Dwayne Johnson and Leonardo DiCaprio to team up for Martin Scorsese Hawaii mob movie
NEW YORK — Martin Scorsese's next film will pack a punch now that Leonardo DiCaprio and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson have been reportedly attached to star in it.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind New York City-set classics like 'Taxi Driver' and 'Goodfellas' will head to the Aloha State for his next star-studded flick — a mob movie set in Hawaii during the 1960s and '70s.
According to Deadline, Johnson, DiCaprio and Emily Blunt are in discussions for the project based on a real-life crime boss who tussled with mainland companies and rival gangs to exert control over the Hawaiian islands.
Vanity Fair journalist and screenwriter Nick Bilton also confirmed his involvement on Thursday.
'I'm writing a movie for Martin Scorsese starring this unbelievably incredible cast!' he posted in an Instagram story, along with screenshots of Deadline's article.
Johnson and Blunt, who previously worked together on 'Jungle Cruise' and will soon be seen in the UFC fighter biopic 'The Smashing Machine,' reportedly teamed up to present the project to longtime collaborators Scorsese and DiCaprio. Once interest was sparked, they all reached out to Bilton to ask him about writing, Variety reported.
Bilton is the mastermind behind the 2021 HBO documentary 'Fake Famous.' He also worked as a writer on HBO's scripted series 'The Idol,' starring Lily-Rose Depp and the Weeknd, and served as producer on the network's documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Sarah Michelle Gellar Wants to ‘Bring Back Everyone Who Has Died' in the Original For the ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Reboot
Sarah Michelle Gellar is hoping for a serious revival in the upcoming 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' reboot. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair Italia, Gellar, who played the titular vampire-slaying heroine in the 1997 series, said she hopes for a massive 'Buffy' reunion in the reboot. That means bringing back all the characters from the past, even if they perished in the original. More from Variety Sarah Michelle Gellar Says She Knows 'A Few' Children of Original 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Cast Members Who Auditioned For Reboot 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Reboot Pilot Casts Ryan Kiera Armstrong in Lead Role 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Director 'Tried Relentlessly' to Convince Sarah Michelle Gellar to Return for Sequel Despite Her Character's Death: I Had to 'Pitch Some Crazy S-' 'It will be lighter than the last few seasons of the original,' Gellar said. 'We will try to find a balance between new and old characters. My dream is to bring back everyone who has died, but space will have to be made for new stories as well.' It was unveiled back in February that Hulu was nearing a pilot order for a 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' sequel series. A few months later, in May, Ryan Kiera Armstrong was officially named series lead. It was also revealed that Gellar will star in the pilot and then continue in a recurring role as Buffy. 'From the moment I saw Ryan's audition, I knew there was only one girl that I wanted by my side,' Gellar said of Armstrong's casting. 'To have that kind of emotional intelligence, and talent, at such a young age is truly a gift. The bonus is that her smile lights up even the darkest room.' Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman will write, showrun and executive produce the 'Buffy' reboot. Gellar will also executive produce alongside Gail Berman. Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui will executive produce under the Suite B banner, while Dolly Parton will executive produce under Sandollar. 20th Television and Searchlight Television serve as producers. Berman, the Kuzuis and Parton all executive produced the original 'Buffy' series. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Digital Trends
an hour ago
- Digital Trends
Watch John Oliver and a wood carver turn the tables on AI slop
Last Week Tonight frontman John Oliver put AI slop in the crosshairs in the latest edition of the popular HBO show. AI slop, for the uninitiated, is all the AI-generated imagery that's starting to take over your feeds on sites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Pinterest. The slop can also be AI-generated videos on YouTube, music on platforms like Spotify, and even e-books, news articles, and games. As Oliver notes in his monologue, the growth of powerful AI-generation tools over the last couple of years has made it easier than ever to 'mass produce and flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content.' Oliver gave a few examples: 'Images of Jesus made out of shrimp … videos like Barron Trump wowing the judges on America's Got Talent while his dad plays backup piano, a pug raising a baby on a desert island, or Pope Francis taking a selfie with Jesus while flying through heaven.' The Last Week Tonight host also points to some deeply strange though highly creative videos showing people transforming into various fruits and vegetables (6:51), with his favorite one showing a man changing into a red cabbage (yes, it's as wacky as it sounds). But the show takes a more troubling turn when Oliver highlights a photo of a man beside a wood carving of a dog (14:49). The photo, which has more than a million likes, is AI-generated, and is very close to another (real) image of a wood sculptor next to a wood carving of a dog. The issue is that generative-AI models are trained on content — including real artworks, books, music, and so on — scraped from the internet, and the artists whose work has been scraped, like this wood sculptor's efforts, are not being compensated. And worse still, the platforms hosting the slop are raking in revenue, as are some of the folks posting AI slop. 'So any enjoyment you may get from weird, funny AI slop tends to be undercut when you know that someone's hard work was stolen in order to create it,' Oliver said. In a neat move at the end of the show (27:02), Oliver brings in the wood carver, Michael Jones, to show off a piece of his own work based on the previously mentioned red cabbage man, neatly turning the tables on AI slop. 'I don't have a big fix for all of this, or indeed, any of it,' Oliver said. 'What I do have, though, is a petty way to respond. Because perhaps one small way to get back at all the AI slop ripping off artists would be to create real art by ripping off AI slop.'
Hamilton Spectator
2 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Q&A: Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan chronicles Virgil Abloh's rise to fashion fame
NEW YORK (AP) — With his calm and cool demeanor, fashion disruptor and multi-hyphenate Virgil Abloh artfully challenged the fashion industry's traditions to leave his mark as a Black creative, despite his short-lived career. In the years since his 2021 death at just 41, his vision and image still linger. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robin Givhan sheds new light on how Abloh ascended the ranks of one of the top luxury fashion houses and captivated the masses with her latest book, 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh.' In the book out Tuesday, Givhan documents Abloh's early life growing up as the son of Ghanaian immigrants in Rockford, Illinois, his days as graduate student studying architecture and his working relationship and friendship with Kanye West. Before taking the helm of Louis Vuitton as the house's first Black menswear creative director, Abloh threw himself into his creative pursuits including fine art, architecture, DJing and design. Abloh remixed his interests with his marketing genius and channeled it into fashion with streetwear labels like Been Trill and Pyrex Vision. These endeavors were the launchpad for his luxury streetwear label Off-White , known for its white diagonal lines, quotation marks, red zip ties and clean typeface. Off-White led to Abloh's collaboration with Ikea, where he designed a rug with 'KEEP OFF' in all-white letters and also with Nike where he deconstructed and reenvisioned 10 of Nike's famous shoe silhouettes. Throughout his ventures, Abloh built a following of sneakerheads and so-called hypebeasts who liked his posts, bought into his brands and showed up in droves outside his fashion shows. Social media made Abloh accessible to his fans and he tapped into that. Off-White had built a loyal following and some critics. Givhan, a Washington Post senior critic-at-large, openly admits that she was among the latter early on. Givhan said she was fascinated that Abloh's popularity was more than his fashion. 'For me, there was something of a disconnect really,' she said. 'That here was this person who had clearly had an enormous impact within the fashion industry and outside of the fashion industry, and yet it wasn't really about the clothing. It was about something else.' For her latest project, Givhan spoke with The Associated Press on how she approached each of Abloh's creative undertakings and his legacy during a period of heightened racial tension in America. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. AP: Tell me why you felt it was important to include the context of what was happening at the time Abloh was growing up as well as on his rise up through the fashion industry, with him ultimately ending up at Louis Vuitton. GIVHAN: Fashion doesn't just sort of happen in a vacuum. People are the product of their parents, their family, their environment, their timing, their interests, all of those things. I always like to see, what is swirling around people when they make certain decisions? What is sort of in the water that you're absorbing, that you are not even conscious that you're absorbing it. AP: Can you talk about the process of writing about all of his creative endeavors and how they shaped his career? GIVHAN: The skater culture — in part because it was such a sort of subculture that also had a very specific aesthetic and was such a deep part of the whole world of streetwear — and then the DJing part intrigued me because so much of his work as a designer seems to reflect a kind of DJ ethos, where you're not creating the melody and you're not creating the lyrics. You're taking these things that already exist and you're remixing them and you're responding to the crowd and the crowd is informing you. And so much of that, to me, could also be used to describe the way that he thought about fashion and the way that he designed. AP: What role would you say that Virgil has had in the fashion industry today? GIVHAN: He certainly raised the question within the industry of what is the role of the creative director? How much more expansive is that role? ... And I do think he has really forced the question of how are we defining luxury? Like what is a luxury brand? And is it something that is meant to sort of have this lasting impact? Is it supposed to be this beautifully crafted item? Or is it really just a way of thinking about value and beauty and desirability? And if it's those things, then really it becomes something that is quite sort of quite personal and can be quite based on the community in which you live. AP: How did he use social media to his advantage and to help catapult his career? GIVHAN: He really used social media as a way of connecting with people as opposed to just sort of using it as kind of a one-way broadcast. He was telling his side of things, but he was also listening to other people. He was listening to that feedback. That's also what made him this larger-than-life person for a lot of people, because not only was he this creative person who was in conversation with fans and contemporaries, but he was this creative person inside. He was this creative person at the very top of the fashion industry. For a lot of people, the idea that you could ostensibly have a conversation with someone at that level, and they would seemingly pull back the curtain and be transparent about things — that was really quite powerful. AP: You write about his relationship to Kanye in the book. Were you able to get any input from him on their relationship for the book? GIVHAN: Their individual ambitions, aesthetic ideas and curiosity kind of propelled them forward in separate directions. I did reach out to Kanye after a lot of the reporting because he obviously is this thread that is woven throughout the book. And, ultimately, he elected not to engage. But I was lucky enough to get access to an unpublished conversation that Virgil had had around, I think it was 2016-ish, where he talked at length about his working relationship with Kanye and sort of the differences between them and the similarities and the ways in which ... Kanye inspired him and sort of the jet fuel that he got from that relationship. More than anything, because Virgil's personality was in so many ways kind of the opposite of Kanye's, that for every door that Kanye was kind of pounding on, Virgil was able to politely sort of walk through. AP: Why do you think his legacy continues to persist? GIVHAN: For one, he had such an enormous output of work. I think there's a lot of it to consider. Also, sadly, because his career was cut so short that there is this sense of someone who sort of stops speaking mid-sentence. I've been thinking about how Virgil might have responded, how his creativity might have responded to this moment because so much shifted post-George Floyd that like this is another inflection point and it makes me wonder, 'OK, how would he have responded today?' And with the person who said, 'I'm not a rebel and I'm not a flame thrower,' would he have picked up some matches? I don't know.
