if you’re actually making things :)

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Vertical drama cameraman nearly beheaded in on-set driving incident A 27-year-old camera operator was crushed under a Rolls-Royce after an unlicensed actor hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The production failed to produce insurance documentation, which feels like a glimpse into how regulated vertical drama shoots are. Spoiler: not very.

Reddit becomes UK’s fourth most visited social platform As Google increasingly surfaces forum posts and AI overviews cite Reddit directly, the platform is repositioning itself as the human footnote to synthetic answers.

Lightspeed partner predicts end to creator economy Michael Mignano publicly argues that tools like Sora will soon erase the creator economy. Perhaps a slightly odd take (or well informed?) considering he’s someone who founded two creator-facing apps.

Over half of YouTube Shorts served to new users is AI slop A Kapwing study found that 54% of Shorts recommended to first-time users qualify as low-effort AI or “brainrot.”

The Clearance Sale (Public Domain Edition)

Public Domain Day passed on January 1 which meant an avalanche of material slips out of ownership and into availability. This year it was works from 1930 and sound recordings from 1925.

What’s striking is how few filmmakers treat the public domain as an active resource rather than trivia. Everyone’s tracking new cameras and codecs but almost no one tracks new characters, or artworks becoming usable without permission and that’s a blind spot.

In a production environment defined by rights friction and shrinking budgets, the public domain is one of the last places where creative freedom actually increases over time.

If you’re making any kind of video content right now and you’re not keeping a running list of newly public-domain material you can use — visually, musically, narratively — you’re leaving free production value on the table. Go look at the list. Now.

Here’s what you can do:

Take a film from 1930 and actually use it. The whole film. You can literally lift the entire dialogue and characters. You can pull a Marx Brothers gag and drop it into a TikTok.

Or you could build entire projects around Betty Boop as she existed in her earliest form. You can also go as far as remaking All Quiet on the Western Front shot-for-shot if you wanted to.

And you can monetise all of it.

What you cannot do:

You can’t use a character as they evolved later. For example, Betty Boop is public domain only in her 1930 form.

You can’t assume international freedom. This applies to US law so a film that’s legal stateside, may still be copyrighted in Europe.

Highlights from the list:

Films
– All Quiet on the Western Front — Lewis Milestone
– Animal Crackers — Marx Brothers
– The Blue Angel — Marlene Dietrich
– Morocco — Marlene Dietrich
– L’Âge d’Or — Luis Buñuel

Characters & animation
– Betty Boop (original) — Max Fleischer
– Early Mickey Mouse shorts & comics (1930) — Walt Disney

Music (compositions)
– I Got Rhythm — George Gershwin
– Georgia on My Mind — Hoagy Carmichael
– Dream a Little Dream of Me — Fabian Andre
– Body and Soul — Johnny Green

Sound recordings
– The St. Louis Blues (1925) — Bessie Smith & Louis Armstrong
– Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen (1925) — Marian Anderson

Books
– The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett

Stranger Things finale out-earns Avatar in popcorn sales Netflix’s theatrical finale generated more than $25M in concessions over New Year’s, beating Avatar: Fire and Ash’s holiday concession take without selling a single ticket.

California suburb loses its last movie theater to condos The Regency Calabasas Commons, the final cinema serving a broad stretch from Thousand Oaks to Santa Monica, closed permanently on December 28. It will be replaced by mixed-use condos: in a neighborhood where many homes already contain theaters better equipped than the one that just shut down.

ScriptMatch analyses 10,900 script buyer data Just 5% of deal pathways run through agents or reps, while 24% flow through producers holding first-look or output deals.

A single 10-hour fireplace video has earned over $1.2M Since 2016, one looping fireplace upload has out-earned most narrative creators on the platform.

Got a film for Sundance?

My friend Ed Rigg, who’s been on the film fest circuit for awhile now and runs RecDek (film and TV recommendation app) is accepting short films to screen at the RecDek House during Sundance this year.

Only criteria: it must be a short film, and you must already be going to Sundance.

That’s it.

So somewhere between freezing in Park City, bouncing between screenings and bad coffee, and processing your official Sundance rejection, you could still end up watching your short play in a swanky chalet screening room.

RecDek hosts houses, parties, and screenings at all the major festivals. I’ve personally been to their events at BFI London, Cannes, Berlinale, and can say this is an opportunity worth submitting to.

It’s also free, so you’ve nothing to lose :) Deadline is Jan 16th.

Submit here

Cut of the Week: The dog driving video that refuses to be AI

This video keeps resurfacing on my feed. A Labrador in the driver’s seat, another dog buckled into a child seat, scrolling by at golden hour.

The creator, Kanchanasopawong (aka Artwood on IG), a Thailand-based photographer, has the demeanor of someone who has opted out of urgency entirely as he drives through the Thai countryside - even letting his dogs take the wheel.

“Is this AI?” is becoming a common question on any video that beggars belief and I asked myself the same question but then clocked the original upload date: January 31, 2024.

We’re probably heading toward a world where videos will need to get tagged “PS” aka pre-Sora.

I’ve watched it 10 times now and I’m still not sure what the trick is.

Truck being towed? Or his truck idling in neutral? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Retail Therapy

Rokid AI Glasses: “Look Busy Without Looking at Your Phone” Accessory ~$599

These look like normal glasses, which is the point. Rokid’s AI Glasses bundle an assistant, camera, and audio into a lightweight frame you can actually wear all day. You can ask questions or capture quick POV clips without pulling your phone out every five minutes, which is increasingly the new luxury.

Clicks are “bringing buttons back” - Bluetooth Wireless keyboard ~$79

Clicks is a slide-out Bluetooth keyboard that turns your phone into a pocket workstation. Pull it out when you need to actually write emails or messages that require more than a sentence.

The wireless built-in battery that tops up your phone is a great addition and the keys are very tactile. It also pairs across devices so one keyboard follows you from phone to tablet to TV.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.

Welcome to the Last Render Time of 2025

What a year to cover this industry.

A year where every corner of video tech turned into an arms race. AI. Streamers. Display. Distribution. And then there was geopolitics: the US-China tech cold war moved from screens to skies, nuking creator toolchains in the process.

This week’s Render Time has a bit of everything: tech bans with collateral damage, trailers that look worse on purpose, Larry Ellison risking a sixth of his net worth on Warner Bros.

Also, a calendar that might actually make you stick to your resolutions. (It won’t, but take a look anyway.)

Thanks for reading all year. See you in 2026.

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LG unveils world’s first on-device 5K Ai upscaling monitor Ahead of CES 2026 LG unveils the UltraGear evo which delivers 5K-class clarity without forcing GPU upgrades. Spanning OLED, MiniLED, and ultra-wide formats, the lineup reframes the monitor as an active image processor, potentially triggering a display arms race.

Tropfest Returns in 2026 With $100K Fund and a Global Reset
After a six-year hiatus,Tropfest is back, reclaiming its spot as the world’s largest short film festival with a major live event set for February 22, 2026 in Sydney’s Centennial Park. The relaunch comes with a new $100,000 fund and global YouTube livestream.

Ellison Personally Backs Paramount’s $78B Shot at Warner Bros Paramount escalated its hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery by having Larry Ellison personally guarantee $40.4B of the financing (a sixth of his net worth).

Marty Supreme Posts a Historic Indie Opening Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, led by Timothée Chalamet, delivered the highest per-screen average of 2025 and the biggest limited debut in A24’s history.

DJI enters no-buy zone

When the FCC added DJI to its Banned List last week, the story seemed straightforward: foreign drones banned for national security reasons but the actual ruling does something far more expansive.

The ban also sweeps up “critical drone components, communications equipment, and video surveillance technology” from foreign manufacturers.

It’s that last phrase where things get interesting.

DJI hasn’t been a “drone” company for years.

They’ve been steadily building out an entire stabilization and imaging ecosystem: Osmo action cameras, pocket gimbals, phone stabilizers, motion-tracking modules. And those same sensors, firmware, and control systems that power their drone, also power all of this.

By banning the underlying components, the FCC has effectively killed DJI’s ability to sell new action cameras and gimbals in the US.

This goes way, way beyond aerial shooters and FPV pilots.

DJI hardware is embedded in creator workflows everywhere. The official line is “airspace sovereignty” and national security but the FCC’s own language tells you what’s really happening here: they want to “unleash the American consumer drone ecosystem.”

Elephant in the room

There is no American consumer drone ecosystem.

Well, there’s Skydio. But they literally gave up on consumers in 2023 only to sell to government, military, and enterprise at sky-high prices.

Or how about these?

• AeroVironment: Military drones

• Impossible Aerospace: Long-endurance industrial drones

• 3D Robotics, GoPro, Teal: All failed spectacularly trying to compete with DJI

The fact is, DJI has a 75% market dominance of drones and this ruling will dramatically affect the US market. One to watch.

1080p: A Bitrate Odyssey

The first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey landed with 121.4 million views in 24 hours, doubling Oppenheimer and setting a personal record for Nolan.

Early reaction fixated on historical inaccuracies (yawn). The real story, as Polygon also noted, was the YouTube bitrate.

Low bitrates, forced 1080p, and compression artifacts are par for the course when uploading to YouTube, but this time it felt intentional because it's Universal and they absolutely knew how to avoid it.

Consider: Universal, one of the largest studios in the world, with the infrastructure to QC a trailer upload in its sleep. Nolan shooting on two million feet of IMAX film using four custom-built cameras with some of the highest-resolution captures in history.

So why did the trailer look so compressed?

In 2025, uploading UHD footage to a scrapeable platform like YouTube is a liability. Studios are learning that once HQ assets go public, it’s no longer theirs.

Trailers get ripped and fed into generative models within hours. Entire channels now farm algorithmically-juiced “official-looking” fake trailers. From that angle, deliberately shipping a compromised version looks more like damage control.

This explains the pattern of official studio uploads consistently looking worse than random creator videos with commenters especially flagging similar artifacts across other Universal trailers.

Then there’s the IMAX angle. The Odyssey wasn’t meant to be experienced on YouTube.

The gap between a muddy online trailer and an IMAX screening might be strategic because the worse it looks online, the more the theater becomes the only place to actually see it.

Movie Marketing Is Everywhere… And Still Not Working A recent Vulture piece cuts to the uncomfortable truth behind modern movie marketing. Studios have saturated promos to the point of exhaustion, yet audience awareness of new releases keeps falling.

IDF Opens 2026 Short Pitch Call The Institute of Documentary Film has opened submissions for its 2026 Short Pitch Program, inviting emerging filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe to submit short documentary projects (up to 25 minutes) in development or rough cut. Applications close February 1.

Disney Crosses $6B Worldwide They became the only studio to clear $6B at the global box office in 2025, powered by theatrical-first releases like Avatar: Fire and Ash, Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2.

Cut of the Week - Time Crisis: The Story of Arcade Legend Eddie Esguerra

Singular character, hyper-specific obsession, and a runtime built for sharing. We’ve seen that before but this creator profile does so much more than just documenting a quirk.

The video follows arcade legend Eddie Esguerra, who spends most weeks circling Los Angeles arcades to play a single game: Time Crisis. The twist is how he plays it: running two-player mode alone, simultaneously, in a style that turns an arcade cabinet into grand performance.

We move from observational doc,to screenlife, to UGC phone footage, to arcade screens, and to social media. All collapsing into one scroll.

The cut understands that Eddie isn’t just playing Time Crisis, he’s being watched, recorded and circulated.

After a solid festival run, including Palm Springs International ShortFest and San Francisco Documentary Festival, the short is now rolling out online via Short of the Week.

Retail Therapy

Apolosign Digital Calendar Display: The “Actually Stick to It” Home Reset ~$399

If your New Year’s resolutions include being more organized and arguing less about who forgot what in the house (spoiler: it was them), take a look at Apolosign. It turns a wall into a shared source of truth: synced calendars, chores, tasks, and reminders everyone can see without opening an app.

It also doubles as a photo frame and smart-home control panel, so it earns its place even when motivation dips mid-January.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.

Our penultimate Render Time for 2025.

A director went to prison for crypto-gambling Netflix’s money. The Oscars are leaving ABC after 67 years. Gen Z is out-attending every other demographic at theaters. Google Earth spoiled a TV show months early through satellite imagery. YouTube nuked AI trailer channels with millions of subscribers. Physical media is somehow back.

Every month this year has been stranger than the last so what does 2025 have left to throw at us in its final week?

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Pluribus Gets “Spoiled From Orbit” Thanks to Google Earth
At-home sleuths spotted a huge message on the show’s Albuquerque cul-de-sac set in Google Earth’s historical satellite imagery captured as far back as Aug 30, 2024.

Blackmagic Camera 10.0 Adds 10-Minute Pre-Record + 4-Channel Audio to URSA Broadcast G2 & PYXIS
A free firmware update turns these cameras into never-miss-it machines, caching up to 10 minutes before you hit record and doubling onboard audio tracks to four for faster doc/news/event turnaround.

ARRI Says the Rumors Are Noise: Lighting + High-End Cinema Stay Core
After restructuring chatter, ARRI touts a 2026+ lighting roadmap and continued camera ecosystem investment.

Creators Coalition Forms in response to AI A new cross-industry convening group is organizing around four pillars in hopes of guardrailing the AI revolution.

Sundance 2026 Shorts Lineup Includes Luigi Mangione Doc + Steph Curry Film
The shorts program leans into cultural flashpoints and celebrity-backed nonfiction, with a Luigi Mangione-focused short and a Steph Curry/Ben Proudfoot co-directed project among selections.

The Director Who Stole $11M From Netflix

A New York jury swiftly convicted filmmaker Carl Rinsch this week for orchestrating one of streaming’s most brazen frauds, finding him guilty of stealing over $11 million in Netflix production funds for personal stock market bets and cryptocurrency gambles because apparently directing wasn’t thrilling enough.

The 47 Ronin director now faces up to 90 years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering, though sentencing on April 17, 2026 will likely yield a fraction of that maximum.

The catastrophe began in 2018 when Netflix’s then-content chief Cindy Holland aggressively poached the sci-fi series White Horse (later Conquest) from Amazon for a staggering $61 million.

With Keanu Reeves vouching for Rinsch’s vision, the director secured final-cut authority, a creative concession that certainly aged well. After burning through $44 million with little to show, Rinsch demanded another $11 million in 2020 for supposed production needs. Instead, prosecutors proved he diverted these funds to speculative trading and luxury purchases.

By 2021, Netflix had nothing but teaser clips and terminated the project, writing off $55 million.

This case represents everything wrong with streaming’s early “growth-at-all-costs” era. Holland’s aggressive content grab created conditions ripe for exploitation. Granting final-cut power to a director whose previous film (47 Ronin) was a notorious box-office bomb reveals the kind of due diligence you’d expect from someone handing cash to a stranger at a casino.

What’s particularly bold is Rinsch’s courtroom audacity, testifying he actually deserved more money after gambling away millions meant for production. The swift jury deliberation suggests his defense was about as convincing as his filmmaking track record.

Gen Z Sparks Cinema Revival

Cinema United’s 2025 “Strength of Theatrical Exhibition” report delivers surprising news: Gen Z is reviving cinema.

Gen Z attended an average of 6.1 films this year, up from 4.9 in 2024 and outpacing every other demographic. Within Gen Z, 41% saw six or more movies, a figure that’s surged over 30% since 2022.

While overall domestic ticket sales remain 23% below 2019 levels, the data suggests theaters are successfully transforming their customer base.

Cinema United President Michael O’Leary emphasized that “weekend box office” metrics miss the bigger picture. He found that premium large-format screens, in-seat food ordering, and deluxe lounge seating specifically attracted younger audiences because apparently Gen Z discovered they enjoy not watching movies on their phones.

Meanwhile, 77% of Americans aged 12-74 saw at least one film theatrically, representing over 200 million admissions.

Films like Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another weaponized viral marketing through younger stars like Chase Infiniti and Timothée Chalamet, turning theatrical releases into unmissable social events rather than content to stream later while doom-scrolling.

There’s also a social penalty now for not showing up on release week. Letterboxd logs, Film Twitter discourse, and ranking threads all move fast.

If you don’t see a film when it drops, you’re instantly out of the loop. Streaming later doesn’t count the same way because the conversation has already moved on.

YouTube Nabs an Oscar

The Academy Awards will abandon ABC after 67 years and migrate exclusively to YouTube beginning in 2029.

The five-year global streaming deal (running through 2033) grants YouTube rights to the entire Oscar ecosystem: the main ceremony, red carpet coverage, Governors Awards, nominations announcements, and behind-the-scenes content…all streaming free to YouTube’s 2 billion worldwide users.

ABC have broadcast the Academy Awards since 1961 but the 100th Oscar ceremony will be its last. While the 2025 ceremony drew a respectable 19.7 million viewers it represents less than half the format’s 1999 peak, when 55 million watched Titanic sweep. The Academy chose YouTube over Netflix and NBCUniversal/Peacock, making the Oscars the first of the “Big Four” awards (Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Tonys) to completely abandon broadcast television.

YouTube might solve the Oscars’ existential crisis.

Traditional broadcasts forced three-hour runtimes, relegating technical categories to commercial breaks and playing off emotional speeches. Streaming might eliminate those constraints, potentially allowing full cinematography showcases and unrushed acceptance moments that could actually go viral on... YouTube.

This mirrors Gen Z’s 25% moviegoing frequency increase: premium experiences optimized for social sharing. The ceremony becomes content Gen Z can clip and remix exactly how they already consume everything else.

YouTube Nukes Two Major AI Fake-Trailer Channels After Metadata Crackdown
Screen Culture and KH Studio (over 2M subs and 1B+ views combined) were terminated for violating spam/misleading policies after repeatedly blurring “fan concept” framing and gaming search visibility.

DVDs and CDs Get a Gen Z Bump as “Ownership Culture” Creeps Back
Collectors (and streaming-fatigued viewers) are driving a small-but-real physical media rebound.

Cut of the Week - NATURALLY: A Fashion Film by SHOWstudio and Ray-Ban Meta

Working with SHOWstudio and Ray-Ban Meta Gen-2 glasses, legendary fashion photographer Nick Knight flips the usual fashion-film hierarchy.

Instead of a locked camera and a subject performing for the lens, the camera becomes embodied as he literally walks the image into existence.

The core technique is something called Gaussian Scanning.

Rather than capturing a subject from a single hero angle, Knight circles each model multiple times wearing the glasses, recording continuous 3K video. Those passes are later extracted into volumetric data, generating a 3D scan that can be re-situated inside scanned landscapes.

What’s new here is how much decision-making happens during capture as Knight directs the system in real time:

Hey Meta, I’m about to start shooting. Start recording in 3K.
Hey Meta, remember these lighting settings for me.
Hey Meta, how’s the battery life looking?

Even the environments followed the same logic.

In the weeks leading up to the shoot, Knight and his assistants scanned nature the same way they scanned models. Slow walks and multiple passes.

The result is an impressionistic surface that feels handmade despite being deeply computational.

Retail Therapy

Vasco Translator Q1: Voice-Cloning Pocket Interpreter $660

Vasco’s Q1 is a stand-alone translation device that goes beyond basic phrase flipping: real-time voice translation across 80+ languages, photo translation via a built-in camera, and live phone-call translation without a subscription.

The voice cloning feature plays back in a translated approximation of your own voice though it’s still hit-or-miss. Pricey next to smartphones, but for travelers who want fewer taps and more certainty, it’s worth a look.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Where the heck did 2025 go? It’s gone by so blazing fast.

I do love the end of year period as it is a great time to reflect and re-calibrate for the new year. How did I do on my goals? Do I want to add or amend them? What’s going to make the next year epic?

On Eddie AI: we did a lot this year. We made hundreds of app updates. Literally almost every day, sometimes multiple times per day :)

Some of my favorite updates:

• Eddie integrates directly with Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut to pull clips from and send export sequences to. We did a trifecta of launches, back to back to back. (Launch video below.)

• Eddie AI v2: a bunch of great updates incl A/B roll logging

• Scripted mode v2 launch: Eddie can cut straight to camera videos and choose the best takes. How cool is that.

• We turned on subscriptions. It’s validating as a business that what you’ve built is worth paying for. Also prior to this we weren’t 100% clear whose feedback we should listen to. Now it is abundantly clear who are customers and whose feedback we should prioritize.

And we have a lot planned for January 2026.

What should we add to Eddie in 2026? (Or this month. :) )

Thank you for being part of the journey.

—Shamir

Hollywood’s consolidation panic is dominating every trades headline this week. Paramount chasing Warner Bros. for $108 billion while Saudi capital backs the bid.

But the consolidation story is only half of what’s reshaping production. The other half is decentralization: Disney licensing Star Wars IP for AI generation, Letterboxd turning community taste into an indie distribution channel, and Iranian filmmakers proving you can win Cannes without permits or production infrastructure.

This week we tracked both directions at once.

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Paramount’s $108B Warner Bros. Discovery Bid Signals Consolidation Panic, Not Strength
As legacy studios scramble to scale against Netflix, creators face fewer greenlights and a tighter, more centralized industry

Sundance 2026 Loads Up on Comedy and Turns Its Park City Farewell Into a Victory Lap

With the festival preparing to leave Utah in 2027, the lineup doubles down on laugh-first indies, restored classics, and a Robert Redford tribute.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Prologue Leaks Online
The six-minute 70mm IMAX-exclusive preview doesn’t remain exclusive for long.

Letterboxd’s Video Store Turns Taste Into Distribution Power
By translating watchlists and community demand into transactional rentals, Letterboxd sketches a viable indie-first release model.

Hollywood Has a Saudi Problem (And It’s Getting Bigger)

Hollywood is broke, and Saudi Arabia knows it.

Stars are reportedly earning checks as high as $2.5 million for appearances at the Red Sea Film Festival, while studio executives quietly traveled to Jeddah to explore new partnerships. Saudi capital is even rumored to be supporting Paramount’s ambitious $60 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

The underlying logic is straightforward.

Post-pandemic losses, prolonged strikes, and the escalating cost of competing in the streaming era have tightened traditional funding pipelines. Saudi Arabia, armed with deep reserves and Vision 2030 ambitions, sees an opportunity to invest in culture, infrastructure, and global relevance at once.

The relationship isn’t without friction. Some comedians have faced backlash for performing in the kingdom, and many high-profile attendees remain publicly silent. But that silence also reflects a long-standing industry reality: financing shapes futures, and pragmatism often wins over posture.

For Saudi Arabia, this is less about image repair than long-term positioning.

And judging by the steady flow of talent and executives heading to Jeddah, the strategy is resonating.

A24’s The Drama Campaign Shows Marketing as Part of the Movie Itself
Fake engagement announcements and anxiety-driven teasers reinforce A24’s grip on cultural attention with minimal spend

TIME Names KPop Demon Hunters Breakthrough of the Year, Cementing Netflix’s First True Culture-Dominating Original
The animated K-pop fantasy became the streamer’s most-watched title ever by pairing original IP and hyper-specific Korean cultural texture.

DIGILOG’s iPhone App Challenges Apple’s Locked-Down Camera Pipeline
Rebuilding the image from raw sensor data and offering film-inspired color science, DIGILOG reframes smartphones as legitimate creative cameras.

CREE8’s Acquisition of PRODUCER Accelerates the Shift to Cloud-Native Production
By folding planning, management and delivery into one ecosystem, CREE8 bets that fragmented toolchains are finished.

Berlin Startup gets $41M to solve AI video silent problem

Mirelo, a Berlin-based startup just raised $41 million to fix the glaring AI video sound problem.

The two-year-old company builds AI that watches your video and generates matching sound effects. This could be another missing piece in the puzzle to figure out how to make AI-generated content actually watchable.

Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz led the seed round, betting big on a simple insight: sound is half the experience.

But they may already be too late. Sony, Tencent, ElevenLabs, and even Google’s Gemini have shipped competing products. However, Mirelo’s team of 10 (soon to be 30) is focused exclusively on sound effects, not the broader music generation space where competition is fiercer.

The startup targets creators and prosumers at $23.50/month, not Hollywood studios which is smart because there’s an ocean of amateur AI video that desperately needs audio, and professional sound designers weren’t really working on this kind of content anyway. That work usually fell to an overworked editor.

Now, AI is stepping in as a practical assist.

The real question is whether a narrow focus on sound effects is defensible long-term, or just a temporary wedge before the tech giants absorb this feature into their existing video tools.

Universal’s Portrait of God Deal Confirms YouTube as Hollywood’s New Proving Ground
The Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele produced adaptation of Dylan Clark’s viral horror short shows studios treating online shorts as validated IP.

FUJIFILM’s GFX ETERNA 55 Firmware Update Pushes the Camera Into Serious Cinema Territory
Atomos RAW, Open Gate recording, and performance fixes signal Fujifilm’s intent to compete credibly in professional production workflows.

James Cameron Sends Personal Note to Projectionists for Avatar 3

Cameron personally asks theater technicians to follow exact projection and sound specs for Avatar: Fire and Ash, including proper framing and reference volume.

Why Disney Just Spent $1B on OpenAI

Disney just invested $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed 200+ characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and its other franchises. Starting early next year, creators using Sora can generate videos featuring Darth Vader, Spider-Man, or Stitch..legally.

This is a watershed moment because for the first time, indie filmmakers and solo creators can work with IP that was completely untouchable. Want to make a fan film with actual lightsabers and Marvel costumes?

Well, now you can.

A YouTuber can illustrate Star Wars theories with generated footage. Film students can prototype scenes with recognizable characters. Small creators gain access to cultural touchstones that previously required Disney’s permission or deep pockets.

There are legitimate questions about access and equity. Sora will likely require a paid subscription, creating a divide between creators who can afford licensed IP tools and those who can’t.

And while Disney is licensing its own characters for AI use, independent artists are still fighting to protect their work from training datasets.

But Disney’s willingness to license IP for AI generation shows a path forward. If this deal works, other studios might follow, opening up more options for creators rather than fewer.

The key will be whether OpenAI’s pricing makes this genuinely accessible to independent creators, or if it becomes another premium tool that mainly benefits those already established.

Cut of the Week: Jafar Panahi’s ‘It Was Just an Accident’ is a Revenge Thriller Made Without Film Permits

Most filmmakers wait for permits, budgets, and approval but Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi managed to shoot a Palme d’Or winner in secret.

No permits. No film commissions. Just a crew small enough to hide in plain sight. The editor even doubled as the driver.

Footage got edited on an 8GB laptop using proxies while the originals stayed hidden for security.

In a recent Academy conversation, Panahi touches on how he pulled it off via turning limitations into methodology. His career has become a masterclass in small-footprint filmmaking but, tragically, out of necessity.

We’re planning a deeper dive on Panahi’s approach, because what he’s doing out of survival is exactly what most indie creators need to learn by choice.

Retail Therapy

Pebble Index 01: The Thought-Catcher Ring: $75

A minimalist smart ring for people who think faster than they type. Press the hidden button, speak your idea, and move on. The ring quietly syncs your voice notes to your phone, turns them into text, and files them for later.

No charging, no cloud processing, no attention-grabbing screen. Just a discreet, stainless-steel reminder that your best ideas don’t always arrive at a desk.

SKG G7 PRO-FOLD Neck Massager with Heat: $199.99

A compact, foldable neck massager built for end-of-day decompression. Nine upgraded massage heads deliver noticeably deeper vibration, while infrared heat and red-light therapy loosen stiff shoulders and improve circulation.

An easy plug-and-play upgrade for anyone spending long hours at a desk, on set, or on the road.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Happy Monday! What are you going to make this week?

Most of the news, including the Netflix-Warner merger, which Paramount has now countered with a hostile bid, is …noise.

Keep researching, writing and making great stories. Keep publishing them and finding an audience. Keep finding a way to persist, survive, and thrive. Control your own destiny. This is the way.

Have a great week.

Shamir

Everyone’s treating the Netflix–Warner Bros. merger like a seismic moment in film history. And it probably is.

But beneath the headlines is the real question: how does this deal actually change the daily reality for filmmakers, editors, and creators?

This week, we cut through the noise.

Real shifts are also happening elsewhere: Apple quietly teaching creators a new cinematic grammar for visionOS, ACE opening its doors to YouTubers, courts dragging OpenAI into a discovery battle that could redefine every AI tool you rely on, and New Jersey building a studio lot big enough to rival Hollywood’s.

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Apple releases Immersive Video & Audio recap
At a two-day Cupertino event, Apple broke down its Apple Immersive Video format, spatial audio pipelines, and end-to-end Vision Pro workflows.

Sight & Sound’s 50 Best Films of 2025 Signal a Rebellious, Global Cinema
The BFI poll crowns Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners as top 2.

Audiio Launches ‘Voices’ Voice-to-Voice AI for Fast, Studio-Grade Narration
New tool lets filmmakers record scratch VO, then re-render it in one of 24+ pro voice models while preserving timing and emphasis

ASC’s 40th Awards to Honor Robert Yeoman and Cinematography’s Key Stewards
The ASC will give Robert Yeoman its Lifetime Achievement Award, with M. David Mullen, Cynthia Pusheck, Stephen Pizzello, and Kodak also recognized

You Weren’t Pitching Netflix Anyway

If we’re being blunt, the Netflix–Warner Bros. merger doesn’t directly upend the daily life of most solo creators or indie filmmakers.

At least not in the immediate future.

Neither platform was a major buyer of true indie films to begin with; they don’t cruise festivals scooping up microbudget features the way Amazon once did or Searchlight still does.

So if you’re a self-funded filmmaker, editor, or creator working outside the studio system, this isn’t the asteroid hit some headlines are making it out to be.

Where it does matter is in the macro pressure it adds to an already contracting ecosystem: One fewer major studio commissioning work means overall fewer jobs, fewer apprentice opportunities, fewer mid-tier gigs.

The industry’s attention swings even harder toward franchise IP, making it tougher for original voices to find studio oxygen.

Festivals lose a bidder, which trickles down into lower acquisition prices across the board which affects the very small percentage of indies competing at that level.

But for the vast majority of solo creators?

The actual day-to-day impact is more ambient than direct. You weren’t pitching Netflix anyway. YouTube, Vimeo, brand work, small distributors, boutique streamers all continue unaffected.

For now…

AI Copyright War Escalates as Court Forces OpenAI to Reveal Deleted Datasets
A U.S. judge ordered OpenAI to hand over internal chats about why it deleted LibGen-sourced “Books1” and “Books2”.

Sony Suspends a7 IV Firmware 6.00 After Cameras Start Rebooting
Sony pulled its major 6.00 firmware update for the a7 IV after reports of unstable behavior and boot loops.

Kill Bill x Fortnite Short Drops Online and in Theaters

Tarantino’s revenge saga gets a glossy, hyperstylized Fortnite crossover short screening both online and theatrically.

ACE Opens Eligibility to YouTube and Online Shorts

For decades, American Cinema Editors has operated like a gated city with its prestige features, prestige television, prestige pedigree awards. If your work lived on YouTube, Vimeo, or anywhere outside a studio pipeline, you were basically invisible.

Not anymore.

ACE is introducing a new competitive category, Best Edited Short, opening eligibility across its existing categories to work released exclusively on digital platforms. So not only film festival films or theatricals. Just… online.

To underline the shift, ACE is giving YouTube itself the Visionary Award, an honor previously reserved for industry titans like Avid.

This is the clearest institutional signal yet that the center of gravity in editing has moved. Not will move. Has moved.

ACE’s update is an admission that the best editing of the last ten years hasn’t always happened inside a guild-credentialed machine. It’s often happened in bedrooms, on laptops, at 2 a.m., under a deadline no one asked for.

It also sets up a fascinating tension: the same award that crowns a studio-backed doc editor might now sit beside a creator who refined their craft making 18-minute explainers or microbudget narrative shorts.

YouTube Tests Direct Messaging… Again
They’re piloting DMs in Ireland and Poland, letting users share videos and chat privately inside the app. A sharp reversal after killing its 2017–19 messaging experiment.

Arki Busson Bets Big on a Billion-Dollar “1888 Studios” Megalot in New Jersey The French financier is turning a 60-acre Texaco brownfield under the Bayonne Bridge into a 23-stage, billion-plus waterfront complex

Cut of the Week : War Is Over! (Ono Lennon / Wētā FX / Lightstorm / Unreal Engine)

Every awards season brings its obligatory “message short,” the kind that leans on sentiment, soft focus, and tasteful melancholy. War Is Over! doesn’t bother with any of that.

It goes much bigger, stitching John & Yoko’s anti-war plea into a photoreal battlefield.

The setup is deceptively small: two soldiers on opposite sides of an endless, pointless war play a long-distance game of chess via carrier pigeon. Moves exchanged across a wasteland as artillery thunders around them.

The real sleight of hand is how handmade the film feels despite the digital muscle behind it. Lightstorm’s cinematics, Wētā FX’s atmospheric simulation, and Unreal’s real-time backbone give the short a tactile grit.

As the game escalates, the war escalates, and the line between strategy and survival collapses. When Lennon & Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” floats in, the song’s optimism is forced to sit inside a world built on mud and shrapnel.

It’s an Avengers-scale collaboration: Lenono Music, ElectroLeague, Lightstorm, Wētā, Epic Games, all pulling in the same direction to deliver a short that feels both hypermodern and painfully human.

Retail Therapy

Insta360 Ace Pro 2: Leica Glow-Up Edition - $600

Insta360’s Ace Pro 2 just leveled up with four Leica-crafted bundles that turn it into a pocket filmmaking rig: pro grip controls, new Leica color profiles, and swappable premium lenses. Options run from the Xplorer Pro travel/vlog setup to a full three-lens videography kit and yes, there’s even a bundle with an instant printer for the truly committed.

InnAIO T10: World’s First Voice Cloning AI Translator - $151

A coin-sized magnetic disc that snaps onto the back of your smartphone, the InnAIO T10 is the first translator designed to function as a dedicated phone-mounted AI interpreter. It handles real-time two-way translation across 150+ languages, supports cross-app messaging translation, meeting transcription, photo/text translation, and even on-device voice cloning.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.

This week, Nikon and RED start merging color science like a cinematic treaty. Camerimage in Poland, turned into a playground of 17K sensors, race-car rigs, and Lynchian mysticism. Meanwhile Todd Field suggests Eyes Wide Shut might not even be the film Kubrick meant us to see, and OpenAI and Google are rationing video generations because their GPUs are overheating.

Meta is building VR worlds from a sentence, and documentary filmmakers are bracing for a future where truth itself has no baseline.

Craft, tech and uncanny dread: all in a week that also gives us a $150-per-person indie lab run by Ari Aster, a Forbes deep dive into faceless automation and Sundance filmmakers refreshing their inbox like it’s a blood sport.

All topped off with Apple’s puppet musical Xmas ad to remind us what “real” feels like;

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Nikon and RED Tease ‘Cinematic’ Color Recipes for Nikon Bodies
Nikon is rolling out RED-developed Imaging Recipes to its Z-series via Imaging Cloud on December 10, effectively dropping slices of RED color science straight into hybrid cameras

Camerimage 2025 Doubles Down on Craft, Tech, and the Future of the Image
From David Lynch tributes and POV Cyclops rigs to F1 race cams, Blackmagic’s 17K URSA Cine and Vision Pro immersive demos.

Todd Field Says Eyes Wide Shut Might Just Be Kubrick’s First Draft
Field now argues the version we all know is likely Stanley’s first cut, not his final word.

OpenAI and Google Throttle Sora and Nano Banana Pro as GPUs ‘Melt’
Holiday-week demand forced both companies to tighten generation limits. Sora down to six free videos a day, Nano Banana Pro to two free images.

Liberty Global Buys a Piece of ElevenLabs to Own the Voice Layer
The telecom giant’s strategic investment in ElevenLabs is a bet that ultra-realistic multilingual voice AI will become default infrastructure.

Meta’s WorldGen: AI-Generated VR Worlds From a Single Prompt

Meta just dropped one of the biggest XR moves of the year: WorldGen, a research-stage system that can generate fully navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. This isn’t “make me a Minecraft biome.” The workflow chains procedural layout generation, diffusion-driven 3D reconstruction, and automated texturing into scenes you can immediately drop into Unity or Unreal.

It even breaks environments into editable objects using an accelerated AutoPartGen process, turning the output into real production assets rather than decorative backgrounds.

It matters because Horizon Worlds has been bottlenecked by creator tooling and overall visual quality, and this is Meta’s clearest attempt yet to bulldoze that ceiling. The company has already shipped AI mesh generation, texture generation, sky generation, ambient audio, and code assistance; WorldGen is the first time they’ve bundled the entire pipeline into a single “build my world” prompt box.

The limitations are there though as it still relies on a single reference view, which caps scale; it can’t generate multi-floor structures or seamless indoor–outdoor transitions; and it doesn’t reuse geometry or textures, which kills performance at large sizes.

But even with those constraints, WorldGen signals where Meta’s long game is heading: toward worlds that can be vibe-constructed into existence, leaving human creators to handle the storytelling instead of grunt-level environment building.

If the tool lands anywhere close to its research ambitions, Horizon Worlds shifts from looking dated to looking like a sandbox for AI-native level design.

NYT Warns AI Is Undermining the Very Idea of Documentary Truth
As generative video floods the ecosystem, filmmakers fear a “liar’s dividend” world where real footage is doubted, fake footage passes as history, and the entire documentary contract of trust starts to collapse.

DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Pops Up in FCC Filing With a Bigger Battery

FCC docs confirm DJI’s next pocket gimbal cam is imminent, showing a 20%+ battery bump, Wi-Fi 5 carryover, and a design nearly identical to the Pocket 3.

Ari Aster’s Square Peg Social Recap

Out of 1,800 applicants, just 35 filmmakers spent four days in Austin with Ari Aster and 27 mentors. No pitches, no development theater, just blunt conversations about how the industry actually works, all for a $150 entry fee.

ARRI Cuts 150 Jobs and Shuts Two German Facilities
Hollywood’s production freeze keeps rippling outward, forcing the 107-year-old camera giant into its harshest restructuring in decades.

The Faceless YouTube Gold Rush

Forbes also dropped a clear-eyed breakdown of the faceless-YouTube boom and why it’s not a fad but a structural shift in how educational and evergreen content gets made.

The premise is simple: audiences want utility without performance, and the algorithm rewards anything that delivers watch-time without the fluff.

The case study is wild. Scott Smith, a behind-the-camera operator turned automation obsessive, built two faceless channels from zero to six figures in under 90 days.

His method isn’t mystical. He picks niches with enduring demand, A/B test thumbnails and titles like a quant trader, publishes relentlessly, and outsources everything except judgment. Editing, scripting, voiceovers, all handled by a micro-team or AI.

Faceless content has fast become the highest-leverage format on YouTube. It travels internationally, resists personality-driven volatility, and scales like a small media company.

It also reflects a cultural shift around performance: viewers are tired of being “performed at,” and creators are tired of performing.

THR Spotlights Synthetic Sincerity, IDFA’s Boldest AI Experiment

Marc Isaacs’ hybrid doc-fiction feature asks a provocative question: can AI characters be taught authenticity? Blending real research labs, scripted scenes, and absurd humor, the film uses fabricated “Synthetic Sincerity Lab” experiments to probe what happens to documentary truth

Billie Eilish Taps James Cameron for a 3D Concert Film Hitting Theaters in 2026

Eilish is launching Hit Me Hard and Soft on the big screen with James Cameron co-directing. A flex that could redefine concert movies as theatrical spectacle and give cinemas the kind of event-driven ammunition they’ve been starving for.

Sundance 2026 Enters “Probably Not” Week

Notifications are closing, acceptance rates hover at 0.5%, and for most filmmakers a quiet inbox means a pass which set the stage for Penny Lane’s candid post about why Sundance rejection stings in the short term but fades entirely in the long run.

Penny Lane Is My Real Name

I didn’t get into Sundance (again).

I didn’t get into Sundance (again…

Read more

6 months ago · 68 likes · 30 comments · Penny Lane

Cut of the Week : A Critter Carol (Apple)

Every holiday season, brands fire up their most sentimental tricks: snow, strings, soft light. This year, Apple went the other direction and doubled down on something rarer: touch.

A Critter Carol, shot entirely on the iPhone 17 Pro, feels handmade because it is handmade. A forest full of puppets stitched, carved, and painted into existence. A raccoon, a bear, an owl, a rabbit: nine creatures built one joint at a time, animated by puppeteers in blue suits erased later in post.

The premise is simple.

A hiker drops their phone. The woodland cast picks it up and makes a music video to Flight of the Conchords’ “Friends.”

While Coca-Cola leaned into generative AI this year with its glide, weightless physics, and stitched-together vibe, Apple went the other way with seams, texture, woodblock type, and intentional imperfection.

Even the BTS footage is a small rebellion, showing blue screens, hand-soldered puppet rigs, and puppet outtakes that are funnier than the final cut.

You’ll probably roll your eyes at the “shot on iPhone” tag because by now, everyone knows a $1,000 phone isn’t delivering this alone.

What you’re seeing is a small million dollar army of crew, lighting, puppeteers, and weeks of prep disguised as simplicity.

Retail Therapy

Zhiyun ML100R: Pocket-Sized RGB Sun for Run-and-Gun Shoots - $244

At 122×110×46mm, it’s tiny enough to live in a jacket pocket yet bright enough to anchor an outdoor setup. The compact lens reflector (15° or 36°) gives you tight punch or wider spread without lugging full-size modifiers, and the Godox-mount ecosystem.

OBSBOT Tail 2: A PTZ Camera That Actually Follows You Like It Means It - $999

The 4K60 PTZR unit locks onto people, cars, props and keeps framing clean even if you close the app and walk away. 5× optical zoom, native 9:16, and a dead-simple setup make it a creator-friendly robo-operator. Normally $1,199, currently sitting at $999.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Fortnite is suddenly a film studio, resurrecting a missing Kill Bill chapter that Tarantino never managed to shoot.

The Simpsons rolls out shorts across platforms like it’s testing the physics of modern IP. And Jeff Cronenweth, after years of defining Fincher’s visual language, walks back into the Facebook universe to steady Sorkin’s sequel.

On the tech side, YouTube tried to predict your age.

IMAGO arrived in Brussels with numbers that read like a crisis report: cinematographers burning out, crews underpaid, unemployment everywhere.

At the same time, one Reddit user with a tad too much time on their hands analyzed the demographics of all 207 qualifying Oscar short films.

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• The Simpsons Drop Into Fortnite
  Four new shorts roll out across Fortnite, Disney+, and YouTube. Springfield goes multiverse, and Disney quietly tests whether blockbuster IP + bite-sized storytelling still moves culture.

• YouTube Expands AI Age Verification System

  YouTube rolls out AI-powered age verification to more users, automatically estimating a viewer’s age through anonymized signals when content is flagged as age-restricted.

• MovieMaker drops Coolest Film Festivals of 2025
  The coveted annual list drops, reshuffling the power centers of where emerging filmmakers actually break out. Worth bookmarking before you submit anything for next year.

• Paramount x WBD x Saudi Money: The New Hollywood Board Game
  The latest merger chatter points to a vertically stacked, foreign-capital-backed giant. Legacy studios are consolidating faster than they’re innovating, and the Middle East keeps tightening its grip on entertainment infrastructure.

• Jeff Cronenweth Rejoins Facebook Saga as DP on Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning David Fincher’s long-trusted cinematographer returns for Social Network sequel.

Redditor analyzes all 207 Oscar qualifying short films

One user sifted through all 207 Oscar-qualified live-action shorts for 2026. Trailers, loglines, qualification paths, everything and published a full breakdown.

US Dominance

118 of the 207 qualifying films come from the U.S.

Include the UK and Canada, and English-language countries make up 73% of the field which is unsurprising for an awards competition built around an English-language industry.

64 countries made the overall cut, including the first-ever Oscar qualifier from East Greenland.

Gender Gap

The director split: 64% men, 32% women.
Still a 2:1 ratio in a category that’s supposed to be the Academy’s most “discoverable.”

Canada and the UK are the only regions cracking ~42% women directors; Asia lags at ~20%. The pipeline problem is real, and festivals aren’t correcting it as fast as everybody pretends they are.

Thematic Usual Suspects

• Identity & belonging

• Immigration & displacement

• Gen-conflict and family fractures

• Mental health

• Tech & AI

• Social injustice

• War, violence, and global instability

• Coming-of-age

How Shorts Actually Qualify

If you think Oscars = “festival prestige,” the data says otherwise:

• Festival awards: 55–60%

• Theatrical/qualifying screenings: 40–45%

A qualifying “screening” isn’t a nationwide rollout. It can simply mean renting out a theater in New York or Los Angeles for a seven-day run.

Celeb Clout

Actors continue to use the short-film format as an awards pathway, with Idris Elba, Letitia Wright, and Michael Keaton all directing qualifying shorts this year.

Established filmmakers are also present: Charlie Kaufman has How to Shoot a Ghost, and Mindy Kaling is producing Anuja.

There are also returning contenders. Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, who qualified last year with A LIEN, are back with TRAPPED after winning HollyShorts.

In December, the Academy cuts this list from 207 → 15. That’s a 92.7% rejection rate for anyone keeping score.

If you’ve seen any of the films on this list: who makes your final 15?

• Blender 5.0 Lands With Major Pipeline Upgrades
  Support for HDR workflows, ACES integration, and a NanovDB update signal Blender’s push to become a serious pro-grade VFX tool.

• DaVinci Resolve Goes Truly Global
  AP taps DaVinci Resolve Studio as its new worldwide editing backbone, a major validation of Resolve as the industry’s default NLE for news, fast-turnaround video, and cloud-distributed teams.

The Great Camera Burnout

IMAGO’s Working Conditions Committee has taken its latest Behind the Lens findings straight to the EU Parliament, hoping policymakers finally grasp how unstable life has become for camera operators.

Anyone paying attention to the creative industries knows the mood is bleak.

Bectu’s recent survey painted the UK TV sector as half-idle, with workers drifting into other fields just to survive.

The supposed rebound after the strike-heavy chaos of 2023 never really arrived. Greenlights are erratic, budgets are thin, and the broader economy isn’t doing crews any favours.

IMAGO presented European data, but it represents 4,000 cinematographers across 57 societies, and the same problems appear across the board. Their headline is unflinching: behind the beautiful cinematography lies a workforce dealing with an ugly reality of instability and exploitation.

What the Survey Actually Shows

In the past year alone, two-thirds of cinematographers went through a period of unemployment.

• 20.2% off work for up to 10 weeks

• 24.3% for 28 weeks or more

The rest of the dataset isn’t kinder:

• Only 13.1% lock in a contract before a job begins

• 64.6% have endured 3+ months without work in the last five years

• 26.5% rely on side jobs

• 51.4% say overall workload is still below pre-COVID levels

• 26.3% routinely clock more than 60 hours per week

• 52.7% frequently go past 12 hours a day

• 81.6% contribute unpaid labour during pre-production

• 64.9% do the same in post

Kurt Brazda AAC, who leads the Working Conditions Committee, believes presenting the report to EU lawmakers shifted the conversation meaningfully. Legislators seemed genuinely unaware of how widespread the problems are.

Several routes forward are now being discussed:

• Drafting an EU-wide directive that protects creative workers

• Linking EU production funding to meeting baseline working-conditions standards

• Using the Lux Film Prize as a vehicle to highlight best practices

IMAGO has been invited to keep advising on how to shape and implement these ideas.

It won’t transform overnight, but for the first time in years, the people holding the cameras might get structural support instead of platitudes.

Fortnite revives Kill Bill?

Twenty years after Kill Bill hit theatres, Quentin Tarantino is finally finishing a chapter he never shot… through Fortnite. Chapter 7 launches November 30th with “Yuki’s Revenge,” a sequence he wrote in 2003 but abandoned before filming. Tarantino and Uma Thurman even appeared at the Vista Theatre in L.A. to unveil the collab.

The story follows Yuki Yubari, sister of Gogo, on a revenge mission to the U.S. that ends in a showdown with Black Mamba and the destruction of the Pussy Wagon. It was meant to be Chapter 5 of Vol. 1, but it never made it to camera.

Epic had to design Yuki from scratch, using only Tarantino’s notes since she never appeared on-screen. The timing coincides with the nationwide release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair on December 5: the unified cut with restored anime footage.

But Yuki’s chapter still exists only on the page, making Fortnite the only place it can live making this far from a simple promo tie-in.

A game engine is finishing a filmmaker’s canon two decades later: a sign that cinema’s future might expand through new mediums rather than traditional production.

• IFFI Launches India’s First Dedicated AI Film Category

  The International Film Festival of India adds a new section for AI-generated films, signaling that AI-made cinema is moving from fringe experiment to officially sanctioned festival lane.

Retail Therapy

Bang for buck with Bang & Olufsen’s $1,500 Earbuds

B&O drops a pair of absurdly high-end earbuds with sculptural design and reference-grade sound. Might be overkill for most, but perfect if your coping mechanism is spending too much on audio.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

On one side, Christopher Nolan went out on the open sea, burning two million feet of film to drag The Odyssey into IMAX reality. On the other, OpenAI is lighting $15 million a day on fire so the internet can generate ten-second meme videos with perfect motion blur.

Villeneuve quietly locks Dune: Part Three.
Roger Deakins shrugs at AI with the indifference of a man who’s seen every tool come and go.

The BBC, meanwhile, is one editing mistake away from a constitutional crisis.
And Timur Bekmambetov claims he can teach machines how to “act”, method prompts and all.

Brands are wobbling too.

Coca-Cola’s holiday ad leans so hard into AI that its trucks forget how axles work.
Gear companies keep shipping toys for creators who still shoot in the real world.
And Vince Gilligan reminds everyone that storytelling, not software, is the thing that survives.

A week of cinema, somehow, caught in between the ocean and the cloud. Let’s go.

Render Reel

• Oscars Reinstate “Honor System” After Academy Email Leak NBC reports voters are again trusted to watch films without verification, raising questions about awards legitimacy.

• Dune: Part Three Wraps; Villeneuve’s saga locks picture; spin-off expands the timeline instead of waiting for Part Four.

• Roger Deakins on AI: “Use Whatever You Want” The cinematography icon shrugs at the tech and doubles down on narrative over tools.

• One Editing Mistake Could Cost the BBC Its Charter: a single miscut in a Trump Panorama triggers a political firestorm and regulatory scrutiny.

OpenAI’s $15 Million-a-Day Habit

OpenAI is torching something like a quarter of its revenue just to keep Sora’s video hose spraying. For a company already losing money at a relentless pace, OpenAI is leaning into the chaos with reckless abandon.

A half-trillion-dollar valuation, a $20B annual revenue run rate… and a fat $12B quarterly loss lurking behind the curtain.

Then came Sora for iOS. One million downloads in a week, four million by Halloween, and an endless stream of AI “videos” flooding group chats.

Forbes’ estimates the cost of each 10-second generation at around $1.30. That might not sound brutal, until you scale it.

Assume Sora’s ~4.5M users, 25% of them churning out about 10 clips a day. You end up at 11.3M videos every 24 hours. Multiply that by $1.30 each and you’re staring at roughly:

$15M per day

Or

$5.4B per year

…all to generate videos that are overwhelmingly memes.

Even OpenAI’s own team isn’t pretending this is sustainable. Bill Peebles, the guy running Sora, literally said the economics “are completely unsustainable.” And he wasn’t exaggerating.

Video models are orders of magnitude pricier than text with four-dimensional data, coherence over time, huge inference loads and GPU minutes piling up like parking tickets.

And yet OpenAI keeps the free faucet open. Why?

Because this is the land-grab phase. Build the user base now, survive the burn, figure out the monetization later. It’s the oldest internet play in the book except the compute bill has never been this astronomical.

Analysts argue the cost curve will crash downward soon: video inference 5x cheaper next year, maybe another 3x drop after that. And once OpenAI flips the switch on pricing with ads, pro users in film/advertising and enterprise licensing then Sora could turn from a loss machine into a serious revenue engine.

But even Sam Altman is admitting a limit.

Is the free era of Sora is living on borrowed time?

• OWC Launches StudioStack A Modular, Stackable Storage Tower for Mac Creators aimed at pro editors.

• Desview Announces Atlas-X Wireless Video System: low-latency, budget-friendly monitoring system targeting indie sets.

• DJI Neo 2 Lands With Smarter Tracking and Better Low-Light Performance DJI pushes further into creator-friendly, pocketable cameras.

The Director Who Wants to Teach AI to “Act”

Bekmambetov, the Wanted director and long-time screen-life evangelist, has spent $5 million and a decade building Stanislavsky AI, a new system designed to aid AI actor performance.

Unlike the usual “describe the emotion” prompting, Stanislavsky tries to reason its way into a performance.

Tell it “he’s sad” and you get mannequin energy. Tell it “his dog died yesterday and the sunset reminds him of it,” and suddenly the model understands the nuance.

At least, that’s the pitch.

Bekmambetov is really trying to rebuild the entire production pipeline. Feed a script into the system and it starts proposing shots, sequences, production design cues, even a shared interface where departments can collaborate and steer the AI.

It’s pre-vis, storyboarding, blocking, and departmental coordination collapsed into one software brain, and it launches in December.

He used it on his next film, Mercy, a Chris Pratt thriller about a man pleading for his life with an AI judge. Before shooting a single frame, he showed Amazon MGM a fully AI-mocked cut of the movie. This meant that a studio could feasibly “see” a film before the crew even arrived on set.

His next project goes further: The Man With a Shattered World, mostly unfolding inside a soldier’s fractured mind, and will be almost entirely AI-generated.

One human actor. Everything else synthetic.

But despite all this, he’s not predicting the extinction of actors. The future he imagines is hybrid, performers training their own AI doubles, directors blocking scenes with machine stand-ins, and production using synthetic mockups to move faster and cheaper.

AI won’t kill creativity, he argues. Bad storytelling will. And whether Hollywood likes it or not, Stanislavsky is about to force that conversation.

Nolan’s 2 million feet Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s 13th feature scales up again with reports of the production using up to two million feet of film during a 91-day shoot. With months spent filming on open water with Damon and the crew actually battling real waves. Nolan wanted audiences to feel the danger and disorientation of voyaging through an unmapped world.

This is Nolan’s philosophy at its purest: the physical world pushing back at the filmmaker. If Oppenheimer was about the terror humanity created, The Odyssey is about the terror humanity sailed into.

As modern Hollywood races toward synthetic production, virtual stages, and AI-assisted everything Nolan is choosing to double down on the opposite. The kind of cinema that can only exist through sweat, danger, and film stock by the mile.

• Digital Domain Names Sudhir Reddy as New President THR notes a leadership shake-up at one of VFX’s legacy powerhouses as the industry repositions around AI and real-time tools.

• Vince Gilligan Says AI Won’t Ruin Storytelling the Breaking Bad creator shrugs off tech panic and puts the blame back on craft.

Cut of the Week: Coca-Cola -Holidays Are Coming

Every December, Coca-Cola rolls out its most dependable myth: the red holiday truck drifting through snow like a corporate sleigh.

Lately, though, the gloss has slipped.

This year’s spot carries the telltale quirks of AI. The weightless movement, the soft, syrupy glide, the way shots feel like they were born in isolation and stitched together after the fact.

But here’s the real question: if Coke didn’t label it “AI-made,” how many viewers would actually clock the difference? Most people watch these ads while scrolling, half-distracted, letting the imagery wash over them. A floating axle or an impossible shadow barely registers when the brain is just hunting for holiday vibes.

Or maybe audiences are now “AI-literate” enough to feel the uncanny valley the second they step into it.

The “making of” only deepens the oddness.

Coke says it generated over 70,000 clips to reach the final cut. They even bragged about needing just five “AI specialists” and a month of work, though the full campaign still touched nearly 100 people by the Wall Street Journal’s count.

Maybe the issue isn’t the tech. Models like Sora 2 and Veo 3 clearly improved this year. But even cutting-edge AI starts to wobble when asked to deliver an entire commercial instead of a single, polished hero shot.

Retail Therapy

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A friendly 10.1-inch digital photo frame that receives photos and short videos from iPhone and Android over Wi‑Fi, with no subscription required.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

This week Quentin Tarantino revealed he’s stitching Kill Bill back into a four-hour blood opera. Wong Kar-wai is swapping film reels for 30 episodes of ’90s Shanghai nostalgia. And Terrence Malick is still somewhere in an editing room, lost in a fog of faith and 3,000 hours of footage.

While new auteurs build empires in television and tech, the old guard is still chasing ghosts of perfection.

The machines, meanwhile, are learning how to make movies faster than humans can finish theirs.

Render Reel

• Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair gets full theatrical trailer Quentin Tarantino fuses Vol. 1 and 2 into a four-hour unrated cut with a new anime sequence, out Dec 5.

• Michael Jackson biopic trailer shatters records First teaser pulls 30M views in six hours, spotlighting Jaafar Jackson and reigniting the tone debate.

• Blossoms Shanghai marks Wong Kar-wai’s TV leap The auteur debuts a 30-episode series set in ’90s Shanghai for international release.

• Godzilla Minus Zero officially announced Toho confirms Takashi Yamazaki’s return for the sequel to Minus One, targeting late 2026.

• China shutters New York indie film festival Authorities allegedly pressured diaspora filmmakers to withdraw, forcing cancellation.

The Great Hollywood Reboot

Walk through any Hollywood lot today and you’ll see the signs of an industry in transition. Smaller crews, hybrid writers’ rooms, and post-teams syncing in from thousands of miles away via the cloud.

The Ankler.

Fade to Black: Hollywood’s AI-Era Jobs Collapse Is Starting

I write every other Tuesday for paid subscribers. I explored the seismic impact of OpenAI’s Sora 2 and ChatGPT-5 and interviewed Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser about his studio’s strategy to safeguard IP. Check out The Ankler & my comprehensive coverage of…

Read more

6 months ago · 13 likes · 4 comments · Erik Barmack

The old Hollywood monopoly is certainly cracking, but maybe, globally, that’s not a tragedy.

Over the past three years, Los Angeles has shed over 41,000 film and TV jobs which is a quarter of its entertainment workforce. But what looks like loss in one ZIP code is growth everywhere else. The means of production have gone global.

The New Hollywood of the ’60s and ’70s was born from rebellion; filmmakers tearing up the rulebook, turning LA into the unquestioned mecca of movies.

But this new, New Hollywood won’t even live in Hollywood at all.

It’ll live in Seoul, Mumbai, Lagos, Dubai, and São Paulo.

Or wherever talent, tech, and audiences now converge. The center of gravity has shifted, and it’s no longer anchored to a single patch of California sun.

That shift shows up in the numbers too. In 1980, Los Angeles County held roughly 63% of all U.S. film and TV jobs. By 2023, that share had fallen to 27%.

Hollywood’s acting like an aging movie star. Still famous, still photogenic, but struggling to accept that it’s no longer the only lead. The industry’s next close-up belongs to wherever embraces that creativity has no inherent geographic monopoly and will use whatever tools to make the best stories possible.

• Aputure launches free Sidus Link Pro plan Full Bluetooth lighting control now free for indies.

• Blackmagic Camera for iOS 3.2 adds live streaming Native SRT/RTMP output lets iPhones stream directly to YouTube/Twitch.

• Movie car museum liquidates 50 iconic screen vehicles at no reserve From Back to the Future to John Wick, Pop Central Museum ditches the usual museum model.

Imagine × Obsidian and the New Architecture of Hollywood

Obsidian, a new production company from director Wes Walker and producer Louis Gheysens, has partnered with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment to build one of Hollywood’s first studios structured entirely around AI-assisted production.

Rather than chasing automation, Obsidian is re-engineering the process itself: organizing compact, director-led pods that blend storyboard artists, CG generalists, editors, and AI specialists to move projects from sketch to screen in weeks instead of months.

Its proprietary tools, including DigitalForge, a real-time collaborative engine, and EchoChrome, a high-end rendering platform, bring AI and CGI directly onto the set instead of leaving them buried in post.

Veteran artists like Marc Vena (Logan, War for the Planet of the Apes) and Tani Kunitake (The Matrix, Black Panther) are helping train Obsidian’s custom datasets to emulate human cinematography rather than machine imitation.

For Imagine, the partnership extends through development, pre-vis, and post-production.

Terrence Malick’s The Way of the Wind : The Unfinished Gospel

Malick’s reputation for obsessive, years-long filmmaking is well documented.

Days of Heaven (1978) was shot almost entirely during “magic hour,” stretching production to 15 months and post to two years. Two decades later, The Thin Red Line (1998) produced over a million feet of film and took 20 months to edit, with Adrien’s Brody’s “star” role being cut from the film almost entirely.

The Tree of Life (2011) blended Texas family drama with cosmic VFX sequences, requiring three years of post and hundreds of different versions.

And between 2010 and 2012, Malick shot To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song back-to-back, amassing several millions of feet of film and yet again reduced certain major actors to cameos.

However, Malick’s biblical epic The Way of the Wind that was shot in 2019, has reportedly now accumulated over 3,000 hours of footage, and sadly may never see the light of day.

Even by Malick standards, it’s audacious.

Now 81, the director shows no urgency to finish what’s become one of cinema’s longest ghost stories. Rumored premieres have come and gone (Cannes 2025 was the latest mirage), and today this once high-profile, star-packed epic has slipped entirely off the radar.

Funded primarily by Germany’s Studio Babelsberg, The Way of the Wind drew an eclectic, international cast, Mark Rylance, Joseph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ben Kingsley, and Leila Hatami among them.

Rylance, rumoured to play several incarnations of Satan, recalled the experience with a kind of reverent disbelief: no rehearsals, just a 28-page monologue delivered opposite a mostly silent Jesus. He’s hopeful the wait will prove worth it, though others have lost patience.

Actor Franz Rogowski, who worked with Malick on A Hidden Life, described the film simply as “missing in action,”.

Even if Malick does end up finishing he’ll have to contend with not one, but two upcoming Jesus’ films already set for release.

Mel Gibson, resurfacing after years of controversy, is attempting to resurrect his career with The Resurrection of the Christ: Parts One and Two, slated for 2027. Gibson’s project follows the descent into Hell and the resurrection which is ground that closely mirrors Malick’s own biblical vision.

Whatever frustrations surround Malick’s process, he’s still one of the few American directors chasing the sacred through cinema.

His film may yet prove to be the most quietly radical Gospel ever made, unless, in true Malick fashion, its saviour never makes it to the final cut.

• AI reshapes YouTube’s next era Generative tools for editing, dubbing and music creation arrive alongside a crackdown on AI spam.

• Snapchat adds AI search in major partnership Integrates Perplexity AI for chat-based search and creator tools.

Cut of the Week: Shanti Rides Shotgun

There are few settings more American than a driving school and few less likely to deliver cinematic poetry.

But Charles Frank’s Shanti Rides Shotgun turns a Queens driving instructor’s Toyota into a confessional, a comedy stage, and a cultural mirror all at once. The eight-minute short follows Shanti Gooljar, a Guyanese immigrant who has somehow become the go-to instructor for the kids of Manhattan’s 1%.

Seinfelds, Murdochs, and Courics among them.

The film mines this absurd setup for humor, but what makes it sing is Shanti herself: a foul-mouthed, deadpan, motherly figure who yells her way through the anxieties of New York’s rich kids while quietly carrying her own grief.

Frank and his team shoot the film like a low-budget heist, three cameras rigged inside the car, catching the split-second swings between chaos and tenderness.

The film is part Taxi Driver, part Curb Your Enthusiasm, filtered through docu-realism.

Beneath the laughs lies a portrait of class, race, and survival in a city where everyone’s learning to navigate.

Coming off its Grand Jury win at AFI Fest and a Critics’ Choice nomination, Shanti Rides Shotgun could become the year’s breakout short and we wouldn’t be surprised if it secured an Oscar nom.

• AMC Theatres posts narrower loss, higher spend per viewer Q3 results show fewer tickets but record premium spend.

• Theaters push back on Warner Bros. sale talks Exhibitors warn merger could cut releases and invite antitrust action.

• Chloé Zhao and Kodansha Studios team for Hollywood manga expansion Zhao joins as Chief Creative Officer to globalise live-action adaptations.

• AFM Returns to L.A. After a brief detour to Las Vegas, the American Film Market heads home to Los Angeles (Nov 11–16), drawing optimism from U.S. distributors and global buyers alike.

Retail Therapy

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Pollen Robotics Reachy Mini – $299

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Recommended reads

• Every so often a post pops up that reminds us why we love Substack. Case in point:

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Happy Monday.

Try our updated Clean Up & Scripted mode; it got released over the weekend in beta.

It’s meant for linear recordings.

Imagine you’re making a talking-head video for YouTube or a vlog or want a clean interview to scrub through.

Clean Up & Scripted mode is for you. You don’t need to have a script. But if you have one or an outline, drop it in.

Eddie will go through the recording, clean it up, create a coherent edit. Where there are multiple takes, Eddie will identify the best take.

And now…Eddie has robust text-based editing. So you can quickly see and enable the alt takes. Move bites around. And as usual, export seamlessly to Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro.

Let me know what you think.

Onto this week’s newsletter.

Enjoy!

Shamir

Werner Herzog is dragging 50 filmmakers to a volcanic island to make movies.

Christopher Nolan announces he’ll blockade every IMAX screen on Earth for his upcoming Odyssey. And AI Startup Synthesia Hits $4 billion Valuation to put AI avatars in your office training videos.

It’s filmmaking split three ways. The human, the monumental, and the mechanical.

Hollywood, meanwhile, keeps reshuffling the chessboard: Netflix circling Warner Bros., Paramount gutting staff, YouTube reorganising around AI. Even horror got an upgrade, Blumhouse now wants to live inside your headset.

Render Reel

• Bloody Disgusting Launches $35K Horror Short Contest

  To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bloody Disgusting and Screambox are inviting filmmakers to pitch a 40-minute horror short centered on their mascot, Buzzkill. The winning concept will receive a $35K production budget, professional SFX support, and a premiere slot in the 2026 season of Bloody Bites. Pitches are open until November 20, 2025 Submit your pitch here

• Quentin Tarantino Expands His Film Universe into 10 Books Turning his filmography into a literary canon, starting with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

• Amazon Begins Crackdown on Side-Loaded Fire TV Stick Apps in Piracy Blitz From Oct 31 2025, Amazon started blocking unofficial apps on its Fire TV Sticks worldwide, working with anti-piracy coalition ACE to clamp down on devices offering illicit streams.

• Blumhouse Reinvents Fear for the Headset Age Nexus Studios’ Enhanced Cinema project merges M3GAN and The Black Phone with mixed-reality effects that break the frame and pull the horror into your space.

• YouTube Launches AI Upscaling + Shopping Tools for TV Screens YouTube is rolling out automatic AI upscaling for low-res uploads (with opt-out available), new 4K thumbnail limits, and QR-code shopping integration for tagged products while viewers use TV.

Synthesia Hits $4B Valuation

London-based AI video startup Synthesia just closed a $200 million round led by GV (Alphabet’s venture arm), nearly doubling its valuation to $4 billion.

Synthesia’s pitch is corporate pragmatism as its avatars help companies like DuPont, Xerox, and Spirit Airlines translate training manuals and safety briefings into talking-head videos in more than 100 languages. Think less Sora dreamscapes, more enterprise communications scaled to global workforces.

The company now boasts $100 million in annual revenue, putting it toe-to-toe with upstarts like HeyGen and giants like Adobe, which reportedly considered buying Synthesia for $3 billion earlier this year.

The deal never materialized, but the intent says everything: traditional software is chasing AI-native platforms like never before.

CEO Victor Riparbelli remains clear on Synthesia’s positioning: no surreal prompt-fests, no AI hallucinations, just synthetic humans for business content. That said, marketing and ad integrations are on the horizon, and TikTok creators are already experimenting with Synthesia avatars as low-budget spokespeople.

Video

• China’s $6.9B Micro-Drama Boom Turns COVID Hotels into Vertical Soap Opera Factories The industry has pulled in $6.9 billion in 2024, surpassing China’s box office, with over 50% of the nation’s internet users now hooked on these “soap operas for the subway.”
  

• YouTube Offers Voluntary Buy-Outs Amid AI-Driven Reorg YouTube is rolling out voluntary severance offers to U.S. employees as it restructures its product teams to double down on artificial intelligence..

Christopher Nolan’s IMAX Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic The Odyssey will take over every IMAX screen on Earth for an entire month next summer: an unprecedented power move to dominate the box office.

Coming off Oppenheimer’s near-$1 billion haul, it’s less a marketing stunt than a declaration: theatrical spectacle still has teeth. For Nolan, it’s as much about film stock and format loyalty as it is about staking territory.

He’s spent two decades preaching the gospel of celluloid and IMAX, but Oppenheimer proved something even bigger that there are few filmmakers who can pull blockbuster numbers from non-franchise IP spectacles.

I say a “few” but the truth is, no one else can. And Universal knows it.

This feels like a watershed moment for Hollywood.

Shooting a movie this way eventizes the release. It tells audiences: this isn’t something you can scroll past. And that’s going to drive huge numbers for The Odyssey.

Herzog takes filmmakers to the Edge

Werner Herzog has filmed volcanoes, jungles, and war zones but next January he’ll take 50 filmmakers to the Azores for an 11-day workshop that blurs expedition and production.

Each participant will pair up to conceive, shoot, and edit a short film under Herzog’s mentorship, moving from idea to premiere in less than two weeks.

Every day is structured like a miniature production cycle: scouting volcanic landscapes by morning, story conferences and fieldwork by afternoon, screenings and open dialogues with Herzog by night.

Editing begins mid-week, and by Day 11 the finished films screen publicly before the festival crowd at Teatro Micaelense.

The program doubles as an incubator; AGENCIA FREAK will design festival routes for standout shorts, while the Azorean International Film Festival runs parallel, hosting Herzog as jury president and master-class mentor.

Experiencia WH 2026 offers a full-scale creative crucible testing whether cinema can still be immediate. For those who crave danger in their process, Herzog just mapped the coordinates.

Full tuition runs €8,800 so it’s not cheap, but compared to film school prices, studying under Herzog himself almost feels like a bargain.

AI

• OpenAI Rolls Out Pay-Per-Video Monetisation for Sora 2 Sora’s text-to-video tool now includes paid tiers, letting users buy extra generations beyond the daily free cap.

• AI-Generated Sitcom Clip Goes Viral: “It’s Actually Unsettling to Watch” A Friends-style parody built entirely with AI actors and laugh-tracks blew up online this week, sparking a wave of both fascination and unease.

• Sony Launches Video-Compatible Camera Authenticity Solution Sony unveiled a C2PA-standard “authenticity chip” that embeds cryptographic proof of origin in both stills and video. Designed to combat deepfakes, it verifies that footage was genuinely shot in-camera.

Cut of the Week: Reels falling out from Phone // VFX Short

A conceptual VFX short from creator ShortPants. The premise: he sits down for “just five minutes” on his phone. Three hours later, film strips pour across the floor, each frame a frozen scroll from his screen.

It’s a gag built from editing discipline: flawless compositing, physical lighting synced with VFX, and the kind of pacing that sells the absurdity without saying a word.

What makes it brilliant is the metaphor hiding in plain sight. He turns a universal digital habit into an analog nightmare.

You can watch the BTS: Here

Money Moves

• Netflix Eyes Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery
  Netflix has reportedly hired Moelis & Co. to explore a $50 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s entertainment assets, including HBO and Warner Bros. Pictures.

• Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc topped U.S. box office with ≈$17 million, marking another anime-driven win in what’s otherwise the weakest October for theaters in nearly three decades.

• Paramount Skydance Begins 2,000 Layoffs Post-Merger
  Paramount streamline operations after their summer merger. One of Hollywood’s largest layoffs since Disney 2023.

Retail Therapy

DJI Launches Neo 2 Drone in China - $1700

A compact FPV-style drone aimed at both hobbyists and creators. The updated model features 4K/60fps video capture, a redesigned three-axis gimbal, and enhanced low-light performance. Battery life has been extended to around 40 minutes, and new onboard sensors improve obstacle avoidance in tight spaces.

Currently available only in China.

Nékojita FuF: Tiny Cat Robot : $28.70

Japanese startup Yukai Engineering has unveiled a pocket-sized cat robot designed to cool your food and drinks by gently blowing on them, literally. The silicone-bodied gadget clips onto mugs or bowls and uses “FuRhythm” AI patterns to mimic natural breathing, cooling boiling drinks from 190°F to 160°F in just three minutes.

Rechargeable, washable, and of course absurd. A perfect mix of Japanese whimsy and practicality.

P.S

• This week we’re digging Machine Cinema A forward-looking Substack about creativity in the age of AI. A space where filmmakers, technologists, and artists explore what happens when machines join the creative process.

If you’re reading this via Substack app, tap the ❤️ so we know you liked reading this!

Happy Monday! Let’s rock & roll. Have an epic week. It’s in your hands.

Enjoy today’s newsletter,

—Shamir

A week in boardroom blitz and existential crisis.

David Ellison is spending billions to rebuild Paramount from the ground up. The White House bulldozed its own movie theater. Paul Schrader handed his next script to AI.

Everywhere you look, the old guard is cashing out, caving in, or being rewritten.

In one corner, Wonder Studios (backed by OpenAI and Epic Games) raised $12 million to automate VFX. In another, YouTube is arming creators against deepfakes while Sora and Veo continue to lead the video evolution race.

Even the week’s lighter stories carried subtext.

Elizabeth Olsen swore off non-theatrical releases as the Tokyo Film Festival rolled out its red carpet, the same week the White House rolled up its projector screen.

And somewhere on YouTube, a creator 3D-printed his own 16mm film camera.

Headlines at a Glance

• David Ellison Is Moving Fast and Spending Big to Remake Hollywood The new head at Paramount Pictures is executing a major overhaul: an $8 billion acquisition, a $7.7 billion UFC deal, poaching the creators of Stranger Things from Netflix.

• Global film industry shrugs off renewed Trump movie tariff threat U.S. President Donald Trump floated a 100% tariff on films shot abroad, but studios are largely unmoved; international production continues strongly with $24.3 billion spent outside the U.S. last year vs. $16.6 billion domestically.

• Secret Cinema company is bought by Hollywood power broker The London-based immersive film & TV event company (which fuses screening + live experience) was acquired by Ari Emanuel’s events group Mari. A sign of experiential media’s value.

• YouTube declares war on deepfakes with new tool that lets creators flag AI-generated video clones YouTube is rolling out a tool (to select Partner Program creators) that allows them to detect when their face/voice is impersonated and request takedown.

• YouTube explains why only some banned creators will be welcomed back YouTube clarifies its new “Second Chance” pilot programme: not all creators previously banned are eligible to return, raising questions about reintegration criteria and creator rights.

• Elizabeth Olsen refuses to act in studio movies if there’s no theatrical release. The WandaVision and Love & Death star criticized studios for sidelining theatrical releases in favor of streaming.

• Tokyo Film Festival opens with star-studded ceremony The 37th Tokyo International Film Festival kicked off with a glitzy red carpet featuring Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Koji Yakusho, and Juliette Binoche, who serves as jury president.

White House Theater Becomes Ballroom

One of the nation’s most storied screening rooms, the White House Family Theater, has been demolished as part of President Trump’s new $300m East Wing ballroom construction plans backed by private donors including Comcast, Amazon, and Apple.

The historic in-house movie theater built in 1942 under Franklin D. Roosevelt and used by every president ever since.

It’s a place where JFK who previewed From Russia with Love, Reagan watched Back to the Future, and where Obama held family screenings of Lincoln and Selma.

While rumors suggest a modernized replacemen’s in the works, nothing has been confirmed.

The decision was driven by “space needs” and a desire for a larger event venue. But for Hollywood, it’s the end of an era when film served as a private bridge between Washington and the entertainment world.

The 42-seat room once doubled as a quiet diplomatic tool, a screening space for foreign dignitaries, military families, and even early campaign donors.

All it took was a call to the Motion Picture Association, which would reach out to a studio or distributor to deliver the print.

There’s irony in the timing. As streaming replaces theaters and AI threatens to rewrite visual culture, the most powerful house in America has literally bulldozed its own cinema.

From Taxi Driver to GPT: Paul Schrader’s AI Era Begins

Leave it to Paul Schrader to turn a moral crisis into a movie pitch.

The Taxi Driver and First Reformed writer-director announced this week that his next film, Non Compos Mentis, will be partly written and developed with AI tools making him the first major filmmaker to formally integrate AI into a feature workflow.

Schrader described the project as an experiment in “provocation, not replacement.” The goal, he said, isn’t to outsource creativity but to test how far the line between artist and algorithm can stretch before it snaps.

If that sounds like the premise of a Paul Schrader film, that’s because it is.

His work has always circled around obsession, alienation, and control. Lonely men at war with themselves. Now the machine is in the writing room.

Schrader, 78, reportedly used AI for story structure and image generation during early development, feeding it drafts of scenes and visual prompts to “see what comes back.” It’s a move that lands somewhere between curiosity and confrontation: a filmmaker raised on transcendental cinema using modern code to mirror the unconscious.

Hollywood, meanwhile, is still raw from the AI debates that dominated last year’s strikes. Studios flirt with automation while unions fight to preserve authorship. Against that backdrop, Schrader’s move feels both inevitable and subversive. An elder statesman walking willingly into the algorithmic fire.

And, of course, he couldn’t resist extending the argument to criticism itself. Long known for his unfiltered, snarky Facebook reviews of films and peers, Schrader claimed this week that AI might actually make for better film criticism because “it doesn’t have to favor anybody.”

“AI does better coverage than the average coverage,” he said, suggesting that the tech’s lack of bias makes it superior to human reviewers who “get a hint that the person paying you wants you to like this.”

It’s unclear whether he meant critics or studio script readers, but it’s a very classic Schrader provocation nonetheless

Wonder Studios and the $12 Million Bet on AI-Driven Hollywood

Another corner of Hollywood quietly took a much bigger swing on AI. Wonder Dynamics, the AI video platform co-founded by actor Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) and visual-effects artist Nikola Todorovic, just raised $12 million in new funding bringing OpenAI, Epic Games, and Samsung Next deeper into the business of automated filmmaking.

The company’s core product, Wonder Studio, lets creators drop CG characters into live-action scenes automatically, matching lighting, motion, and perspective with the kind of precision that once required full VFX teams.

In plain English: what used to take a week in post can now take a few minutes in the cloud.

This round, led by Korelya Capital, marks a pivot from proof-of-concept tool to full Hollywood pipeline player. Sheridan and Todorovic say the funds will go toward integrating Wonder Studio into Unreal Engine and expanding partnerships with production companies already experimenting with AI-driven previs and compositing.

In a statement, Sheridan described the goal as “democratizing high-end visual effects without losing artistic control.”

The phrase “without losing artistic control” feels like the key. As AI workflows creep into storyboarding, editing, and even directing, Wonder’s pitch is to be the invisible collaborator. It’s a delicate promise in an industry still raw from labor strikes and copyright lawsuits.

If Sora and Veo are rewriting what can be generated, Wonder is targeting what can be finished.

More platform news

• Canon Inc. reached a milestone, producing over 170 million RF/EF interchangeable lenses since 1987 a sign of sustained growth in the camera-ecosystem supporting filmmakers & creators.

• The AI-VFX toolkit Slapshot launched a new AI camera-tracking tool, enabling what used to take a day of manual work to be solved in under 10 minutes.

• The ZEISS group opened beta registration for its “CinCraft Virtual Lens Technology” (a virtual-lens system for virtual/volume production) The three-month program is set for December 2025 through February 2026, with limited slots and selection based on experience and technical fit.

• In the consumer/creator space, the Nikon ZR cinema camera (its first co-developed with RED Digital Cinema) is getting broader availability (e.g., via Amazon),

Cut of the Week: Youtube star 3D prints 16mm film camera

An odyssey into how motion itself gets captured.

In 24 minutes, creator henry kidman shows us how he turns a pile of 3D-printed parts, Arduino boards, and trial-and-error into a fully working 16 mm film camera.

What makes it so watchable isn’t the engineering flex, but the storytelling. Every failure becomes a joke, every fix a lesson in how analog mechanics and digital ingenuity overlap.

It’s part tutorial, part comedy, part slow-motion revelation of what makes cinema tick.

By the end, when the shaky first shots finally roll through his homemade rig, you realize you’ve just watched someone re-invent an entire century of camera design.

Not because he had to, but because he wanted to know if it could still be done.

AI Video:

• Sora 2 gets a major upgrade: free users can now generate up to 15-second videos, Pro users up to 25 seconds; plus a new “Storyboard” multi-scene editing tool.

• Google Unveils VISTA, a Self-Improving AI Video Generation Agent: Google’s new VISTA agent learns from its mistakes to enhance video quality, reportedly outperforming Veo 3 in benchmarks.

Retail Therapy

Samsung Galaxy XR headset - $1,799

The company officially unveiled its long-rumored mixed-reality device, the Galaxy XR, developed in partnership with Google and Qualcomm. Iromises ultra-low-latency visuals, 4K-per-eye resolution, and full color passthrough for both AR and VR experiences.

Crowd Compass - $149

@crowdcompassAfraid to go to a different set because you don't want to lose your friend? 😟😩 Worry no longer! The Crowd Compass has got you covered! 🥳 Now you can always Wander Freely! 🗺📍 #edmtok #rave #ravetiktok #edm #ravefam #squad #foryou #edmtiktok #ravetok #squadgoals

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A pocket-sized lifesaver for when your phone’s just a camera with no bars.
Crowd Compass keeps your group chatting and on the map with mesh radio, not Wi-Fi. Because getting lost shouldn’t be part of the festival experience (even though it is)

Turn Your Music Into a Moment and Get Featured on Times Square Billboards

Ever imagined seeing your art light up Times Square? Or bringing your story to life through your favorite song? Enter the OpenArt Music Video Awards (OMVA) where creativity meets the big stage.

OpenArt invites storytellers, filmmakers, and musicians to create a music video capturing their story using OpenArt for the visuals, with any editing tools you like to bring it home.

Whether you’re a pro, a student, or just AI-curious, this is your chance to make something that feels human, even when it’s made with machines.

Submission Dates: October 15 – November 16

Giveaways:

• 1 free music video on OpenArt

• 1-month free on Epidemic Sound

• 1-month free on ElevenLabs (first 2,000 entries)

Prizes:

• $50,000 total across 30 award categories

• Winners featured on Times Square billboards

• Promotion across social media with 5M+ followers

• Celebrity endorsements and industry spotlight opportunities

The stage (and the skyline) could be yours.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.

YouTube pressed “update,” and the internet pressed “panic.”

This week was all about glitches in the system. Literal and cultural. A global outage hit YouTube just as it rolled out its glossy new player redesign, turning a UI tweak into a worldwide meltdown.

OpenAI’s Sora found itself in its own storm, accused of “digital necromancy” after spawning eerily lifelike videos of dead public figures.

Over in Hollywood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is walking a fine line between masterpiece and money pit, proving that even DiCaprio can’t save a film’s box office these days.

Meanwhile, AI’s influence keeps creeping across every corner of creation from Natasha Lyonne launching an AI film studio to Disney, Warner Bros., and friends drawing the line against training models on their content.

On the lighter end, Co-op reminded us that analog still hits harder with a claymation campaign full of fingerprints, and Fujifilm dropped a camera that literally prints your memories.

Innovation and irritation. Ghosts and glitches. Clay and code.

Headlines at a Glance

• Emma Stone’s‘Bugonia’ Hosts Early Screening for the Bold (and the Bald): “Are You Bald or Willing to Be?” Fans are converging at Dō Los Angeles for a rare screening of Bugonia, a reimagined cult classic that merges ecological myth and digital performance.

• Disney plans to announce a successor to CEO Bob Iger in early 2026.
  As Disney mulls future succession plans, CNBC explores why “co-CEO” structures often create instability and blurred accountability

• Lionsgate Partners with TikTok Creators for Fan Edit Campaigns
  Lionsgate is embracing the “fan edit” phenomenon by working directly with TikTok creators to remix film clips into short-form promos.

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle has become the highest-grossing international film ever at the U.S. box office, surpassing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with over $128.6 million in domestic earnings

• CEO Neal Mohan on $100 billion vision for YouTube’s future
  The Hollywood Reporter’s latest cover story dives into how YouTube has swallowed nearly every TV category except one: scripted drama. It explores what it’ll take for the platform to finally crack the last bastion of traditional television.

• Instagram exploring dedicated TV App
  Bloomberg reports that Meta is developing a dedicated Instagram TV app to challenge YouTube’s growing grip on the big screen. If this finally makes IG a viable short-film platform… hooray indeed.

• Google Slams Australia’s Ban on Under-16 YouTube Accounts Google has criticized Australia’s proposed legislation that would ban users under 16 from creating YouTube accounts, calling it “overreaching”.

YouTube’s “Cleaner” Player Crashes: 800K Users Caught in the Update Storm

On October 15, YouTube suffered its largest ever outage.

Freezing video playback and search functionality for roughly 800,000 users worldwide. Reports flooded Downdetector from North America, the UK, and parts of Asia, with outages lasting from 20 minutes to nearly two hours.

Google blamed the disruption to a server routing issue affecting content delivery networks. The same infrastructure responsible for streaming to TVs and mobile devices.

While the company resolved it within hours, creators saw ad revenue dips and viewers were pushed to rival platforms like TikTok and Twitch.

The timing was especially awkward: YouTube had just rolled out its new video player redesign, which some speculated may have contributed to backend instability.

While some websites might try to test UI changes quietly, there isn’t much chance of YouTube pulling that off. As one of the most familiar interfaces on the internet, even the subtlest tweak can spark uproar.

So it’s no surprise that the platform’s latest video player redesign.. pitched as “cleaner and more immersive” has users up in arms.

Rolled out this week, the update includes refined controls and transitions meant to “make the viewing experience more visually satisfying while obscuring less content.” The redesign leans into Apple-style transparency. A “Liquid Glass” aesthetic. With rounded buttons and minimal chrome.

According to Creative Bloq, the backlash was immediate. The YouTube subreddit is “utterly awash with complaints,” with users begging for ways to revert the look (spoiler: you can’t).

One commenter lamented, “If you copy Apple’s ugly bullsh*t, you end up with a cheap-looking UI,” while another complained that every big company is “losing their identity to something nobody ever asked for.”

Still, some of the outrage may just be the internet’s default reaction to change. As Creative Bloq points out, UI updates to apps people stare at daily always feel jarring. Like the digital equivalent of someone rearranging your living room.

But, as with Airbnb’s once-“controversial” icon, the noise tends to fade.

Who Owns the Dead in the Age of Sora?

The Guardian’s latest report highlights how OpenAI’s Sora can produce eerily realistic videos of historical figures like Karl Marx or Martin Luther King Jr., making them shop, dance, or even troll on camera.

Experts are calling it “a new frontier of appropriation,” where likeness, legacy, and consent collapse into data.

The estates of public figures, which once fought over posthumous image rights for holograms and biopics, now face a machine that can summon anyone, in any setting, without permission or intent. Within seconds.

OpenAI’s defense, that these are “historical simulations” or “creative demonstrations” has done little to calm outrage.

The company insists the feature is part of “exploring educational use cases,” but the results look closer to the commodification of it. As one critic told The Guardian, “It’s digital necromancy sold as progress.”

For an industry that already trades in likeness, Sora’s “AI slop” problem feels less like sci-fi and more like a mirror.

The future of image rights won’t just concern the living, but the long dead and the question may no longer be who owns the footage, but who owns the ghost.

Money moves

• Warner Bros. Discovery rejects takeover bid from Paramount Skydance: WBD says Paramount’s initial offer (~$20/share) was too low to proceed

• Canal+ takes 34 % stake in French cinema-operator UGC: As part of its expansion strategy, Canal+ acquires significant minority stake and gains option to buy full company later.

• OpenAI just gave Sora 2 two big upgrades including longer videos for free users Sora 2 now lets users generate multi-scene sequences and longer runtime videos, marking its most creator-friendly update yet.

One Flop After Another?

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has already grossed $140 million worldwide.

Impressive for an original, R-rated drama-comedy hybrid in 2025. But the film’s economics are upside down. Warner Bros. spent $130 million on production and another $70 million on marketing, meaning it needs roughly $300 million to break even.

Add the fact half of ticket sales going to theaters to DiCaprio’s first-dollar gross deal and the film is now projected to lose around $100 million theatrically.

The film doesn’t get made without DiCaprio, but simultaneously it’s his involvement that guarantees a ballooning budget.

You can’t make a small DiCaprio movie.

Even when he’s working with auteurs like Scorsese, or Tarantino, the gravitational pull of his star power brings along the machinery of a tentpole.

You can’t make a small DiCaprio movie. Even under auteurs like Scorsese or Tarantino, his gravitational pull drags along the machinery of a tentpole.

But with One Battle After Another, the trailer promised something entirely different — a quirky, half-stoner caper with DiCaprio’s character, Bob, played as a bumbling idiot in a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde riff alongside Teyana Taylor.

If you’ve seen the film, it’s not exactly a world away but it’s just a sliver of a much larger, darker, and more complex whole.

Cinephiles will come for PTA regardless, but the broader audience? They didn’t know what they were being invited to see.

Compare that with Christopher Nolan, who has somehow mastered the paradox: making original, R-rated, non-franchise films that earn blockbuster returns. Oppenheimer and Inception (both grossing nearly $1B) with Nolan’s name is a brand that promises clarity. You know what kind of experience you’re getting, even if you don’t understand the plot.

PTA’s brand, by contrast, is a lot more ambiguous.

Still, Warner Bros. marketing didn’t do the film any favors. Instead of positioning it as a cinematic event, they buried the politics, skipped behind-the-scenes spotlights, and rolled out a TikTok campaign where even the cast seemed baffled by how to describe it.

Meanwhile, directors like Ryan Coogler and Nolan have turned production itself into marketing. Viral videos showing real explosions, analog cameras, and the tangible spectacle of craft.

One Battle could’ve leaned into that too.

Cut of the Week: “Owned by You, Right by You” Co-op’s Claymation Heartbeat

In an age of contactless payments and mobile banking, paper receipts have all but disappeared. Once handed over with your change, they now dangle forgotten from self-checkouts or end up crumpled in the bin. Or you’re trying to slap costs on the corporate card.

But this overlooked relic of everyday life takes center stage in Co-op’s campaign from last year, which brings its new brand messaging to life through an actual receipt printer.

By using old-school tech to deliver a modern story, the ad cleverly ties the Co-op’s reliability and community roots to something tangible, lasting, and real.

Directed by Sam Gainsborough and brought to life by animation studio Blinkink, the spot swaps digital gloss for handcrafted charm, using stop-motion claymation to visualize collective ownership and community care.

The ad follows a series of clay characters. Workers, families, and shop owners. Literally sculpting their world together.

AI:

• Hollywood vs OpenAI: Disney, Warner Bros., and other studios say no to Sora
  Major studios move to block AI training on their footage and likenesses, setting the stage for a legal showdown over creative IP.

• WPP boosts AI marketing with $400 million Google deal
  The world’s largest ad group invests heavily in Google’s generative-video tools, turning AI production into a global marketing engine.

• Google’s powerful Veo steps up its creativity in 3.1 version update for ‘realism’
  Improved motion coherence and prompt accuracy bring Veo’s videos closer than ever to cinematic realism.

• Natasha Lyonne Launches AI Film Company Asteria The actor, writer, and director is co-founding Asteria, a new AI-driven film company aiming to blend machine learning with creative storytelling.

Retail Therapy

Fujifilm Instax Mini LiPlay Plus: $235

Fujifilm’s latest hybrid instant camera adds Bluetooth connectivity, voice note printing, and remote shooting via smartphone.

Incendio Fire Magic Wand: $56

A handheld pyro device for performers and creators, the Incendio Wand lets users safely shoot controlled fire effects for photography or stage work. Part gadget, part spectacle. Great for Halloween.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Hollywood’s been through disruption before, but nothing’s moved this fast.

The week belonged to Sora 2, OpenAI’s new video app that went from zero to a million downloads in three days . Timelines turned into TV screens overnight as users dropped themselves into your favorite shows on a whim.

The Guardian called it a “granular control” rollout, The New York Times called it a “post-production world,” and CAA called it a legal emergency.

In short: the public got their new toy, and Hollywood found its new villain.

Elsewhere, the BFI London Film Festival rolled out its biggest lineup in years, Tron: Ares lit up the box office, and Dwayne Johnson’s latest went down swinging. Disney bought yet another fantasy IP, Paramount and Warner keep circling each other, and a Nigerian venture fund dropped ₦20 billion on Nollywood’s next wave.

Meanwhile, Spike Jonze used AI for Gucci, Instagram handed out “Rings” to creators, and MrBeast warned that synthetic video is coming for everyone…even him.

But make no mistake, Sora 2 was the main event.

Headlines at a Glance

• Disney’s Tron: Ares dominates Oct 10 box office, earning ~$14.3 million on opening day, leading the weekend slate.

• Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine posts career-worst opening with ~$5.9 million, triggering talk of risk and recalibration for big name driven biopics.

• Kantara: Chapter 1 surges past ₹300 crore domestically, and crosses ₹590 crore globally, a breakout international success from India.

• Crypto Film Beats Apple at the Emmys White Rabbit from Shibuya Film, co-created by Emily “pplpleasr” Yang, won Outstanding Innovation in Media Programming, edging out Apple’s nominees.

• A Theater Just for Shorts Brooklyn filmmaker Karma Masselli is building a physical movie theater dedicated entirely to short films.

• BFI London Film Festival Highlights: Knives Out 3 opens with Daniel Craig; Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love dominate buzz; Yorgos Lanthimos, Park Chan-wook, and Noah Baumbach headline a stacked auteur lineup alongside the biopic Giant and art-world drama Moss & Freud.

• Camera Intelligence unveils “Caira,” a new AI-native Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera, pushing computational photography at the hardware level.

• YouTube Adds AI-Powered Alternate Endings A new Shorts feature lets users generate AI-created continuations or alternate endings to existing videos.

Sora 2 Soars post launch

OpenAI’s Sora 2 only launched on 30th of September but within three days it already surpassed one million downloads on Apple’s App Store.

You may have noticed your feed filling up with your friends inserted into shows like Breaking Bad and Stranger Things but according to The Guardian, the wave of AI-generated clips: from Marvel scenes to Disney princess parodies forced OpenAI to introduce “more granular control” for rights holders.

The company said creators and studios would soon be able to opt out of having their work or likeness appear in Sora-generated content, and that visible watermarks and metadata tags would become standard.

As The New York Times put it, this is the first glimpse of a “post-production world,” where direction, editing, and animation merge into a single act of typing. The implications go far, far beyond copyright.

We’re not there yet but when creators can render a full scene in seconds that’s indistinguishable to what would have taken several months and cash to make, where does that leave us?

History offers a clue.

When photography appeared, painters feared extinction until they responded with impressionism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism. Movements that explored what the camera couldn’t capture.

Filmmakers now find themselves in a similar position, searching for forms that resist automation.

Despite its sophistication, Sora 2 still struggles with duration and continuity as visual time remains AI’s weakest link. You really have to consider just how resource intensive very single second AI video generation is:

AI video generators struggle with time because every single new frame has to match every single frame that came before it. The longer the clip, the more relationships it has to maintain.

Think of it like connecting boxes with lines. With 24 boxes (roughly one second of video at 24 fps) you get 276 connections.

Double it to 48 boxes, and you now have 1,128 connections. The number of relationships doesn’t double, it quadruples.

And that’s only for one more second of video.

That’s why adding a few seconds of footage isn’t a small increase in work for AI; it’s an exponential jump in complexity.

The Agency Awakens: CAA vs. OpenAI

Enter CAA.

They broke the agency silence with a statement that tore OpenAI a new one:

Statement in full:

CAA is unwavering in our commitment to protect our clients and the integrity of their creations. The misuse of new technologies carries consequences that reach far beyond entertainment and media, posing serious and harmful risks to individuals, businesses, and societies globally.

It is clear that OpenAI/Sora exposes our clients and their intellectual property to significant risk. The question is, does OpenAI and its partner companies believe that humans, writers, artists, actors, directors, producers, musicians, and athletes deserve to be compensated and credited for the work they create?

Or does Open AI believe they can just steal it, disregarding global copyright principles and blatantly dismissing creators’ rights, as well as the many people and companies who fund the production, creation, and publication of these humans’ work?

TL;DR: Cool tech. Also, please stop using our clients to beta-test your plaything.

The Hollywood Reporter called it the most aggressive stance any agency has taken on generative video to date. But underneath the legal language sits something older than copyright: control.

For decades, agencies like CAA, WME, and UTA have been the brokers of image. They decide who gets paid, how likeness is licensed, and where visibility turns into value.

Now, they’re watching a model that can conjure those same images on demand, and it’s not asking for 10%.

Sure, the outrage is about protecting artists but it’s also about protecting the business model that defines Hollywood’s hierarchy. If likeness can be synthesized, then representation becomes optional.

CAA is laying the groundwork for the next negotiation. One that won’t be about box office bonuses or backend points, but who owns the rights to the digital double.

If Baudrillard were alive today, he’d be having an absolute field day with our timeline.

Money Moves

• Warner Bros rejects early offer from Paramount Skydance WBD pushed back on a ~$20/share bid, but talks remain active as Paramount considers a higher counteroffer.

• Chris Aronson exits Paramount as part of post-merger reshuffle The longtime distribution head leaves amid David Ellison’s effort to consolidate control at Paramount Skydance.

• Row K Entertainment launches as a new indie distributor / financier Backed by Media Capital Technologies, Row K is planning to distribute and finance up to 10 films a year under ex-Paramount marketing leadership.

• Disney Acquires Impossible Creatures IP for Film Franchise Disney secured theatrical and ancillary rights to Katherine Rundell’s fantasy book series, with plans to adapt the first two installments into films.

• Utica Capital Launches ₦20 Billion Film Venture Fund in Nigeria A major new fund has been approved by the SEC to accelerate Nollywood growth through production investment.

Cut of the Week: Sora 2 x Southpark

A single Sora-generated South Park clip just exposed what our near future might actually look like.

In the video, a Sora 2 user recreated a mini-South Park episode without writers, animators, or actors. It’s clumsy but as technologist X user @signulll put it: “Seasons of TV, generated on demand by users and AI is the future staring us down.”

He’s right.

And the reality is, if you saw the clip on your feed without the Sora watermark, would you really think it wasn’t an actual clip from a South Park episode?

Animation was always destined to be one of the first frontiers for AI especially with a style as deliberately crude and easy to mimic as South Park’s.

What isn’t easy to mimic is Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s satire but we’re heading toward a future where we won’t need to.

AI :

• Grok to get AI video detection tools Musk says xAI will build in capabilities to analyze bitstreams for AI signatures and trace video origins, aiming to combat deepfake proliferation.

• Scores of Bollywood AI videos vanish from YouTube after Reuters expose Over 250 AI-manipulated videos depicting Bollywood stars were removed, following public and legal pressure.

• MrBeast warns AI threatens creator livelihoods The YouTube creator posted concerns that AI-generated video saturation could devalue human creators’ work.

• Instagram Launches “Rings” Creator Awards Meta’s new program will reward top Instagram creators with cash bonuses and exclusive platform perks. Spike Lee, KAWS and Instagram head Adam Mosseri lead jury.

• Spike Jonze’s AI Gucci Film Gets Surreal.. and Real
  The director’s latest short for Gucci pushes further into generative imagery, blurring the line between auteur vision and algorithmic design.

• Taylor Swift Fans Unite Against AI Swifties accuse Taylor of using AI for promo videos.

• ‘F* My Son’ Director Embraces Generative AI in Filmmaking Director Todd Rohal says AI helped design shots and storyboards for his new film.

• Google confirmed that Veo 3.1, its next-gen video model The update adds support for longer, more continuous clips, directly addressing one of Sora 2’s biggest limitations.

Retail Therapy

Caira “Nano Banana” Brings AI to Mirrorless Cameras: Price TBC

“The camera of the future” A new AI-native Micro Four Thirds camera with no rear screen, MagSafe iPhone connectivity, and an onboard AI chip for real-time scene recognition and shot suggestions. Designed for minimalism, the Caira Nano Banana merges smartphone intelligence with mirrorless performance. Launches via Kickstarter on October 30th.

Nikon x Unistellar ENVISION Smart Binoculars: Price $1200

AR-powered binoculars that overlay real-time data on your view, identifying stars, constellations, landmarks, and terrain. Co-designed with Nikon, the ENVISION connects via smartphone to deliver augmented navigation, celestial tracking, and free feature updates through the companion app.

If you’re reading via the Substack app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

It’s launch day at Eddie, your AI AE (uh hem… assistant editor ☺️).

Eddie now… <drum roll> provides feedback on your edit. And it’s pretty cool. (And that’s me trying to temper expectations.)

Okay I give up. It’s actually kinda insane.

Eddie AI can now analyze your edit in both the audio/visual mediums and give you detailed timestamped feedback intended to improve performance of the edit, such as for YouTube / online distribution.

Try it by updating to the latest Eddie AI Mac/PC app. Click “New Project” and choose “Feedback” mode. Then import the mp4/mov of your edit or pull the sequence in from Premiere/Resolve/FCP. Let it analyze and boom. FYI It’s free. (Not sure if we’ll ever charge for it.)

We’ll be demoing this (and other ways to use Eddie for those editing for YouTube) at VidSummit in Dallas on Oct 8 and Oct 9:

• Oct 8, 3:35pm, Workshop Room 2

• Oct 9, 1:45pm, Workshop Room 2

DM me if you’ll be there.

The other big update is Rough Cut mode now incorporates Social Media, ChatGPT and A-roll logging modes. This means: you just import your source videos once and you can chat to Eddie about key characters and the emotional tone of the story; get your interviews logged; experiment with different rough cut versions of varying lengths; and get a bunch of social clips with titles/descriptions. All from the same import. No need to import afresh for each edit.

I know it was annoying as *&%^. It’s fixed. Have fun with Eddie, play with it, make cool sh*t. You can thank me later.

Here’s the launch video. Robbie is back, safe, if you were wondering. Though I may maroon him again for giving me this click-baity thumbnail.

And finally, we (finally) updated our landing page. Check it out, let me know what you think.

Enjoy today’s newsletter on the news from the world of video.

—Shamir

Trump’s talk of a 100% film tariff has producers doing currency math in their sleep, while the L.A. Times paints a grim portrait of Hollywood’s missing middle. 42,000 jobs gone and counting.

At the same time, SAG-AFTRA has gone full firewall on AI after a digital actress tried to land real representation. Meanwhile in platform land, ESPN and Fox finally fuse into one mega sports bundle, Meta and Apple keep jousting over who owns your face.

Over in AI video, OpenAI’s Sora 2, Elon’s Grok Imagine, and Runway Gen-4 all push closer to photoreal “world simulators.” And if that’s too heavy, DJI’s new Nano and Curio’s talking plush toy prove gadgets are still fun even when the rest of the industry feels existential.

Our visual future remains in the balance.

Headlines at a Glance

• ESPN + Fox One Streaming Bundle Finally Launches: Another mega-sports package crowds the OTT shelf; UI fragmentation vs. ARPU uplift becomes the fall debate for streamers.

• Taylor Swift’s ‘Release Party of a Showgirl’ Powers Box Office: A pop event film outmuscles traditional releases, underscoring the rise of fan-first theatrical windows.

• ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ Gets First Theatrical Run : Tarantino’s unified cut hits 70mm/35mm in December; repertory programming continues to punch above its weight.

• One Battle After Another’ Tops $100M, will it break even? Dicaprio and PTA might not be enough to see “film of year” action thriller over the line.

• UK film industry dubbed “Brollywood” seeing a boomL for now: The U.K. is attracting major shoots, thanks to tax incentives and infrastructure, but faces uncertainty if U.S. policies (like the proposed tariff) disrupt that momentum.

Cinema’s Next Trade War: Trump Tariff

Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat has Hollywood sweating and not just from the L.A. heat.

At a rally last week, the president floated a 100% import tariff on foreign-made films, a move that would effectively double the cost of any movie shot outside U.S. borders. The proposal has sent shockwaves through production hubs from Vancouver to Budapest, where Hollywood has outsourced everything from blockbusters to prestige TV for decades.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, producers are already running the math.

Entire budgets could implode overnight, particularly for streamers and studios reliant on tax incentives abroad.

The policy, if enacted, could force an industry repatriation. Pushing shoots back to California, Georgia, and New Mexico, where costs are higher and crew capacity already stretched.

Post-production vendors in Canada, the U.K., and Australia are equally on edge, as their Hollywood pipelines could dry up.

What’s most striking is how out of sync this potential ruling feels with the reality of modern filmmaking.

Hollywood today is a global organism. Camera teams in Prague, VFX artists in Mumbai, editors in London. The tariff is essentially a tax on the collaborative DNA of the industry itself.

For now, the proposal is still just talk. But in an ecosystem already navigating strikes, AI anxiety, and shrinking margins, the idea of a cinematic trade war might be one plot twist the industry didn’t see coming.

Hollywood’s Creative Middle Class Is Vanishing

In just two years, Los Angeles’ motion picture workforce has collapsed from 142,000 to 100,000.

That’s 42,000 jobs gone, editors, animators, camera operators, gaffers, line producers, and sound mixers who once moved from show to show without missing a paycheck.

We were hopeful for an industry resurgence after the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes ended in 2023 but that’s become far from the case.

The era of growth at all costs for streaming ended, and profitability became the only metric that mattered.

The result: nearly 30% fewer films and TV series with budgets over $40 million started production in 2024 compared to 2022.

The first three quarters of 2025 aren’t looking good either without production down another 13%.

Production activity in the Los Angeles area has fallen to its lowest level since the mid-1990s, according to FilmLA. For the first time in decades, established crew members are going a year or more without work.

The collapse of mid-budget storytelling has rippled through every layer of the ecosystem. Catering companies, prop houses, costume suppliers, and post facilities are all reporting double-digit revenue drops.

South California, a region once powered by the entertainment economy now has an unemployment rate of 5.7%, well above the national average.

The middle tier that made Hollywood function is being hollowed out. Some have retrained in other fields whilst others have left the state entirely.

For decades, Los Angeles thrived on the belief that there would always be another gig. That belief is wavering now and whether the city’s creative engine roars back to life remains to be seen.

More platform news

• Government Shutdown Snafu Keeps Jafar Panahi From NYFF: Real-world politics collide with festival logistics; the premiere goes on without the director.

• Paramount Taps Josh Silverman to Supercharge Consumer & Experiential Licensing, products and IRL activations become a bigger P&L lever as film/TV margins tighten.

• Fujifilm X-T30 III leaks ahead of October launch: Rumored to share the sensor / processor of the X-S20, possibly with IBIS, offering a more compact and affordable entry into Fujifilm’s X line.

• Metahelios pushes next-gen color filter tech for camera chips: A behind-the-scenes semiconductor innovation that could influence future sensor / imaging pipelines.

SAG-AFTRA Draws Line in the Silicon: The Battle Over AI Actors

Last week we touched on Tilly Norwood, the hyper-real digital actress unveiled by Dutch creator Eline Van der Velden at the Zurich Film Festival. This week, SAG-AFTRA officially entered the chat and they’re not handing out welcome baskets.

The union’s message was blunt: “Creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”

Norwood’s debut was meant to introduce Xicoia, what Van der Velden called “the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio.” Instead, it ignited an industry-wide backlash. News that Tilly was in talks to sign with a real Hollywood talent agency was seen as crossing a moral and professional line.

SAG-AFTRA’s statement didn’t mince words: “‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor,” they wrote. “It’s a character generated by a computer program trained on the work of countless professional performers without permission or compensation.”

The union also reminded producers that deploying “synthetic performers” without notice or negotiation violates contracts, and accused studios of trying to “solve no problem” while creating a much bigger one: the erosion of human artistry and livelihoods.

Actors including Emily Blunt, Toni Collette, Mara Wilson, Lukas Gage, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez quickly chimed in, backing the union’s stance (and maybe hoping not to get out-performed by a cloud subscription)

Van der Velden, for her part, insists the whole thing’s been blown out of proportion. “I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool — a new paintbrush,” she wrote on Instagram. “Creating Tilly has been an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character or shaping a performance.”

The controversy underscores how fragile the peace is between Hollywood and AI post-2023 strikes, when digital likeness protections are becoming the hill everyone was willing to die on.

Whether Tilly ends up as the future of acting or a very expensive cautionary tale remains, fittingly, in development.

Cut of the Week: $3 Trillion War for Mobile’s Future

Casey Neistat is back.

After two months off YouTube, he’s returned with $3 Trillion War for Mobile’s Future, a cinematic tech essay that feels a timeline of our relationship with screens, and a question about what comes after the smartphone.

The video opens with a reminder: Google Glass dropped eleven years ago.

Then Casey traces the lineage, from early mobile bricks to the iPhone era to where we are now: caught between Apple’s $3.7 trillion headset dreams and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Both want to build the next interface of human life, but neither has quite cracked it.

And that’s what makes the video compelling.

Casey argues the real X-factor in wearable tech is really etiquette. He recalls being told by his wife not to wear the Vision Pro around their kids: “It just feels rude.”

The future of wearables won’t be decided by their tech. It’ll be decided by what feels socially acceptable to wear.

AI Video News:

• OpenAI launches Sora 2 with cameo / likeness features: The new version adds synchronized audio and lets users insert their own face & voice into AI-generated scenes.

• Perplexity acquires Visual Electric to compete with Sora / Nano Banana

  The acquisition signals that non-big-tech players are taking stakes in the AI video space, expanding into image + video generation to rival OpenAI / Google.

• Elon Musk teases Grok Imagine v0.9

  Musk claims the latest iteration can generate video (plus text + image) extremely fast, with improvements in realism and performance.

• SANA-Video: new diffusion model for efficient, longer video generation

  In the academic space, SANA-Video (just announced) allows more efficient generation of minute-long, high-resolution videos using block linear diffusion and constant memory architectures.

Retail Therapy

• Nikon drops its first cinema camera: the ZR - $2199.95 SRP (body)

  Nikon, under its recent acquisition of RED, has announced the Nikon ZR. A full-frame cinema camera co-developed with RED. It supports internal R3D NE codec, 6K/60p, and 4K/120p.

Google Smart New Nest Cameras and a Smart Speaker

Google’s smart home relaunch feels like a full-system reboot as Gemini replaces Assistant with the hardware getting sharper. It’s less about shiny new gadgets and more about a unified ecosystem with a quiet, confident bid to make your home the next AI interface.

Here are the product prices mentioned:

• Google Home Speaker — $100

• Nest Cam Indoor 2K — $100

• Nest Cam Outdoor 2K — $150

• Nest Doorbell 2K — $180

• Nest Cam Outdoor 2-pack — $250

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there.”

Reese Witherspoon says attention spans will “radically” reshape the business, Disney’s getting sued for clinging to Mickey, and Amazon’s coughing up $2.5B for dark-pattern Prime tricks.

At the Zurich Summit, the industry’s power brokers debated AI and indie survival, while Eline Van der Velden casually announced Hollywood’s first AI actress is about to sign with a real agent.

Across the platforms, Trump finally signed off on TikTok’s $14B split, MrBeast keeps building his own empire, and YouTube is testing AI DJs to narrate your playlists.

On the hardware front, DJI fired straight at Insta360 with its tiniest action cam yet, a 52g Nano you can clip to your hat or your dog.

And for this week’s Cut: Gucci drops a 30-minute Spike Jonze/Halina Reijn fashion epic with Demi Moore, Elliot Page, and a literal tiger at the dinner table.

Hollywood, tech, and fashion are all showing their teeth. Here’s what cut through.

Headlines at a Glance

• Reese Witherspoon says Hollywood will “change radically” to meet shifting attention spans, warning “you’ve got to go where the audience is.”

• Disney sued over enforcing Mickey’s IP now that early versions have entered public domain.

• Amazon will pay $2.5B to settle FTC claims it misled customers into Prime, shakeups ahead for streamers’ UX and policy.

• Zurich Summit: Power players from Sony, Neon, CAA, Mk2 and more gathered to dissect AI, indie film monetization, distribution, politics, and festival health.

• Scrubs Reboot: Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, and most of the original gang reunited for a table read this week, officially setting the revival in motion.

• One Battle After Another debuts with $22M: Record for PTA but low draw for Dicaprio

Hollywood is about sign first ever AI actress

Hollywood’s newest rising star.

Doesn’t need craft services, never shows up late to set and won’t throw a tantrum when the director asks for one more take.

Tilly Norwood the hyper-real AI actress created by Eline Van der Velden’s new talent studio Xicoia, is now in talks with major agencies about signing representation. Yes, actual agencies with human agents.

She’s (I guess?) set to become one of the first AI performers to sit on the same rosters as flesh-and-blood talent.

Van der Velden revealed the talks at the Zurich Summit this weekend. The actor-comedian-technologist, who also runs production outfit Particle6, said the same agencies that once laughed off the idea of AI actors are suddenly circling:

“When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that?’… now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months.”

Van der Velden was joined onstage by Verena Puhm, the former AI artist who now leads Luma AI’s Studio Dream Lab LA. Both painted a picture of an industry moving faster than it admits: In early 2025, studio execs were still brushing off AI. By spring, the same execs were calling back with projects.

AI is already inside the studio system, just under heavy NDA. Puhm said nearly every major company is experimenting with AI-assisted projects, even if they won’t talk about it publicly until “early next year.”

Trump Greenlights TikTok Split

It’s official: Donald Trump just signed an executive order greenlighting TikTok’s U.S. carve-out. After years of saber-rattling, lawsuits, and deadline extensions, ByteDance will finally divest its American operations into a new joint venture valued at $14 billion.

Here’s what the deal looks like:

• Investors: Oracle (Larry Ellison), Silver Lake, Abu Dhabi fund MGX, and Dell’s Michael Dell. Together they’ll control about 45%.

• ByteDance: Keeps 19.9% of the new U.S. entity.

• Other Investors: Existing backers retain 35%.

• Fox Corp.: In talks to join the consortium. A second major media player circling TikTok after Ellison’s Skydance Media just scooped up Paramount.

• Board: Seven members, six of them American.

• Algorithm & Data: Controlled stateside. Oracle will manage U.S. user data on its cloud.

Security fears have driven this saga since Trump’s first term, when federal agencies banned TikTok citing potential Chinese government access to user data. TikTok has always denied the claim, but Congress passed a divest-or-ban law in 2024, and the Supreme Court upheld it this January. Trump has punted deadlines multiple times, but this time, the ink is dry.

The app will stay the same for now. No new downloads, no change to the feed or ad experience. But analysts warn of a “slight chance” a new U.S. TikTok app could roll out later, carrying over all user data.

More platform news

• FT: Arcade Media (Sidemen) takes outside funding to scale globally.

• Bloomberg feature: MrBeast’s expanding entertainment empire

• LA Times breakdown of YouTube’s new AI creation tools (Veo 3 Fast powering Shorts).

• YouTube’s official posts on new creator monetization & brand partnership tools (context for current rollouts).

• YouTube Labs Debuts AI Music Hosts: YouTube launches a new sandbox for AI features. Direct response to Spotify’s AI DJ.

DJI Smallest ever action cam Release

DJI just dropped its tiniest action cam yet.

The Osmo Nano weighs 52g, measures just 57×29×28mm, and magnetically clips onto hats, helmets, headbands. Even a dog collar. It’s waterproof to 10m, shoots 4K/60 (or 4K/120 slow-mo), and comes bundled with a Multifunctional Vision Dock that charges, transfers files at 600MB/s, and doubles as a remote with its own OLED screen.

The Nano is aimed right at Insta360’s turf. Less a spec race and more a Shenzhen showdown.

DJI, long dominant in drones, has been moving into Insta360’s action-cam niche, while Insta360 recently pushed into drones. The Nano itself borrows the modular design of Insta360’s Go series: the lens block detaches from the body, sticks magnetically to surfaces, and can be remotely monitored via the screen.

Perfect for odd angles, gym rigs, or street-lamp POV shots.

Image specs:

• 1/1.3-inch sensor + high-performance processor
  13.5 stops of dynamic range, strong low-light via SuperNight mode

• 10-bit + D-Log M color for cinematic grading (a key edge over Insta360 Go Ultra)

• 143° ultra-wide FOV, HorizonBalancing, and RockSteady 3.0 stabilization

Also features gesture-based auto-recording (nod to start), pre-record buffer, horizontal/vertical flip, and direct dual-mic support via OsmoAudio. DJI also benefits from its widely adopted wireless mics, already the default for most YouTubers, giving it a serious accessories advantage.

Pricing:

• $299 (64GB) or $329 (128GB) combos: includes dock, hat clip, lanyard, case, and ball-joint mount.

DJI is positioning the Osmo Nano less as a GoPro rival and more as a hands-free POV recorder for the TikTok/YouTube Shorts crowd.

A pro-grade cam you can literally forget you’re wearing.

Cut of the Week: Gucci “The Tiger”

Gucci dropped a surprise with The Tiger, a 30-minute short co-directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn. Her follow-up to Babygirl and Jonze’s longest narrative project since Her twelve years ago.

The story centers on Barbara Gucci (played by Demi Moore), head of Gucci International, who gathers her children and a mysterious guest for her birthday dinner. Beneath the glamour, Barbara struggles to juggle her role as matriarch, and brand protector until the night unravels, exposing cracks in her carefully polished world.

The cast is stacked: Elliot Page, Edward Norton, Keke Palmer, Alia Shawkat, Ed Harris, Julianne Nicholson, Ronny Chieng, and model Alex Consani.

The film riffs on the question, “What would you do if you were in a room with a tiger?” both literally and metaphorically.

Shot by cinematographer Jasper Wolf, scored by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, and produced for Gucci’s La Famiglia line, The Tiger blends sci-fi tension, family drama, and surreal spectacle into something far beyond a fashion promo.

AI Video News:

• Meta launches Vibes: an AI-generated short-video feed in the Meta AI app.

• OpenAI Grove update: applications closed; program signals fresh founder pipeline amid rapid model updates.

• Semafor: Runway Gen-4 & Google Veo 3 inch closer to photoreal “world simulators.”

Retail Therapy

• DJI Osmo Nano: $300

DJI’s answer to Insta360’s Go Ultra. A 52g wearable, modular action cam with a detachable magnetic lens, 4K/60 capture, 10-bit LOG, and a dock that doubles as charger, file transfer hub, and remote.

• Curio Grem AI Toy: $100

@avababeUnbox joy with Grem, our new AI buddy! 🌎 ✨ 🌙 From first hugs to park‑adventures, this little friend is already part of the family. Ready for fun and giggles wherever we go! @Curio Interactive #toyunboxing #aitoy #grem #heycurio #fyp

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A plush, Grimes-voiced, cloud-connected companion that delivers fresh stories and guided play through voice interaction, a crisp speaker, and a modular voice box, designed for screen-free learning.

If you’re reading in the app, tap the little ❤️ so we know you’re out there :)

We had a minor earthquake in the middle of the night in the San Francisco Bay Area. Woke up. All was fine. Couldn’t get back to sleep for a few hours. Then my sleep tracker got passive aggressive for having a crummy sleep score. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Hope your week is off to a great start.

Last week, we launched a bunch of updates. TL;DR: Eddie is more agentic as your AI video editing assistant. Check out the CineD article on the updates.

—Shamir

This week, Jordan Peele’s Him lines up to crown horror’s biggest year on record, while The Conjuring and Demon Slayer continue to blast through box office milestones.

But horror isn’t just in theaters. Meta’s AI glasses demo turned into a horror show of its own, with Zuckerberg fumbling a live call on stage in front of a global audience.

Meanwhile, Disney, Universal, and Warner lawyer up against a Chinese AI giant, as Europe preps its first fully AI-generated feature for a festival debut.

In Paris, cinephiles and Hollywood stars like Nolan to Pitt might be saying au revoir to one of the city’s last remaining video stores. Whilst in Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone, dreams of an AI de-aged Rambo return.

From lawsuits to lost video stores to reanimated icons, it was a week that felt haunted on all sides.

Headlines at a Glance

• iPhone 17 Camera Upgrade: Dual 48MP rear lenses, 18MP front camera, and new Dual Capture mode expand creative possibilities for Apple’s new flagship model.

• One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson starring Leonardo DiCaprio, premiered this week. Critics tip it for Oscar race.

• Disney/Universal/WBD sue Chinese AI firm MiniMax Hollywood majors lawyer against firm in copyright dispute.

• Streaming Platforms Will Overtake Traditional Pay-TV in Asia-Pacific:
  They’re set to surpass pay-TV as the largest source of content investment in Asia-Pacific in 2025.

• “The Conjuring: Last Rites” Breaks Global Box Office Record for Horror Genre
  The film earned ~$194 million worldwide in its opening, making it the biggest opening ever for a horror movie.

• AI-Generated Film 'Post Truth' to Premiere at Warsaw Film Festival: A feature film created entirely with generative AI, "Post Truth," is set to have its international debut at the Warsaw Film Festival.

• San Sebastián Spotlight: Trier Defends Directors’ Right to Final Cut Sentimental Value director doubles down on decision keep his films away from Hollywood studios.

The Meta Ray-Ban Horror Bravery Show

For creators, live demos are a daredevil endeavour.

With no edits you have no safety net and last week, Mark Zuckerberg found out exactly what happens when the product becomes the blooper reel.

On stage at Meta Connect, Zuckerberg tried to show off the new $799 Ray-Ban Display AI glasses. First, chef and content creator Jack Mancuso asked the AI assistant how to make a Korean steak sauce.

Instead of guiding him step by step, the AI kept skipping around: “You’ve already combined the base ingredients,”

He hadn’t.

Cue nervous laughter from both audience and Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg himself then tries to answer a video call from CTO Andrew Bosworth using the Neural Band wrist controller. The glasses froze whilst the ringtone droned on, and Zucks stood there caught between silence and spam call.

His vision of a hands-free AI-assisted visual future is still on course but their stage slip is a reminder that when it comes to tech, trust is everything.

We’re living in the era of the unforgiving audience, where failures hit feeds at the speed of the scroll.

But if you’re pitching tools as the future of video, you can’t really afford for it to crash mid-demo.

And that’s what makes the Meta demo quite brave.

Big tech companies like Apple rarely stage actual live demos of their products so Zucks was literally rolling the dice live. Channeling the same horror every startup tech founder feels on a Zoom demo: should I fake it, or just pray to the heavens it works for real?

Afterward, CTO Andrew Bosworth went into damage control, calling it a “demo fail, not a product fail.” Bosworth explained that the glitch was basically a DDoS from their own audience.

In rehearsals it worked fine but in front of thousands, it overloaded so as far as excuses go… it’s a pretty credible one.

The tech itself: glasses with in-lens displays and wrist-based gesture control on something as sleek as a Rayban is a genuine breakthrough.

Zucks just experienced some pretty bad luck. At scale. But many founders wouldn’t even dare do this live.

And for that, he deserves some credit.

P.S Zucks wasn’t the first anyway.

• Steve Jobs begs audience for more WiFi (2010)

  During the iPhone 4 keynote at WWDC, Jobs couldn’t load the New York Times in Safari so he eventually asked the audience of journalists to shut off laptops and hotspots, noting “570 Wi-Fi base stations” were active in the room.

• Elon Musk smashes Cybertruck window (2019)
  At Tesla’s 2019 Cybertruck reveal, Musk asked the designer to throw a metal ball at the supposedly unbreakable windows. Both shattered, leaving bullet-like cracks and Musk muttering, “oh my f***ing god.”

Jordan Peele’s Him and horror’s record-breaking year

Horror has always provided Hollywood a reliable return on modest budgets. But 2025 is different: the genre is having a banner year, and Jordan Peele’s Him could push it into the record books.

So far, horror films have raked in around $1.12 billion domestically, closing in on the all-time record of $1.16B set in 2017. The year of It, Get Out, and Split.

2025 has been stacked with breakout hits: Sinners starring Michael B. Jordan ($278M), Weapons (a $40M production pulling in nearly $150M), and franchise revivals like Final Destination: Bloodlines and The Conjuring: Last Rites.

More than 40 horror titles have hit theaters this year, with sequels to The Black Phone and Five Nights at Freddy’s still to come.

Now, the Jordan Peele-produced Him carries the weight of expectations, not just as a new release but as the film that might seal horror’s record-breaking year.

More platform news

• TikTok Deal Nears: White House says U.S. firms will control the app’s algorithm and board, with Oracle overseeing data, though Beijing’s approval remains uncertain.

• Google's "Nano Banana" Trend Goes Viral A new viral trend, dubbed "Nano Banana," has taken Indian social media by storm, showcasing users creating detailed 3D models of figurines from photos using a feature in Google's Gemini AI.

YouTube Live Gets Biggest Upgrade Yet

YouTube just rolled out its most ambitious Live update ever. Aimed at making livestreaming more discoverable and profitable for creators.

The upgrade adds practice mode, so streamers can rehearse before going live. A new Playables on Live library lets creators fill airtime by playing lightweight games like Angry Birds Showdown while chatting with their audience.

Discovery gets a major boost: creators can now stream in vertical and horizontal formats simultaneously, with a single unified chat. YouTube is also expanding React Live, letting anyone start a vertical stream to react to another live event or video in real time.

To keep streams alive after the broadcast ends, AI-powered highlights automatically cut the best moments into Shorts, ready to share.

On the monetization side, YouTube is testing side-by-side ads that run without cutting off streams.

The context: over 30% of logged-in YouTube users watched live content in Q2 2025.

This means the play is clear: Live is becoming a competitive front in the creator economy, and YouTube wants to ensure that when creators think “live,” they don’t default to Twitch or TikTok.

The Rambo Prequel: From AI Fantasy to Live-Action Reality

Sylvester Stallone once floated the idea of starring in an AI-de-aged Rambo prequel, digitally rewinding himself to the war-scarred twenty-something drifter of First Blood. The idea never moved forward but Hollywood has chosen a more traditional route: a bona fide Rambo prequel with Noah Centineo set to lead, scheduled to shoot 2026 in Thailand.

Studios are still wary of handing over entire films to synthetic actors or full AI-de-aging, despite the tech’s rapid advances. De-aging has already worked in controlled doses.

Think The Irishman or Marvel’s flashback scenes. Even back in 2006, Bryan Singer used de-aging for flashback scenes of a younger Prof X and Magneto.

Anchoring an entire blockbuster on a synthetic young Stallone might currently be a step too far..

But for how much longer?

Cut of the Week: Lucy Davidson’s Stop-Motion Animation ‘Baggage’

The great trick of stop-motion is how something so small and handmade can suddenly feel enormous.

Filmmaker Lucy Davidson leans into that magic in Baggage, her black-and-white short where suitcases aren’t just luggage. They’re people with histories, anxieties, and secrets stuffed inside.

The film was an official selection at SXSW 2025 and also a finalist at Sydney.

Not bad for what was fundamentally a student project.

A graduate of Aardman Academy, Davidson spins the airport conveyor belt into an existential stage. Three girlfriends, who also happen to be literal bags, shuffle toward security but one’s weighed down by more than just clothes.

The film asks: As they travel along the conveyor belt to security, can she hide what’s inside?

It’s playful, but piercing and in just a few minutes, Baggage channels the nervous humor and private dread of every traveler who’s ever worried about what might spill out when their life gets scanned.

In the age of the algo, Baggage is proof that sometimes the most affecting images still come frame by painstaking frame. Hand by hand.

Cam News:

• Canon’s 3D VR lens (RF-S3.9mm F3.5 STM Dual Fisheye) won a Gold Award at the 2025 International Design Excellence Awards for its design.

• Insta360 wins its first Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award, for its innovations in 360-degree camera tech and software, making immersive video and live streaming more seamless

• Hamamatsu Photonics introduces the ORCA-Quest IQ camera, a qCMOS sensor camera aimed at life sciences / physics imaging, showing high technical innovation.

From Pitt to Nolan: Paris’ Legendary Video Store on the Brink of Closure

In Paris, legendary DVD store, JM Video has been keeping cinephilia alive since 1982. With over 50,000 titles, the shop’s collection even dwarfs the libraries of Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ .

Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt, Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan have all dropped by when they’re in town but streaming convenience and Parisian rent threaten to close the video store permanently.

JM Video is one of only two DVD rental shops left in Paris (down from 5,000 outlets nationwide in 2000). Store manager Théo Bancilhon says they reported losses of nearly €20,000 in the past two years.

Customers like Virginie Breton swear by their collection. “You can find things here that you cannot find anywhere else,” she says. The store carries everything from obscure festival gems to long-forgotten studio flops that never made it to streaming.

Faced with closure, Bancilhon has turned to the public.

Earlier this month, a crowdfunding campaign raised €26,000 from over 1,000 donors in less than two weeks.

The shop needs €35,000 just to stay afloat, and closer to €65,000 for real security. Against the twin pressures of streaming’s dominance and Parisian rents, survival is anything but certain.

Retail Therapy

Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses: $799

Smart glasses with built-in display, live translation, and gesture-based controls via the Neural Band. Think AI assistant, video calls, and subtitles floating in your field of view, all crammed into a pair of Ray-Bans. We couldn’t not feature them after the horror-show demo at Meta Connect. Shipping Sept 30 in the U.S.

iPhone 17: also from $799

I guess we also couldn’t not feature the new iPhone. Dual Capture lets you film in Dolby Vision with front and back at once. Perfect for vloggers and reaction videos. Shipping now.

Neakasa M1 Robot Vacuum: $550

A self-emptying, laser-guided robo-vac that also mops. Promises quieter suction, smarter navigation, and fewer hairballs left behind.

Vimeo finally got eaten by Bending Spoons (yes, that’s a real company). Fujifilm storms into the cinema kitchen with an 8K medium-format beast, while a pocket-sized VFX app serves blockbuster effects straight from your phone.

Paramount is circling Warner like a main course at the mega-merger buffet, whilst doubling down on Star Trek for dessert.

At TIFF, midnight horror bites collide with Colman Domingo’s awards-season heat, even as AI threatens to resurrect Orson Welles and cook up an animated feature of its own.

This week, cinema’s past, present, and future all sat at the same crowded table.

Here’s what cut through the feast.

Headlines at a Glance

• ‘Andor,’ ‘Arcane,’ and ‘Severance’ Lead Creative Arts Emmy Winners: The Creative Arts Emmy Awards saw big wins for the critically acclaimed series.

• New ‘Star Trek’ Projects Unveiled for 60th Anniversary: Paramount announces a slate of new projects to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the iconic franchise in 2026.

• Beeble Camera App Wants to Be a VFX Studio in Your Pocket: A new app aims to bring powerful visual effects tools to mobile devices.

• OpenAI Hopes Animated 'Critterz' Will Prove AI Is Ready for the Big Screen: The movie is an adaptation of a 2023 short film made using AI tools.

• TIFF Buzz Report: Hamnet Wins TIFF’s People’s Choice Award, Cementing Its Awards-Season Momentum

• Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons Restoration: Nearly 80 years later, AI is being used to reconstruct the long-lost 43 minutes of Welles’ butchered follow-up to Citizen Kane.

• F1 (starring Brad Pitt) has overtaken Mission: Impossible to be the top-grossing Hollywood film so far in 2025.

Paramount Eyes Warner in Mega-Merger Bid

Paramount Skydance was only born in August. And it may already be swinging for the crown.

Reports say David Ellison is prepping a cash takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery. If it lands, the deal would stitch HBO, Warner Bros studios, CNN, DC, Paramount+, Pluto TV, and more into one empire.

Wall Street loved the rumor: WBD stock jumped nearly 30%. But actually pulling it off is another story. Both companies are drowning in debt. Regulators will circle. And the logistics of two streaming platforms, two studio infrastructures, two Hollywood cultures will be a nightmare to untangle.

Still, the ambition is clear. Paramount Skydance wants dominance.

And in a moment when media consolidation is accelerating, this is a shock-drop that could rewrite the industry at every level.

From who makes the shows to where you watch them.

Vimeo Sells to Bending Spoons

Vimeo just got scooped up by Bending Spoons for $1.38B, A long fall from its $8.5B IPO in 2021.

On paper, this looks like a rescue. The Milan-based firm has a rep of or buying faded tech brands (Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup). And running them through a private-equity playbook of ruthless cost-cutting and aggressive monetization.

The results haven’t been pretty.

Mass layoffs. Stripped-down features. Communities left for dead. For filmmakers who once swore by Vimeo as the creative class’s home base, it ain’t looking good.

And let’s not pretend Vimeo was in great shape before this. Billing controversies, support black holes, even an EU exit so badly handled that staff ended up pointing users to a speculative newsletter post for answers.

Not long ago, the “Vimeo Staff Pick” was the holy grail of shortform filmmaking but in 2025, does anyone actually care?

Bending Spoons insists it’s more than an efficiency machine, pointing to improvements in Evernote as proof. But its track record suggests Vimeo’s future hinges less on creator trust and more on balance-sheet discipline.

Then there’s the AI question.

Vimeo promised not to use user videos for model training. But WeTransfer’s clumsy TOS update earlier this year fueled suspicion that Bending Spoons sees archives as training goldmines.

So far, the deal raises more questions than answers. And the dream of Vimeo as a vibrant creative hub feels further away than ever.

More platform news

• Tariffs and TikTok Dominate U.S.–China Trade Talks: Another round of negotiations is underway, with Washington weighing both economic pressure and TikTok’s future in the U.S. spotlight

• Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror) is creating a new crime thriller for Netflix, starring Lena Headey, Georgina Campbell, and Paddy Considine.

Fujifilm unveils its first ever cinema camera

Enter the ETERNA 55:

Fujifilm’s first true cinema camera, and a clear signal they want to dance with the big boys. At its core: a 4:3 open-gate 102MP sensor, nearly three times taller than Super 35.

That means flexibility for anamorphic, reframing, and heavy VFX work.

It comes loaded: dual-base ISOs, variable electronic ND, hot-swap power, full ProRes and RAW recording without an external box. And, true to Fuji form, the film simulations are baked in so shooters get a quick shorthand that feels like 35mm stock.

The body is built for set life: ~2kg, V-mount power, side-mounted monitor, with matching lenses like a 32–90mm zoom tuned for the big sensor.

It’ll cost you around $16,499. Ships October 2025. Which raises the obvious question: who is exactly is this for?

It’s not competing with Arri, Venice, or RED. But it’s also too expensive to sit alongside prosumer cams like Sony’s FX3 or Blackmagic’s lineup.

That leaves the ETERNA 55 in a strange no-man’s-land. Technically impressive, but no clear audience.

Cut of the Week: OK Go “Impulse Purchase”

LA-based Indie rockers, OK Go, have been reinventing the music video for almost two decades ever since they turned a row of treadmills into internet history with Here It Goes Again back in 2006.

From Rube Goldberg contraptions to zero-gravity choreography on a parabolic flight, their visuals have always lived somewhere between stunt and science experiment.

But for all that innovation, they’d never gone fully animated… until now.

“Impulse Purchase” is the first.

An official co-production with Blender Studio, the video is directed by BAFTA winner Will Anderson and designer Lucas Zanotto, with frontman Damian Kulash literally puppeteering the animation through live face-capture.

No painstaking keyframes here. The performance is mapped in real time into a constantly mutating 3D world. It’s glitchy, playful, and unmistakably OK Go.

And the kicker: it’s completely open source.

All of the Blender files and tools are free to download, so anyone can build their own versions. Kulash called the project “weirder, more wonderful” than he’d imagined, and Blenderheads are already running with it.

Creator News:

• YouTube rolls out its multi-language audio dubbing feature to all creators after a two-year pilot.

• Kai Cenat’s “Mafiathon 3” hit a milestone, crossing 300,000 Twitch subscribers during the event.

• ZEvent 2025, a huge French streamer charity event, raised over €16 million in four days from 325 streamers on Twitch.

• YouTube & Creators HQ launch the first YouTube Academy in MENA (Middle East & North Africa), aiming to support skills & sustainable creator careers in the region.

• #TeamWater MrBeast, Mark Rober & thousands of creators from ~115 countries raised $40M for WaterAid to bring clean water to 2M people.

Retail Therapy

• TCL PlayCube Projector: $799
  A cube-sized projector that fits in your hand but throws up to a 120-inch display. Perfect for backyard screenings, travel setups, or flexing your Letterboxd watchlist on a wall.

• Birdfy Smart Bird Feeder: $124
  A Wi-Fi bird feeder with a built-in HD camera that auto-records feathered visitors, IDs the species with AI, and pings you when a cardinal (or just another pigeon) shows up.

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Ciao, Venice. Hey there, Toronto.

As the Lido folds its red carpet, the spotlight flips to TIFF as the runway to the awards season begins.

Summer officially wrapped with horror trying its best to soothe box office blues and Google’s Veo 3 can now make short films out of your camera roll. Meanwhile, Twitch’s Tower is tumbling, Netflix doubles down on Wednesday, and Canon’s got a mystery camera they’re not telling us about.

It’s a week that feels stitched together from mismatched parts. Fest glamour, algorithm drama, and cultural shifts happening in real-time.

Here’s what stood out as we attempted to catch up.

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Headlines at a Glance

• TIFF roars open with Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery premiere, while Channing Tatum nabs the festival’s Tribute Performer Award Read more

• "The Conjuring: Last Rites" Possesses the Box Office: The latest installment of the horror franchise debuts to massive numbers Read more

• Google's Veo 3 AI Will Animate Your Photos: A new AI model in Google Photos can now turn your still images into video, a feature that could change how we think about our camera rolls. Read more

• Canon Teases a New Cinema Camera: A mysterious new teaser from Canon has the camera world buzzing about a potential new addition to their lineup. Read more

• Twitch Viewership Takes a Tumble: Streaming giant saw its lowest viewership numbers since 2020 amid viewbot crackdown. Is this a sign of a larger shift in the creator landscape? Read more

• "Wednesday" Returns to Netflix: The highly anticipated second part of Wednesday's second season has finally dropped on Netflix Read more

• China Mandates AI-Content Labeling first major nation to legislate AI watermarks at scale. Read more

Lions, Laurels, and Letdowns: Unpacking the 82nd Venice

As the Lido rolls up its red carpet, the awards told one story, the ovations another.

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother slipped away with the Golden Lion, a quiet family epic that blindsided many who expected more overtly political fare. The jury’s decision immediately stirred debate: Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab which earned a record-breaking 23-minute standing ovation had to settle for the Grand Jury Prize

Elsewhere, Benny Safdie claimed Best Director for The Smashing Machine, proving his pivot from Safdie Brothers co-pilot to solo helmer was more than just an experiment.

But beyond the main slate, another conversation was brewing.

Running parallel to the festival, the Reply AI Film Festival crowned Love at First Sight as its winner. It’s the kind of cross-pollination that would’ve been unthinkable even a few years ago: the world’s oldest, second-most prestigious festival, bending just enough to make space for synthetic storytellers.

For purists, it’s a warning shot. For futurists, it’s a proof of concept.

Festivals have always been barometers of what cinema means in a given era and Venice 2025 showed us that means both legacy auteurs like Jarmusch still shaping the canon, and AI-driven experiments are now sneaking onto the same waterfront.

The Twitch Tower Tumbles

August wasn’t kind to Twitch. The purple giant logged its lowest viewership since 2020, a five-year low. The drop coincided with a platform-wide viewbot crackdown, which scrubbed inflated numbers off the charts and exposed how much of Twitch’s traffic was smoke and mirrors.

Some streamers saw their metrics literally crash overnight. Others discovered their “average concurrent” was smaller than they thought, a reality check that could hurt sponsorships and CPMs.

Is this just a numbers correction, or start of a platform power shift?

More platform news

• YouTube Rolls Out "Effect Maker" for Shorts: The new tool allows creators to build their own custom effects for Shorts, opening up a new world of creative possibilities. Read more

• Netflix's September Slate: A look at the new and returning shows and movies hitting Netflix this month, including the return of a fan-favorite baking show. Read more

Box Office Blues (With an Asterisk)

Headlines are calling the summer box office a dud.

And yes, at $3.67 billion, the May to Labor Day haul landed just shy of the $3.68 billion earned last summer. But there’s more to it than that. Last year’s summer was blessed with Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.

You know, just two billion-dollar juggernauts that carried that season. Nothing major.

This entire year only one film, Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch, even crawled over the billion-dollar line. Which makes the near-parity with 2024 (and close to 2023, too) more impressive than it looks at first glance.

The what-ifs write themselves. Swap out Thunderbolts and Elio for Avengers: Doomsday and Toy Story 5 and we’re looking at a “summer box office that roared back,” The infrastructure is there, audiences are still showing up but we just didn’t have the tentpoles to tip the scales.

Meanwhile, mid-budget horror and thrillers proved the safest bets.

Weapons cleared $245 million worldwide on a $38 million budget, while Sinners nearly hit $280 million. Even Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters scored $19 million theatrically in just two days, despite dropping on streaming weeks earlier.

Cut of the Week: MrBeast’s “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!”

The Video
MrBeast recreates the iconic Netflix series Squid Game with 456 real players and a staggering cash prize of $456,000. Released on November 24, 2021, the video cost around $3.5 million to produce, allocated between stunning sets and hefty cash rewards

Performance
As MrBeast’s most-watched video (nearly double his next most watched), it has amassed over 850 million views as of September 2025.

What Worked?

1. Worldbuilding on a Grand Scale
   By faithfully recreating Squid Game’s sets with big-ticket production value and immersive design MrBeast delivers spectacle that feels simultaneously familiar and colossal

2. Mass Participation = Mass Drama
   With 456 players, the stakes feel real and unpredictable. Viewers are drawn into a collective spectacle that’s as much about human behavior as it is game mechanics.

3. Clickbait 2.0: Substance Beneath the Shock
   The title grabs you (“Squid Game in Real Life!”), but the payoff is pay-per-view-level production quality and visceral reality-driven suspense. The visual execution justifies the hype rather than undermines it.

4. Effort as Entertainment
   The sheer scale both in budget and logistics underscores that this isn’t just a stunt.. It blurred genre lines between digital content and cinematic spectacle.

5. Strategic Timing
   Released when Squid Game was still fresh in cultural consciousness, MrBeast tapped into collective zeitgeist, amplifying viral potential.

Creator Updates

• Jynxzi Tops the Twitch Charts for August: The streamer was the most-watched creator on the platform last month, thanks in large part to his "99-0" challenge. Read more

• Kai Cenat Announces "Mafiathon 3": The popular streamer has announced the third installment of his popular "Mafiathon" series, set to begin on September 1st. Read more

Retail Therapy

• Lenovo ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept Laptop: Price TBD
  A shape-shifting laptop that flips from landscape to portrait mode. Perfect if you’ve ever wanted your spreadsheet to feel like TikTok. Read more

• Matic Robot Vacuum: $1,095
  A self-driving vacuum with the attitude of a Tesla. Cameras, lidar, and AI mapping, all so it can bully your dust bunnies in 4K. Read more