‘Eddington' Trailer: Ari Aster's Western of Pandemic Paranoia Hits Theaters After Dividing Cannes
A24 has dropped the trailer for 'Eddington,' Ari Aster's modern western that divided the Cannes Film Festival after its Croisette premiere. The film will hit theaters nationwide July 18 — and it very well may 'hit' with heated debate.
The film takes place in 2020 — yes, that 2020 — in the most visceral way, with the anti-mask local sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) of the fictional Eddington, New Mexico, facing off against the town's COVID-guideline-advocate mayor, played by Pedro Pascal (the second of his three summer releases). The heavy-hitter cast also includes Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr., and William Belleau, all of whom represent various perspectives on the pandemic spectrum.
More from IndieWire
Pedro Almodóvar's Next Movie 'Bitter Christmas' Set for Spanish Theaters and Streamer Movistar Plus+
'Pinch' Review: Taut Debut Highlights One Woman's Response to Sexual Harassment - and Complicity
IndieWire reported last month on the film's polarizing audience response, with people truly either loving or hating the film, and few in between. The cast and crew addressed the controversial COVID epic's hot-button reactions at a Cannes press conference.
'It's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this,' Pascal said. 'It's far too intimidating a question for me to address. I'm not informed enough. I want people to be safe and protective. I want very much to be on the right side of history … I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. This was building toward an untethered sense of reality. There is a point of not going back. I was overwhelmed by that fear, and it's wonderful that it was confirmed by Ari.'
'I wrote this movie in a state of fear and anxiety. I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore,' Aster added at the same presser.
IndieWire's David Ehrlich wrote in his A- review that the director is 'exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there's a good chance those are your neuroses, too.'
Prior to its release, 'Eddington' will open the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 16. It will be in theaters everywhere July 18. Watch the trailer below.
Best of IndieWire
Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See
'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie
Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How the Disney-Midjourney Suit Could Reshape AI Copyright Law
Mickey Mouse at Disneyland in California. Credit - Getty Images On Wednesday, the long-simmering dispute between Hollywood and the AI industry escalated dramatically when Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, one of the most prominent AI image generators, for copyright infringement. The two Hollywood heavyweight studios argue that Midjourney allows its users to 'blatantly incorporate and copy Disney's and Universal's famous characters,' such as Shrek and Spider-Man. 'Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing,' Horacio Gutierrez, Disney's chief legal officer, said in a general statement. The lawsuit challenges one of the AI industry's fundamental assumptions: that it should be allowed to train upon copyrighted materials under the principle of fair use. How the case gets resolved could have major implications for both AI and Hollywood going forward. 'I really think the only thing that can stop AI companies doing what they're doing is the law,' says Ed Newton-Rex, the CEO of nonprofit organization Fairly Trained, which provides certifications for AI models trained on licensed data. 'If these lawsuits are successful, that is what will hopefully stop AI companies from exploiting people's life's work.' AI companies train their models upon vast amounts of data scoured from across the web. While most of these companies have resisted admitting that they scrape copyrighted material, there are already dozens of AI copyright-related lawsuits in the U.S. alone alleging otherwise. Midjourney, which allows its millions of registered users to generate images from prompts, faces a class-action suit led by artists including Kelly McKernan, who found that users were inputting the artist's name as a keyword in Midjourney to spit out eerily similar artworks. 'These companies are profiting wildly off our unpaid labor,' they told TIME in 2023. For the last few years, Hollywood has refrained from entering the fray, while sending mixed messages about AI. During contract negotiations in 2023, AI was a major source of contention between unions like SAG-AFTRA and producers, who advanced a 'groundbreaking AI proposal' involving the use of 'digital replicas' to fill out the backgrounds of film scenes. Read More: Even AI Filmmakers Think Hollywood's AI Proposal Is Dangerous But while some in Hollywood hope AI will make filmmaking more efficient and less expensive, many more have grown concerned about the AI industry's usage of copyrighted material. This concern has come to a head with the Disney-Universal lawsuit, which is the first major lawsuit brought by Hollywood studios against an AI company. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction that would immediately stop Midjourney's operations—and casts generative AI theft as a problem that 'threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law.' Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 'We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content,' said Kim Harris, executive vice president and general counsel of NBCU. Newton-Rex believes that this lawsuit is particularly significant because of the size, influence and resources of Disney and Universal. 'The more that these mainstays of the American economy weigh into this fight, the harder it is to ignore the simple truth here,' he says. In February, a Delaware judge dealt a blow to the AI industry's 'fair use' argument, ruling that a legal research firm was not allowed to copy the content of Thomson Reuters to build a competing AI-based legal platform. If the Disney-Universal lawsuit is similarly successful, that would have major implications for both AI and Hollywood, says Naeem Talukdar, the CEO of the AI video startup Moonvalley. Many AI companies might have to retrain their visual models from the ground up with licensed content. And Hollywood, if given legal clarity, might actually accelerate its usage of AI models built upon licensed content, like ones built by Natasha Lyonne's and Bryn Mooser's Asteria Film Co. 'Nobody wants to touch these models with a 10-foot pole, because there's a sense that you'll just get sued on the outputs later,' Talukdar says. 'I would expect that if this judgment falls a certain way, you'll see a lull, and then you'll have a new class of models emerge that pays the creators. And then you'll see this avalanche of studios that can now actually start using these models much more freely.' Unsurprisingly, AI companies are fighting back in court. They're also working on another path forward to retain their ability to train their models as they see fit: through governmental policy. In January, OpenAI sent a memo to the White House arguing their ability to train on copyrighted material should be 'preserved.' They then relaxed several rules around copyright in the name of 'creative freedom,' which triggered a flood of Studio Ghibli-style images on social media. In the U.K., the government announced plans to give AI companies access to any copyrighted work that rights holders hadn't explicitly opted out of, which drew a huge backlash from stars like Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa. Last week, the House of Lords rejected the legislation for a fourth time. Newton-Rex says that this dispute over AI and copyright will not be resolved any time soon. 'Billion-dollar AI companies have staked their entire businesses on the idea that they are allowed to take people's life's work and build on it to compete with them. I don't think they're easily going to give that up because of one lawsuit,' he says. Nevertheless, he says that the announcement of this lawsuit is 'really good for creators everywhere.' Contact us at letters@
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Google offers buyouts to more workers amid AI-driven tech upheaval and antitrust uncertainty
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up ENTERTAINMENT Advertisement Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement The headquarters of The Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, Calif. Beth Coller/NYT Disney and Universal have filed a copyright lawsuit against popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney on Wednesday, marking the first time major Hollywood companies have enter the legal battle over generative AI. Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute 'endless unauthorized copies' of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from 'Star Wars' and the Minions from 'Despicable Me.' 'Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,' the companies state in the complaint. The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation. Midjourney didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. — ASSOCIATED PRESS Advertisement ENTERTAINMENT Nintendo Switch 2 sets sales record in boon for games sector A customer posed with a Nintendo Switch 2 game console at a Bic Camera Inc. electronics store in Tokyo on June 5. Kiyoshi Ota/Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomb Nintendo Co. sold 3.5 million-plus units of the Switch 2 in just four days, a record-breaking start for the company's first new console in eight years. The Japanese company has already sold more of the device than the roughly 2.7 million the original Switch managed during its first month in 2017. The numbers, released by the company Wednesday, bode well for its target to sell 15 million units by March next year. They also reinforce analysts' projections that Nintendo may be able to sell far more if it can pump up supply. Gamers from Tokyo to San Francisco lined up for hours last week to get their hands on one of the most highly anticipated gadgets of the year. The long-awaited Switch 2 succeeds a global hit in the original, which pioneered a hybrid design that allows play both at home on a TV and on the move. The release of the new Switch was regarded as a watershed moment for the industry, steering business decisions by partners and competitors for years to come. At a time of thinning margins and exploding development budgets, a popular new console may galvanize the sector and provide a counterbalance to the increasing dominance of a handful of marquee, live-service games. — BLOOMBERG NEWS Advertisement ENERGY World Bank ends its ban on funding nuclear power projects Two cooling towers of the Civaux nuclear power plant in Civaux, central France. ROMAIN PERROCHEAU/AFP via Getty Images The world's largest and most influential development bank said Wednesday that it would lift its long-standing ban on funding nuclear power projects. The decision by the board of the World Bank could have profound implications for the ability of developing countries to industrialize without burning planet-warming fuels such as coal and oil. The ban has been formally in place since 2013, but the last time the bank funded a nuclear power project was 1959 in Italy. In the decades since, a few of the bank's major funders, particularly Germany, have opposed its involvement in nuclear energy, on the grounds that the risk of catastrophic accidents in poor countries with less expertise in nuclear technology was unacceptably high. The bank's policy shift, described in an email to employees late Wednesday, comes as nuclear power is experiencing a global surge in support. Casting nuclear power as an essential replacement for fossil fuels, more than 20 countries — including the United States, Canada, France, and Ghana — signed a pledge to triple nuclear power by 2050 at the United Nations' flagship climate conference two years ago. The Trump administration, while far less concerned about climate change than it is with competing against the Russian and Chinese nuclear industries, is trying to expand the fleet of American reactors and quadruple their contribution to the country's electric grids. Cabinet officials have emphasized support for a new generation of smaller reactors that offer the promise of faster deployment but have yet to be proven. The United States is the World Bank's single largest shareholder and holds significant sway over its policies. In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the bank to lift its ban, saying in a speech that doing so would 'revolutionize energy supply for many emerging markets.' — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement AUTOMAKERS GM dodges tariffs with production shift to US from Mexico The General Motors assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg General Motors plans to invest $4 billion in its US plants over the next two years in response to President Trump's tariffs in a move that reduces production in Mexico while boosting domestic output of some of its some of its top-selling gas-powered vehicles. The spending will expand factories in Michigan, Kansas, and Tennessee. The moves will boost annual US production capacity by 300,000 vehicles, GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said at a Deutsche Bank conference on Wednesday Assembly of several top-selling models, including its very profitable Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks and the Chevrolet Equinox SUV, will move to factories in the United States from Mexico. GM plans to add between 3,000 and 4,000 US jobs when all production is in place, a spokesman said. The shift marks one of the biggest pivots yet by an automaker in response to Trump's tariffs that have upended the economics of automobile manufacturing. It's also a recognition by chief executive Mary Barra that Trump's trade war is not a passing phase. The investments will allow GM to produce more than 2 million vehicles in the United States each year. GM will continue making vehicles affected by the announcement in Mexico, but at lower volumes, the person said. — BLOOMBERG NEWS Advertisement
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
AMC theaters to play longer ads in lieu of more-expensive tickets
The advertisements before movies are expected to get longer at AMC Cinemas. But it's to combat one thing. The cinema chain is joining major competitors in running even more commercials starting in July under a new partnership with cinema advertising company National CineMedia, USA Today reported. Under the deal, AMC will play commercials in the 'platinum spot,' the part right before the movie begins. The goal is to add revenue without increasing customer ticket prices as theaters continues to struggle financially and recover from COVID-19 losses. 'For the past five years, AMC has sought out crucial revenue that is not reliant on the increase of base ticket prices,' the company said in a statement to the New York Times. While AMC expressed it was reluctant to bring this to theaters, the company also said its competitors have fully participated for more than five years, without any direct impact to their attendance. It is unclear how long the advertisements will run and what kind of ads viewers can expect to see. Find your closest AMC theater here. A Juneteenth tribute to Afro-Caribbean traditions in art, dance in Holyoke; plus an events listing WMass adds its voice to 'No Kings' Day protest at federal building on Saturday Springfield mayor to announce $420K for kids' summer programs Disney to make final payment of $439 million for full control of Hulu Costco to offer new perk for customers — but there's a catch Read the original article on MassLive. Sign in to access your portfolio
