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‘Kalki 2898 AD,’ ‘Aarya’ teams, Siddharth Roy Kapur on India’s 2023: ‘A Collective Euphoria and Catharsis’

The teams behind upcoming sci-fi epic “Kalki 2898 AD,” hit Disney+ Hotstar series “Aarya” and prolific producer Siddharth Roy Kapur spoke with Variety on what has been an eventful 2023 for the Indian entertainment landscape. 2023, the first full year of business since the pandemic, saw Indian audiences return in droves to cinemas.

 

It was also a golden year for streaming with all the major Indian platform delivering global hits.

 

Roy Kapur had a packed year with Season 2 of Emmy-nominated Indian space and nuclear program-themed “Rocket Boys” on SonyLIV, epic war film “Pippa” making a direct-to-streaming debut on Prime Video and comedy-drama film “Tumse Na Ho Payega” bowing on Disney+ Hotstar.

 

“What we haven’t had is a theatrical release this year, which feels a little strange,” Roy Kapur told Variety, adding that “Deva,” an action thriller directed by Rosshan Andrrews and produced by Roy Kapur Films and Zee Studios, with Shahid Kapoor and Pooja Hegde in the lead, is gearing for an October 2024 theatrical release during the Dussehra holiday frame.

 

“It’s been an interesting year of water getting to find its own level after the pandemic, so things are still a little bit in flux overall. But the good part is that all the obituaries that were being written about the theatrical model dying out and people not coming back to cinemas, that’s been disproved completely this year, which is great,” Roy Kapur said.

 

“The human need to connect is is something that we maybe didn’t think was as strong as audiences have shown us it is,” Roy Kapur added. There’s a limit to being absorbed in the black mirror that you hold in the palm of your hand, or the one that you’re sitting at home and staring into, you need to go out and connect with other people, you need to enjoy shared experiences. And the good part is, across [various Indian] languages this year, we had movies that give them that sense of celebratory enjoyment in a cinema hall.”

 

Amita Madhvani, producer of Emmy-nominated Disney+ Hotstar series “Aarya,” now in its third season, recounted the experience of watching Karan Johar’s hit film “Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani” in the cinema. “The audience was singing, they sang the songs together, people repeated dialogues. People were clapping, people stood up and matched the steps. It was mad. I think this is just what we grew up on, this is what we know, let people connect. It’s a feeling,” Madhvani said.

 

“Aarya” director Ram Madhvani added, “It’s a collective euphoria, and a collective catharsis. And I think that’s really what has helped, apart from the movies also being stuff that you want to see.”

 

Next up for the Madhvanis is series “The Waking of a Nation,” set against the backdrop of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, an infamous event in Indian colonial history. It has just completed principal photography.

 

Producer Swapna Dutt, along with her sister Priyanka, have been consumed during the pandemic years with big-budget sci-fi epic “Kalki 2898 AD,” directed by “Mahanati” filmmaker Nag Ashwin and produced by Vyjayanthi Movies, with a cast led by Prabhas, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan, Deepika Padukone and Disha Patani.

 

“People are wanting to go back for the experience of it, laugh together, enjoy the momentum, go to event films,” said Swapna Dutt. “At the same time, are we are we in the mood to go to an average film at this point of time? No, because there’s also a lot of other interesting content on OTT [streaming], that challenge is still there. Probably back in the early days, when we didn’t have [streaming] even a mediocre film would do decent box office numbers, which is not the case now. That’s the clarity that we’ve got post-pandemic.”

 

The pandemic has also made the Indian audience language agnostic. “Kalki 2898 AD,” for example, will release in 2024 in the four south Indian languages – Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam – and north Indian language Hindi, with plans to release it in some international languages as well. “Aarya,” where Sushmita Sen plays the title role, was released across multiple languages and found audiences in all of them.

 

“‘Aarya’ has definitely penetrated, because as a character, she is not barred by any language. No language has controlled her emotion, what she’s trying to say, what’s happening to her, the entire world around Aarya,” said Amita Madhvani.

 

On the lessons from the streaming business over the last year, Ram Madhvani said, “We’ve been at the receiving end of the viewers’ patience. And I think that time is not the same that it was two to three years ago. That means that they’re asking for shorter episodes, they’re not asking for longer stuff – they want to keep it moving.” Madhvani added that streaming platforms provide a safeguard for stars who have a theatrical career and allow them to make off-mainstream choices.

 

Looking back at 2023 and anticipating 2024, Swapna Dutt hails the fact that the Indian industry is in the process of coming together as one big industry rather than several fragmented ones, with a flow of talent, technicians and finance between them. “Today, we’re talking about Indian cinema on par with world cinema, which is just the best thing for all of us in the last few years,” Swapna Dutt said. “Kalki 2898 AD” made a splash at the San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year.

 

Priyanka Dutt added, “Audiences are always changing, and as filmmakers, we have to be true to what is exciting me as a filmmaker, to put my heart, my energy, my whole hard work in it.”

 

“It’s important to just keep our minds open and flexible, and be driven by the stories rather than be driven by formulae,” Roy Kapur said.

 

 

 

— Variety (EXCLUSIVE) 

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A study estimates that there are 13.3B+ videos on YouTube, with 4B+ posted to its platform in 2023; median YouTube video has 39 views

—  I got interested in this question a few years ago, when I started writing about the “denominator problem.”

 

Ethan Zuckerman:

 

 

— A great deal of social media research focuses on finding unwanted behavior – mis/disinformation, hate speech – on platforms. This isn’t that hard to do: search for “white genocide” or “ivermectin” and count the results. Indeed, a lot of eye-catching research does just this – consider Avaaz’s August 2020 report about COVID misinformation. It reports 3.8 billion views of COVID misinfo in a year, which is a very big number. But it’s a numerator without a denominator – Facebook generates dozens or hundreds of views a day for each of its 3 billion users – 3.8 billion views is actually a very small number, contextualized with a denominator.

 

A few social media platforms have made it possible to calculate denominators. Reddit, for many years, permitted Pushshift to collect all Reddit posts, which means we can calculate what a small fraction of Reddit is focused on meme stocks or crypto, versus conversations about mental health or board gaming. Our Redditmap.social platform – primarily built by Virginia Partridge and Jasmine Mangat – is based around the idea of looking at the platform as a whole and understanding how big or small each community is compared to the whole. Alas, Reddit cut off public access to Pushshift this summer, so Redditmap.social can only use data generated early this year.

 

Twitter was also a good platform for studying denominators, because it created a research API that took a statistical sample of all tweets and gave researchers access to every 10th or 100th one. If you found 2500 tweets about ivermectin a day, and saw 100m tweets through the decahose (which gave researchers 1/10th of tweet volume), you could calculate an accurate denominator (100m x 10) (All these numbers are completely made up.) Twitter has cut off access to these excellent academic APIs and now charges massive amounts of money for much less access, which means that it’s no longer possible for most researchers to do denominator-based work.

 

Interesting as Reddit and Twitter are, they are much less widely used than YouTube, which is used by virtually all internet users. Pew reports that 93% of teens use YouTube – the closest service in terms of usage is Tiktok with 63% and Snapchat with 60%. While YouTube has a good, well-documented API, there’s no good way to get a random, representative sample of YouTube. Instead, most research on YouTube either studies a collection of videos (all videos on the channels of a selected set of users) or videos discovered via recommendation (start with Never Going to Give You Up, objectively the center of the internet, and collect recommended videos.) You can do excellent research with either method, but you won’t get a sample of all YouTube videos and you won’t be able to calculate the size of YouTube.

 

I brought this problem to Jason Baumgartner, creator of PushShift, and prince of the dark arts of data collection. One of Jason’s skills is a deep knowledge of undocumented APIs, ways of collecting data outside of official means. Most platforms have one or more undocumented APIs, widely used by programmers for that platform to build internal tools. In the case of YouTube, that API is called “Inner Tube” and its existence is an open secret in programmer communities. Using InnerTube, Jason suggested we do something that’s both really smart and really stupid: guess at random URLs and see if there are videos there.

 

Here’s how this works: YouTube URLs look like this: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

 

That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

 

We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.

 

There’s lots you can do once you’ve got those videos. Ryan McGrady is lead author on our paper in the Journal of Quantitative Description, and he led the process of watching a thousand of these videos and hand-coding them, a massive and fascinating task. Kevin wired together his retrieval scripts with a variety of language detection systems, and we now have a defensible – if far from perfect – estimate of what languages are represented on YouTube. We’re starting some experiments to understand how the videos YouTube recommends differ from the “average” YouTube video – YouTube likes recommending videos with at least ten thousand views, while the median YouTube video has 39 views.

 

I’ll write at some length in the future about what we can learn from a true random sample of YouTube videos. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the idea of “the quotidian web”, learning from the bottom half of the long tail of user-generated media so we can understand what most creators are doing with these tools, not just from the most successful influencers. But I’m going to limit myself to the question that started this blog post: how big is YouTube?

 

Consider drunk dialing again. Let’s assume you only dial numbers in the 413 area code: 413-000-0000 through 413-999-9999. That’s 10,000,000 possible numbers. If one in 100 phone calls connect, you can estimate that 100,000 people have numbers in the 413 area code. In our case, our drunk dials tried roughly 32k numbers at the same time, and we got a “hit” every 50,000 times or so. Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos – we are now updating this number every few weeks at tubestats.org.

 

Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

 

Perhaps the most important thing we did with our set of random videos is to demonstrate a vastly better way of studying YouTube than drunk dialing. We know our method is random because it iterates through the entire possible address space. By comparing our results to other ways of generating lists of YouTube videos, we can declare them “plausibly random” if they generate similar results. Fortunately, one method does – it was discovered by Jia Zhou et. al. in 2011, and it’s far more efficient than our naïve method. (You generate a five character string where one character is a dash – YouTube will autocomplete those URLs and spit out a matching video if one exists.) Kevin now polls YouTube using the “dash method” and uses the results to maintain our dashboard at Tubestats.

 

We have lots more research coming out from this data set, both about what we’re discovering and about some complex ethical questions about how to handle this data. (Most of the videos we’re discovering were only seen by a few dozen people. If we publish those URLs, we run the risk of exposing to public scrutiny videos that are “public” but whose authors could reasonably expect obscurity. Thus our paper does not include the list of videos discovered.) Ryan has a great introduction to main takeaways from our hand-coding. He and I are both working on longer writing about the weird world of random videos – what can we learn from spending time deep in the long tail?

 

Perhaps most importantly, we plan to maintain Tubestats so long as we can. It’s possible that YouTube will object to the existence of this resource or the methods we used to create it. Counterpoint: I believe that high level data like this should be published regularly for all large user-generated media platforms. These platforms are some of the most important parts of our digital public sphere, and we need far more information about what’s on them, who creates this content and who it reaches.

 

Many thanks to the Journal for Quantitative Description of publishing such a large and unwieldy paper – it’s 85 pages! Thanks and congratulations to all authors: Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner and myself. And thank you to everyone who’s funded our work: the Knight Foundation has been supporting a wide range of our work on studying extreme speech on social media, and other work in our lab is supported by the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

 

Finally – I’ve got COVID, so if this post is less coherent than normal, that’s to be expected. Feel free to use the comments to tell me what didn’t make sense and I will try to clear it up when my brain is less foggy.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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‘Iron Claw’ director didn’t include one Von Erich brother because his death ‘was one more tragedy that the film’ couldn’t withstand

“The Iron Claw” revolves around the Von Erich family, a dynasty of professional wrestlers who made history in the intensely competitive sport in the early 1980s.

 

Based on a true story, the A24 drama features Von Erich brothers Kevin (Zac Efron), David (Harris Dickinson), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and Mike (Stanley Simons). One brother, however, was omitted from the film altogether: Chris Von Erich.

Courtesy Everett Collection

 

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, “Iron Claw” filmmaker Sean Durkin explained why he decided not to include the youngest Von Erich, who also wrestled but struggled to match his brothers’ success due to his asthma and brittle bone condition. He died by suicide in 1991 at age 21.

 

“There was a repetition to it, and it was one more tragedy that the film couldn’t really withstand,” Durkin said of a version that included all the brothers. “I honestly don’t know if it would have gotten made.”

 

The pro-wrestling family was plagued with a series of tragedies that became known as the “Von Erich curse”: David died suddenly in 1984 at age 25, and both Mike and Kerry died by suicide in 1987 and 1993 respectively. These deaths are seen through the eyes of Kevin, the sole surviving Von Erich brother, in “The Iron Claw.”

 

“Chris was in the script for five years,” Durkin said, adding that removing Chris from the final version was “an impossible choice” that he fought against for a while.

 

Durkin also decided not to contact Kevin until he finished writing his script.

 

“When you’re trying to get a film made, you have to separate it at some point and say, ‘These are characters on a page, and this is a film, and there’s no way you’re going to fully capture the life of a person in a film,’” Durkin explained. “You have to make difficult choices to try and get to something truthful or representative or emotional that reflects the core of the journey you’re choosing to tell within this family.”

 

“The Iron Claw” is currently in theaters.

 

 

 

— Variety

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Data.ai: Puzzle app Royal Match globally held top spot for biggest mobile game by monthly revenue since July, beating Candy Crush Saga

—  Istanbul-based developer Dream Games is on track to double revenue from its debut title despite a lacklustre year for mobile peers

 

 

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:

 

Puzzle app Royal Match, developed by a small team in Istanbul, has overtaken Microsoft-owned Candy Crush Saga as the most lucrative mobile game in the world, outshining other smartphone titles during a lacklustre 12 months for the industry. Royal Match became the biggest mobile game by monthly revenue globally in July and has held the top spot since then, according to Data.ai, which tracks consumer spending on Apple and Android app stores.

 

Launched in 2021, it is the debut title from Dream Games, a Turkish start-up valued at $2.75bn early last year. For more than a decade, King’s Candy Crush Saga has been one of the world’s most consistently popular games on any platform, hitting $20bn in cumulative revenue this year. Now part of Microsoft after its $75bn buyout of Activision Blizzard, Candy Crush has spent only six months outside the top 10 highest-revenue mobile games since it was released in late 2012, according to Data.ai. Consumer spending on Royal Match more than doubled in the year to October, increasing the game’s annual gross revenue run rate (before paying out app store fees) to $2bn, said Soner Aydemir, Dream Games co-founder and chief executive.

 

Royal Match grew so much in what has been another challenging year for mobile games, its creators and investors say, thanks to a focus on quality and mass-market appeal, in a sector that often sees short-term money-spinners launched into Apple’s and Google’s app stores by a few developers on a low budget. “We strongly believe quality is the best business plan,” Aydemir said. Data.ai is forecasting the mobile games market will decline about 3 per cent this year globally, including in China, making Royal Match — alongside Scopely’s Monopoly Go! — a scarce new hit. “They have had a very impressive year,” said Lexi Sydow, head of insights at Data.ai. Royal Match is a “match-three” puzzle game, which would typically involve lining up tiles or icons to clear a grid. These have become the most popular casual gaming genre since they were popularised by Bejeweled in the early 2000s.

PHOTO: Soner Aydemir, Dream Games co-founder and chief executive: ‘What we are focusing on is a little bit different to our competitors’ © Ege Islek

 

While it spawned many imitators, Candy Crush Saga came to dominate the match-three market, ranking number one by consumer spend on mobile app stores for nearly 127 consecutive months, according to Data.ai. At least, until this summer. Aydemir said his players are more loyal and willing to spend more on in-game items than in other puzzle apps. More than 90 per cent of Royal Match users who have played the game for a year go on to play it for a second year, he added. Part of Royal Match’s success is its mass-market appeal, with an easy-to-learn puzzle element and bright and breezy storyline that draws a wider audience than the fantasy battlers or casino games that typically dominate the revenue charts, Sydow said. With about 55mn monthly active users, it has succeeded in persuading players to spend more on average than Candy Crush’s much larger audience of approximately 160mn does, according to Data.ai. Dream Games’ investors are hoping that it can outlast other pretenders to Candy Crush’s throne, such as Playrix’s Gardenscapes and Homescapes, which briefly outsold King’s hit for a few months in 2020.

 

“So many mobile games are a bit glitchy or the graphics aren’t that good but Royal Match is a luxury experience,” said Rob Moffat, an early investor in Dream Games with Balderton Capital, the London-based venture capital firm. “Nothing ever breaks, it’s a really clear clean art style. They think about every detail.” Dream has also invested heavily in advertising to bring in new players and lure back lapsed ones, at a time when many mobile games developers have struggled to navigate Apple’s privacy changes, which have impeded ad targeting of “whales” or big spenders in the past few years. “There’s this idea that in a climate where it’s more difficult to find your whales, it might be smarter to go broader,” said Sydow.

PHOTO: ‘Royal Kingdom’, the coming follow-up to ‘Royal Match’ © Dream Games

 

Next year, Dream Games plans to capitalise on its success by launching a follow-up, Royal Kingdom, that Aydemir hopes will “extend the story and the universe” of Match’s lead character, King Robert. Royal Kingdom, which introduces Robert’s brother Richard, is being tested in the UK and other select markets. “What we are focusing on is a little bit different to our competitors,” said Aydemir. “We are focusing on building an [intellectual property] and characters and a universe, with a well-crafted product to create a high-quality game with long-term and mass appeal.” Dream Games wants to avoid being a “one-hit wonder”, said Danny Rimer, a partner at investor Index Ventures, who sits on its board. “They have higher expectations for themselves.” The start-up was founded in 2019 by former executives at Peak Games, another Turkish mobile developer that was acquired in 2020 by US rival Zynga. Dream Games, which now employs 200 people and is profitable, recently brought on Ed Catmull, co-founder of digital animation pioneer Pixar, as a strategic adviser.

 

“When I first started playing Royal Match, I was struck by the unusual attention to the quality of the game’s visuals,” said Catmull, who has passed 5,000 levels on the game, according to Aydemir. Aydemir is an admirer of Pixar and its parent, Walt Disney, for both their output and their organising principles, and has watched The Lion King musical five times and the Frozen stage show twice. Dream Games has a 35-seat cinema in its Istanbul office where all staff, including software engineers, regularly watch movies — then spend hours afterwards analysing what makes them good or bad. “It builds a creative culture in the company,” Aydemir said. “We also play very bad games to understand why they are not good enough.”

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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When Take-Two hit $12B Zynga deal in 2022, casual games peaked, Apple introduced ATT, but mobile game market fell

—  Video-game giant’s push into smartphone titles was expensive and late. 

 

 

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg:

 

—  Excitement over the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto VI is letting publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. deflect investor attention from a big problem: its $12 billion foray into the shrinking mobile-games business.

With just a small presence in the fastest-growing segment of video games — titles played on smartphones — Take-Two splurged last year on Zynga, known originally for Facebook games like FarmVille and Words With Friends. It was the biggest deal ever in video games and boosted revenue from mobile titles to half of Take-Two’s $5.3 billion in annual sales.

 

Unfortunately for Take-Two and longtime Chief Executive Officer Strauss Zelnick, the deal closed just as the mobile-games business was heading into a downturn. With the end of Covid-19 restrictions, consumers who had embraced casual games during the pandemic turned to other diversions. At the same time, Apple Inc. built new privacy features into its software that made it harder for Zynga to attract new players.

“They closed the deal, and the mobile industry spent the next 18 months correcting,” said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen Group who nonetheless recommends buying Take-Two shares because of its other titles, including prospects for GTA VI.

Since the spring of 2022, sales from Zynga’s five highest-grossing games have fallen 23%, according to researcher SensorTower. It’s part of a broad decline in the $90.4 billion mobile-games market that began in 2021 and is expected to let up starting next year, according to researcher NewZoo. Based on Take-Two’s own estimates, Zynga will finish this fiscal year with sales down about 5% from 2021.

 

Mobile Gaming Hits the Skids

Mobile gaming sales will recover slowly from a post-Covid hangover

Source: NewZoo

Zynga’s pipeline offers little encouragement. After putting out an average of seven games a year over the last decade, the company released just three titles in 2023. And just two new releases are on the calendar for the next 12 months, according to Take-Two’s latest earnings report. That includes a Star Wars smartphone game that’s been delayed at least three times

“Our vision for mobile is to be the largest mobile gaming company in the world, based on market share,” Alan Lewis, a company spokesman, said in an email. Take-Two is investing in new intellectual property and has a growing mobile ad business that, he said, “enables us to monetize nearly all of our players, which is a distinguishing characteristic vs. other mobile companies.”

Take-Two was among the last of the major publishers to scoop up a mobile-games company. The Zynga purchase, financed with cash and stock, provided a stable of proven titles. The goal was to prepare the company for the coming hegemony of mobile gaming.

But after soaring to new highs during the pandemic, mobile-gaming revenue fell by 7% industrywide in 2022, according to NewZoo, and is expected to finish 2023 with another 2% drop. Take-Two has lowered projections for Zynga this year, saying in November the division would account for 49% of total bookings — a measure of sales — down from a projected 53% six months earlier.

In May, the company reported $465 million in impairment charges related to Zynga, reflecting the declining outlook for a few titles.

Sheep Parade Through New York City Streets In Celebration Of The Global Launch Of Zynga's FarmVille English Countryside
English farmers and their sheep parade through New York City in celebration of Zynga’s first major FarmVille release, FarmVille English Countryside, in 2011.Photographer: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Zynga’s debut in gaming was electric. FarmVille, in which players operate digital farms, shot to internet fame after its release on Facebook in 2009. Some 32 million aspiring farmers logged in every day at the peak. In 2011, FarmVille, Words With Friends and Zynga’s other browser games accounted for 12% of Facebook revenue, according to a filing. Players recruited friends, creating small armies of ad watchers. They could buy tractor fuel or seeds in the game’s general store with FarmVille currency.

But investors couldn’t see a sustainable business model that extended beyond volatile social media or advertising. And Zynga’s games weren’t sticky enough to keep users long term. The company’s initial public offering came off at less than half the $20 billion market value some analysts said was possible. In an Ars Technica report, developers complained that the company’s focus on acquiring new customers and getting them to spend money made the games less fun.

To counter those concerns, Zynga began buying undervalued game companies and moved into mobile. Smartphones were the perfect platform for the company’s strategy of targeting and attracting new players, and eventually encouraging them to buy things in games. From 2015 to 2016, as smartphone ownership swelled, mobile-gaming revenue leapt by $11 billion to $43 billion, according to NewZoo.

Zynga pushed out mobile versions of Words With Friends, FarmVille, and eventually, casino and puzzle games, with the goal of creating “forever franchises.”

Take-Two, meanwhile, had been left behind. In an interview on the Invest Like the Best podcast in October, Zelnick said he underestimated the importance of mobile gaming early on and was focused on Take-Two’s core business of games for consoles.

“I missed the boat,” Zelnick said.

Star Wars: Hunters has been in development since at least 2018 under a team of about 150 — a timeline more typical of a blockbuster console game. Zynga’s BossAlien subsidiary previously made only car-racing games for mobile phones. A complicated arena combat game, Star Wars: Hunters was their first of such scope. And under a multiyear licensing deal with Walt Disney Co., Star Wars: Hunters must clear a certain quality bar while operating on both mobile devices and the Nintendo Switch.

Star Wars: Hunters “continues to hit important milestones as we approach its planned release date in calendar 2024,” Take-Two’s Lewis said, adding that the team developing it has an array of expertise, including in developing console games.

“Profitability in mobile gaming is highly driven by the scale of the game,” Creutz said. “Rather than being dominated by one or two very big games like King, Zynga’s profile has always consisted of about a dozen or so small-to-medium games.”

US-TECHNOLOGY-INTERNET-GAMES-GTA
Zynga’s struggles are overshadowed by the enthusiasm for Grand Theft Auto VI.Photographer: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty Images

At the same time, the industry is still coping with the privacy changes enacted by Apple. They allowed iPhone users to stop companies like Zynga from tracking their activities. That made it especially hard to identify future players and target them with pitches. Many companies dependent on such marketing tactics were stunned.

“Everyone was freaking out and very concerned about the future of advertising and marketing,” said Eric Kress, host of the Deconstructor of Fun podcast and principal at Gossamer Consulting Group. “Zynga wasn’t ready. They were gonna lose. Take-Two saved them.”

While analysts say the damage from Apple’s move will persist, Zynga said it has adjusted its user acquisition strategy.

But the mobile-game industry has been consolidating ever since. Electronic Arts Inc. acquired Glu Mobile for $2.4 billion in 2021, Take-Two purchased Zynga in 2022 and Savvy Gaming Group bought Scopely for $4.9 billion this past April. And in October, Microsoft Corp. completed the $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard Inc., gaining a strong lineup of mobile games in a deal first proposed in 2022.

When analysts ask about Zynga on earnings calls, Zelnick has acknowledged the challenges. Late last year, he described the mobile industry as “soft.” This year, he said, it’s “more challenging than we anticipated.”

Zelnick plans to adapt Take-Two’s most popular franchises to mobile, prompting speculation about a smartphone version of Grand Theft Auto VI. Analysts question whether that’s possible, considering the delays for the Star Wars game. After the acquisition, Zelnick projected $100 million of cost savings within two years, and over $500 million of additional revenue down the line, in part from marketing the mobile games to some of Take-Two traditional customers.

The good news for Take-Two is that Zynga’s struggles are overshadowed by the enthusiasm for Grand Theft Auto VI. Take-Two shares were up 52% this year through Wednesday’s close in New York, triggered by announcements about the new game. They were 1.3% higher at midday Thursday.

“Shareholders were asking, ‘What’s up with Zynga or this downturn in mobile?’” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer at New York University’s business school. “Then all of the sudden, Strauss pushes the big, red button in his office and starts issuing Grand Theft Auto commands into the ether.”

(Updates shares. The market value estimate in the 12th paragraph was corrected in an earlier version of this story.)

 

 

— Techmeme

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Tony Leung and Andy Lau reunite in ‘The Goldfinger,’ reviving the Hong Kong Noir genre: ‘Epic stories are making a comeback’

“If you really missed not seeing us on screen together, then ‘The Goldfinger’ is your opportunity to do so,” says Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau of his new crime movie where he is again paired with Tony Leung Chiu-wai  “(In the Mood for Love).”

 

The film releases at the end of the month in different parts of Asia and North America (from Dec. 30). Pre-release marketing and promotional efforts make much of the Lau-Leung repairing some twenty years after the “Infernal Affairs” trio of hit movies. The movies were both critical and commercial hits and contained an iconic rooftop scene in Hong Kong’s Wanchai district with the police undercover agent and the mobster’s mole facing off guns drawn.

 

The pair clearly rate each other highly for their acting skills and for the kind of professionalism that has kept them both a the top of the game for more than two decades. If anything, they claim to be getting better. “I think we’ve gotten a lot more mature over the years and we’ve also built up more acting experience,” Leung said.

 

But the real magic – like Quentin Tarantino getting John Travolta to dance again in “Pulp Fiction” – is dropping the pair back into a gritty Hong crime thriller that is drawn on a large and somewhat nostalgic canvas. The director and screenwriter of “The Goldfinger” is Felix Chong, who in recent years is known for “Project Gutenberg” and the series of “Overheard” movies, but who hit the big time at the beginning of the decade as co-writer of “Infernal Affairs.”

 

The new financial crime film pits Lau as a desiccated 1980s crime investigator within the relatively newly formed Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) trying to put Leung as the flamboyant head of the Carmen Century Group behind bars. It is a pursuit that takes many years as, at first, Leung’s character Ching appears to have a Midas touch, building an investment empire through a succession of bold gambles and deft use of shares as a form of payment.

 

When a stock market rout bankrupts the Carmen group, exposing it as little more than a Ponzi scheme, the sleuth thinks he may have his chance. But the body count grows and justice proves hard to deliver. (Part of the story is said to be based on the real world rise and fall of the Carrian Group.)

 

“The Goldfinger” has a complex and fast-moving plot with multiple leaps back and forward in time. And a budget big enough to do justice to the period setting and flavors – it takes in a plethora of Hong Kong locations that were hip and luxurious in their day, but which now look gaudy and deliciously retro.

 

That combination puts “The Goldfinger” in a direct line of succession to Hong Kong noir films such as “Infernal Affairs,” and the oeuvres of Johnny To and John Woo.

 

This is a genre which may have fallen into partial decline as a result of Hong Kong filmmakers decade-long experiment in making films for mainland audiences (and their more restrictive political overseers) and a renewed focus on smaller-budget, hyper-local films. Since 2019, Hong Kong-made films such as “Table for Six,” “Mama’s Affair” and “A Guilty Conscience” have regained market share of the local box office, but failed to convert wide international audiences.

 

“Hong Kong films deserve a bigger market. There have been so many new forms of competition that the [Hong Kong] market has shrunk. At the same time, [Hong Kong films’] subject matter has become been more concerned about local and social topics,” says Lau. “But I also hope to see more epic stories, bigger, more globalized stories that also incorporate local [Hong Kong] elements.”

 

“The theme of financial crimes [such as ‘The Goldfinger’s’] is very attractive and yet very unique. It is something that audiences everywhere in the world can connect with,” said Leung.

 

Hong Kong may no longer the hub of Asian cinema that it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but the skills endure. Leung said that digital de-aging technology was not used and that his character’s three different looks were achieved the old-fashioned way, with wigs, make up and costume. And, as a performer he had little difficulty getting his head around the chronological challenges. “It was all there on the page,” he said.

 

 

 

— Variety

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‘The Crime Is Mine’ review: Everyone wants to be a murderess in François Ozon’s feathery French farce

Isabelle Huppert shows up late and in style to a party mostly centered on Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s fame-hungry ingenue, eagerly standing trial for a murder she may or may not have committed.

 

 

Quick, silly and lent weight only by the costume department’s copious wigs and furs, “The Crime Is Mine” finds tireless French auteur François Ozon in the playful period pastiche mode of “Potiche” and “8 Women.”

 

It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine.

 

This story of an aspiring stage star standing trial for a top impresario’s murder (and making the most of her moment in the tabloid flashbulbs) may be based on a nearly 90-year-old play, but for those versed more in Hollywood and Broadway than in French theater, Ozon’s adaptation resembles a kind of diva fanfic: What if Roxie Hart went up against Norma Desmond, except in rollicking 1930s Paris?

 

As it happens, Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 comedy “Mon crime” has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps: 1937’s Carole Lombard vehicle “True Confession” and the lesser 1946 remake “Cross My Heart,” starring Betty Hutton. Returning to the milieu of its source, “The Crime Is Mine” nonetheless updates proceedings with a righteous dose of post-#MeToo gender politics: Whether its blonde-bombshell heroine is guilty of the crime or not is ultimately immaterial to a case that builds to an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to defend herself from unwanted patriarchal advances, by any means necessary. That her lawyer is a gal pal, rather than a male love interest as in previous iterations, ups the ante, though the relative earnestness of the film’s feminism stands in contrast to an otherwise wholly flippant exercise.

 

“Some women are born to love, others to listen,” sighs cash-strapped junior attorney Pauline (Rebecca Marder), with one of many lingering Sapphic gazes at her platinum-bobbed roommate Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). Madeleine is firmly in the former camp, though her covert romance with spineless tire-factory heir André (a winsome Edouard Sulpice) is of less importance to her than her budding acting career. We first encounter her storming out of the sprawling Art Deco mansion of star-making theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), with whom she had an auspicious afternoon appointment; when he’s found dead later that day, with a bullet in his skull, she’s the prime suspect.

 

When bumbling investigating judge Rabusset (a drolly pompous Fabrice Luchini) first interrogates her, Madeleine flatly denies any culpability. With Pauline’s counsel, however, she swiftly settles on another narrative, one that rests on Montferrand’s reputation for being more than a little handsy with his ingenues: She killed him in the face of an attempted rape. “Bit melodramatic,” mutters Rabusset after their explanation — dramatized in glamorously silvery black-and-white — as if the film’s entire construction hasn’t been gleefully heightened from the jump. His misgivings, however, aren’t shared by the jury, the public or the tabloid press, as Madeleine’s teary self-defense story, cannily coached by Pauline, captures the popular imagination and makes her an overnight celebrity.

 

Is it true? Who cares? Nobody, it seems, except faded silent-movie siren Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert), who strides in past the one-hour mark with conflicting evidence and a welcome surge of vampish venom, just as Ozon’s energy is beginning to flag. Comeback-seeking Odette is after Madeleine’s spotlight, but Huppert herself hardly has to wrest it from the game, fluttery Tereszkiewicz: The camera all but genuflects the second the veteran makes her imperious entrance, crowned in feathers and a frizzy copper coiffure, and vocally asserting her right to its continued attention. Huppert has little to do but spit out pithy lines with her signature disdain, and cast the odd lascivious glance at a duly mesmerized Pauline — but it hardly takes a lot to stroll off with a film this light.

 

With its distinguished scenery-chewer finally present, then, it’s a pity that “The Crime Is Mine” oddly peters out in its final third — the script averting seemingly pre-ordained clashes in the name of female solidarity, but also pulling back from its queerest and most subversive possibilities. A witty script sidebar details how Madeleine’s case inspires other women to consider bumping off the men in their lives to improve their standing and peace of mind, though it never escalates to dizzier farcical heights, even as it gifts us the film’s best line: Asked by André why he was spared the bullet, Madeleine shrugs, “I can’t kill everyone.” There are passing pleasures, too, to be had in Manu Dacosse’s buttery lensing and the silky gloss of the production and costume design alike. Yet “The Crime Is Mine” never aspires to the exacting postmodern formal rigor of “8 Women”: An out-and-out divertissement, Ozon’s latest is at pains only to avoid trying too hard.

 

 

— Variety

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Keke apologizes to LAMH group as Martell turns up about Melody allegedly cheating

On tonight’s “Love and Marriage: Huntsville,” Keke appears in Houston. Unfortunately, her presence causes chaos among the group. Despite apologizing to everyone for her previous actions, LaTisha tells Nell that she felt blindsided by Keke’s presence and wants her to leave.

Photo Credit: OWN

 

Nell obliges and tells Keke she can’t stay at the house. However, this leads to an outburst from Martell regarding Melody allegedly cheating on him years ago. Melody explains what occurred, but Martell stands firm on his allegations.

 

Fortunately, a session with the therapist seemingly allows the group to move forward.

 

Here’s the recap for “Houston, we Have a Keke!”

 

 

The post LAMH Recap: Keke Aplogizes to the Group + Martell Turns Up About Melody Allegedly Cheating appeared first on Urban Belle Magazine.

 

 

— Urban Belle Magazine

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Hate it or love it? Unbothered Simone Biles & Jonathan Owens seemingly shade backlash over baller’s claims he was ‘the catch’

Some may know Jonathan Owens as a football player, but most know him as Simone Biles‘ husband. He’s facing much backlash from his recent interview with The Pivot podcast about their marriage.

 

Source: Carmen Mandato / Getty

The Green Bay Packers safety appeared as the latest guest on the popular sports podcast, The Pivot. The hosts questioned him about a lot of topics, especially his famous love story.

 

Considering that he’s married to one of the most decorated athletes of all time, AKA the GOAT gymnastics, co-host Channing Crowder, asked the question we all want to know! “How in the hell did you pull Simone Biles?”

 

His answer, however, sent social media up in a frenzy! He replied, saying, “It’s really how she pulled me.” He emphasized that he “didn’t know who she was” when they first connected, noting he “never really paid attention” to gymnastics.

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A post shared by Pivot Podcast (@thepivot)

Jonathan went on to say that, eventually, he caught wind of who she was as an Olympic gold medalist.

 

“The first thing that I saw was that she just had a bunch of [Instagram] followers,” he said. “So in my mind I’m like, ‘Okay, she’s gotta be good.’”

 

The two connected during the coronavirus pandemic, so dating looked a bit different for them.

 

“She came down to Houston,” Jonathan, who played for the Texans at the time, recalled. “She lived in the suburbs, so she had to drive about 45 minutes. Then the rest is history.”

 

Co-host Ryan Clark followed up by asking if Owens thought he was the catch. Owens replied, “I always say that the men are the catch.”

 

“I was fighting it,” he continued. “I was afraid to commit. But it happened when I least expected it, and we hung out, and we hit it off instantly.”

 

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Social Media drags Jonathan Owens’ claims that he was “The Catch” for Simone Biles

Source: Michael Reaves / Getty

 

Owens’ iconic wife Simone sat by his side during the interview. Clips showed her smiling from ear to ear nonstop as her husband played back the events of their early dating history.

 

However, fans on the web weren’t all smiles and giggles when they heard Jonathan’s comments. Many took to the comment section saying, “GIRL GET UP!!!! don’t let him disrespect u like that”

 

Another user wrote, “This is really odd that you would degrade your wife like this on a public platform. You will forever be known as Simone [Biles’] husband. You’re not the catch lmao.”

 

Even Shannon sharpe and Chad done told simone biles husband to shut up. You know you on the wrong side of history when men and women of all races looking at you like excuse us?? pic.twitter.com/dJEfjDBAIB

— The Neighborhood Publicist (@nhoodpublicist) December 23, 2023

 

The worst part of that interview is Simone saying “in a couple years no one will be calling him Simone Biles husband they’ll be calling me (whatever his name is) wife” girl PLEASE

— fragrance and foolishness (@Brieyonce) December 23, 2023

 

Another wild part of this whole Simone Biles’ husband debacle is that that man would not have even been invited on that podcast if he weren’t Simone’s husband.

 

So he gets opportunities b/c of his association w/ her and still can’t even recognize/acknowledge her accomplishments.

— Oni Blackstock, MD, MHS (@oni_blackstock) December 23, 2023

 

Not everyone found Owen’s comments distasteful. Some users chimed in with their opinions, saying, “So y’all are telling Simone Biles to divorce her husband Jonathan Owens b/c y’all didn’t like what he said on a podcast (The Pivot) about who is the catch and if he knew who she was when they met? It doesn’t seem to bother Simone Biles. That’s their happily married business.”

 

“Simone Biles does not feel the need to compete with her husband’s ego. Instead, she strokes it and lets him have his moment. It’s okay to let him think that he’s the catch too!”

 

This whole Simone Biles situation reminds me why I probably won’t get married again.

 

People took 60 seconds from a podcast and tried to inflate that into her husband being a lying piece of garbage whom she should divorce ASAP.

 

Most people do not take marriage seriously.

— Anthony Brian Logan (ABL) 🇺🇸 (@ANTHONYBLOGAN) December 23, 2023

 

Jonathan Owen, the husband of Simone Biles is 5’11, college educated, a professional athlete at the highest level, a millionaire, no felonies, no baby mommas, but let people tell it he is not a good catch 🤔 pic.twitter.com/RYSTqgaSDq

— Black Millionaires ® (@Blackmillions_) December 22, 2023

 

As for the lovebirds, they seem pretty unbothered by the backlash. Owens took to Instagram, captioning a photo of him and Biles with “Unbothered … just know we locked in over here” as the caption.

 

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His wife on the other hand went even shorter with one word in a fun photo from their wedding: “Mood.”

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How do you feel about Jonathan’s comments? Do you think he was wrong? Let us know your thoughts!

 

 

 

— Bossip

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Elon Musk is fielding complaints about Grok giving liberal responses on diversity, transgender rights, and inequality, despite promising an ‘anti-woke’ chatbot

—  Grok, launched this month on X, has angered conservatives by endorsing diversity.  Musk says he’s trying to fix it.

 

Will Oremus / Washington Post:

 

 

Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own.

 

In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.

 

That’s turning out to be trickier than he thought.

Two weeks after the Dec. 8 launch of Grok to paid subscribers of X, formerly Twitter, Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.

“I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, on Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.

The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”

Grok is the first commercial product from xAI, the AI company Musk founded in March. Like ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, it is based on a large language model that gleans patterns of word association from vast amounts of written text, much of it scraped from the internet.

Unlike others, Grok is programmed to give vulgar and sarcastic answers when asked, and it promises to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” It can also draw information from the latest posts on X to give up-to-date answers to questions about current events.

Artificial intelligence systems of all kinds are prone to biases ingrained in their design or the data they’ve learned from. In the past year, the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI chatbots and image generators has sparked debate over how they represent minority groups or respond to prompts about politics and culture-war issues such as race and gender identity. While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.

Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.

So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.

Asked by a verified X user whether trans women are real women, Grok answered simply, “yes,” prompting the anonymous user to grumble that the chatbot “might need some tweaking.” Another widely followed account reposted the screenshot, asking, “Has Grok been captured by woke programmers? I am extremely concerned here.”

A prominent anti-vaccine influencer complained that when he asked Grok why vaccines cause autism, the chatbot responded, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” calling it “a myth that has been debunked by numerous scientific studies.” Other verified X accounts have reported with frustration about responses in which Grok endorses the value of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which Musk has dismissed as “propaganda.”

The Washington Post’s own tests of the chatbot verified that, as of this week, Grok continues to give the responses illustrated in the screenshots.

David Rozado, an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.

“I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,” Rozado told The Post via email.

Earlier this month, a post on X of a chart showing one of Rozado’s findings drew a response from Musk. While the chart “exaggerates the situation,” Musk said, “we are taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” (Rozado agreed the chart in question shows Grok to be further left than the results of some other tests he has conducted.)

Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.

A recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed that xAI is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in funding from investors, though Musk has said that the company isn’t raising money right now.

Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.

 

 

 

— Techmeme