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.
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.
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.
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 Awardat the 2025 International Design Excellence Awards for its design.
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+ .
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.
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.
