James, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, is launching a YouTube Golf channel “chronicling his journey with the sport,” The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The name of the YouTube Channel will simply be “LeBron James.”
“LeBron and his friends will play a round at some of the world’s greatest golf courses, dine at local restaurants and have a little fun while enjoying everything the game of golf has to offer,” THR is told.
If you simply can’t wait a minute longer for such content, well, we’ve got more good news for you.
The channel launched timed to the publication of this story; its debut episode “follows James and members of the storied 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers championship team as they celebrate the 10-year anniversary of their historic comeback that brought the franchise its first title.”
James, Kevin Love, J.R. Smith, Richard Jefferson, Tristan Thompson, Channing Frye and famously not Kyrie Irving picked a great place to start: Castle Stuart Golf Links at Cabot Highlands in Scotland. There, the “reminiscing, wine and hilarious commentary are flowing,” according to the episodic description.
“I’m looking forward to people seeing this first episode, which was the trip of a lifetime with my teammates. We got to play golf and catch up in some of the most beautiful settings I’ve ever been in,” James told THR. “It’s been a lot of fun out on the course, learning and loving all the nuances of the game, and I’m excited about bringing everyone along with me on this journey through my channel.”
James’ YouTube Golf channel will release new episodes monthly, always on a Saturday.
Ahead of today’s launch, James told THR that he’s “around a 22 handicap right now.”
“Golf has given me the challenge I need as a competitor,” James said. “Just having a lot of fun, learning the game, practicing and playing as much as I can.”
James recently departed the Los Angeles Lakers for a two-year deal with the Philadelphia 76ers. In the courting process, private country clubs in the Philly area offered free memberships to the basketball superstar entering his 24th(!) professional season — clubs in the cities that ultimately didn’t land LeBron did the same. Not that the billionaire needs a handout.
Watch the trailer for episode one:
James and his business partner Maverick Carter founded production company SpringHill Entertainment in 2007. In 2020, it became part of SpringHill Company, which also includes a marketing company founded by James and Carter. Last year, SpringHill Company merged with British TV and film production house Fulwell 73.
British stars George MacKay and Rosy McEwen can admit: Mission was one of the least conventional shooting experiences they’ve ever had. It also happened to be one of the most liberating.
Director Paul Wright (Arcadia) throws caution to the wind in his latest feature film, set to premiere in competition at Edinburgh Film Festival on Saturday. The Glasgow-set Mission follows Dylan (MacKay), a young Scot who has reached the end of his tether with a dead-end job and lonely, unfulfilling existence. Over the course of a week, he seeks meaning in the wake of extreme chaos — such as breaking a monkey out of the local zoo, attacking a police officer and experimenting in some X-rated BDSM — as he attempts to feel alive. Dylan regularly gets in touch with his sister, Claire (McEwen), who is shocked by her sibling’s existential angst and frenetic energy.
The final product is, impressively, mostly improv. Wright didn’t have an initial script. “Paul made a huge lookbook of images to give a sense of the film tonally,” MacKay explains, “and then there were a series of circumstances and incidents for the characters to be in.” Much of the meaning of this film — to MacKay’s delight, having had his life “changed” by Wright on the set of 2013’s For Those in Peril — was discovered in the making of it. “[We were] exploring how much of a story or a character we could create by almost making an archive of material, and then have him discover a lot of it in the edit,” says MacKay. “It was, creatively, a really interesting idea.”
McEwen had never quite done a job like it. “You’d have a slight context for the scene — we knew exactly what was happening and what our characters were feeling — [but] there was so much scope to play with,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s world premiere. “The freedom of that I’ve never experienced before. Just not knowing where it was going to go and the options being limitless.”
The pair also just so happen to be two of the most in-demand Brits working right now. MacKay, star of 1917, has the hotly anticipated Sense and Sensibility adaptation out in October, as well as Margot Robbie’s untitled Ocean’s Eleven prequel coming up. Blue Jean and Black Mirror‘s McEwen, meanwhile, is currently playing a young Nicole Kidman on Prime Video’s Scarpetta. Below, they talk to THR about ad-libbing, absurdism and what keeps bringing them back to independent film: “These big studio [films], it’s a totally different beast… The freedom you get on these smaller sets. This is where I become a better actor. And if you’re not growing, what are you really doing?”
George, I know that you and Paul have worked together before. Was that a big draw for you with Mission?
GEORGE MACKAY It was everything. The film we did together was a wee while ago now. It was called For Those in Peril, and it genuinely was life-changing. It was such a wonderful working experience. It was so exciting and invigorating and creative and I’m so proud to be a part of that film. I think the film itself is really great and it went on to do cool things. It went to the Directors Fortnight in Cannes and Paul and I just became and stayed firm friends. It taught me so much about a way of working and his directing style. With that first film, there was a fair amount of improv with certain sequences, and he shot quite economically, but shot a lot of footage. Rather than do six two-minute takes, we’d do one 10-minute take, and so you learn that a lot of this won’t be used. You felt comfortable to really explore beyond what your first offering would be, but it also had that momentum.
So when this came around, I think we both felt that there was an element of [experimentation]… something that was made really with process [prioritized] ahead of what it would be after. [There was] this film he made, Arcadia, which was this archive documentary where he found the narrative out of archive material. Exploring how much of a story or a character we could create by almost making an archive of material, and then have him discover a lot of it in the edit as well, was just, creatively, a really interesting idea. That was a big part of wanting to do Mission.
What a playground for you guys. Rosy, did you find it was quite a different directorial style to what you’re used to?
ROSY MCEWEN Yes, and one of my favorite experiences ever. It was so freeing, so liberating. Firstly, the crew was really small. The whole thing felt very intimate. I was only there for a few days at the beginning and a few days at the end. So I didn’t even really get the whole experience. But my days that I was there, I felt like I lived a whole life because sometimes it would just be Paul and then the DOP and you in a room, and he would just roll, and 20 minutes would go by. You’d have a slight context for the scene — we knew exactly what was happening and what our characters were feeling — [but] there was so much scope to play with. The freedom of that I’ve never experienced before. Just not knowing where it was going to go and the options being limitless.
Rosy McEwen as Claire in ‘Mission.’
Courtesy of EIFF
Going back to the writing of this, what attracted you to the script?
MACKAY The initial idea was not to have a script. The first thing was a series of images. Paul made a huge lookbook of images to give a sense of the film tonally, and then there were a series of circumstances and incidents for the characters to be in… And as the film becomes a reality, you have to narrow what you’re doing because of all the logistical elements. Like, okay, to do that, we need to book that location. What kit do we need to make that location? Do we really need that? So things get distilled.
Then the narrative is born out of the trajectory of the character. So the initial idea was very energetic. It was images and tone and character more so than a fixed narrative, and then we came to hone it into a script for the practicalities of shooting. Then you put your thumb on the end of the hose trying to get the accuracy and the pressure of the story.
How unconventional. Were you ad-libbing a lot? Was there a lot of improv? There was so much realism to Claire and Dylan’s interactions, especially.
MACKAY Yeah, yeah. Loads of improv. There’s the big scene we have at the end, and that was very scripted. But there’s so much of it that is improv, really.
MCEWEN And I would come back to set and hear wild stories about what George had done, because the setup of the scene would be like, you were in a zoo, and then suddenly [crew members] were like, “George got in this thing, and then suddenly he was running down the street, and then there was a monkey!” (Laughs.) We never quite knew where it was going to end up, and the freedom of that, that’s all down to Paul because you have to be inspired to be able to be that free. You can’t just plop someone in a room and be like, “Go for it.” The idea behind it — these people who just want to break free of convention — was fizzing inside. I imagine you felt the same thing, George, but Paul had just set us up so well that it was always easy to just let the flow take over.
George, do you recall how Paul relayed to you the journey that Dylan is going on through in this film? What is he trying to depict, at its core?
MACKAY At its core, it’s someone who’s trying to get back to [something]. I think he reached a high in his early years. He had a spiritual experience, for want of a better term, that took him to the edge of life, and there was something so extraordinary about that. He’s just in the time in between — in the workings of the world and the world he exists in hasn’t been able to ever get close [to that experience]. He’s been moving the opposite way of getting close to reaching that extraordinary feeling again. I think it’s as pure as that. So he basically gives himself a window of time, and the mission is to commit to feeling as much as possible — at whatever cost — and then the story is about [what happens] once you commit to that. It sounds easy and flippant, but the reality of what that involves… The reality of that chaos is quite troubling, even if you’re wanting it. He’s simultaneously lost and totally clear on what he wants to do.
How do you begin to find relatability there? What do you tap into as an actor, and how do you shake that off at the end of the day? I can imagine this was pretty intense at times.
MACKAY I wouldn’t go as far as Dylan goes in my own life, but I think there is a lot to question. Also, Paul is so incredibly well-read. He got me to read a bunch of books and texts and [listen to] music. I think so much of the extraordinary discoveries in history about people pushing beyond boundaries and going, “Well, why is it only this? Why not this way?” There are so many things like that. In my own head, I’m confounded by it still. I’m trying to think of the term. (Pauses.) I’m on the hamster wheel as much as everyone else, trying to make a good living, do good work and the steps that that takes. But reading the text, capitalism does not make sense. It’s a race to the bottom, and so many things that we participate in… we do that knowingly. What I loved about this story is it really looks at someone who’s deemed, essentially, to be off the track and wayward for having a very clear understanding of [his path].
So much of what we do does not make sense and I think if you put it to most people, they would agree. How we live our lives, what we value, how we value it, the means with which we go about it. The imbalance of the world is so extraordinary and yet we are thrilled to continue participating it, and I include myself in that bracket. But this is why the character was so interesting, because there’s a bunch of things which I think I feel, but don’t go towards. It’s so worthwhile to explore them in this rather extreme example. [Mission] is almost at the end of the story. It becomes about an understanding of compromise and things that were maybe there all along, or things that went too far. But the attraction of Dylan was, I guess, playing an extreme example of someone who was committed to a way of thinking and experimenting within that, without saying it’s right or wrong necessarily.
And Rosy, what angle is Claire coming at this from? How do you envision they’ve become estranged?
MCEWEN I think they are examples of people feeling probably the same thing, but dealing with it in very different ways. I don’t think Claire has the fearlessness that Dylan ends up personifying. I think she feels probably more saddened by life. I see the irony of that, because obviously what happens to Dylan at the end, but I think she accepted her fate, and she feels like quite a sad person to me because of that. I think she feels like life is about going through the motions, and, “Yes, I feel everything that you’re feeling, Dylan, but there’s nothing that you can do about that. This is just life.”
We talked a lot about what trauma they have been through. I don’t know if we ever put full buttons on exactly what they’d experienced, but there was obviously something there in their childhood which had bonded them and dampened any magic that they’d found as kids. There are a lot of layers there. She’s probably a bit jealous of Dylan that he deals with it in the way that she doesn’t really know how to break free from. And when we were shooting a lot of the scenes of Claire in her bedroom, there was a lot of crying and there was a lot of screaming and there was a lot of internalizing everything that Dylan externalizes in the end. I think they’re cut from the same cloth. But yeah, they’re just two examples of how you cope. Neither one right nor wrong, really.
Had you guys worked together before this?
MACKAY We hadn’t! Had we even met? I think it was the first time.
MCEWEN No! It was the first everything. George and Paul are the reason I did it. I didn’t know anything about it. I hadn’t seen the script. They were like, “Do you want to do a few days on a film with George?” and I was like, “Yeah, absolutely. I think I can do that. When do you need me?” Then I learned about everything, I got up there and it was explained [to me]. I didn’t even really know how it was going to be shot. I didn’t know the freedom we were going to have. So the whole thing was this very beautiful surprise.
Also: A great Scottish accent from both of you in this. Did you guys have an accent coach?
MACKAY Yes, yes, but also that was one of the biggest things about working with Paul the first time. I played a Scottish character in Paul’s first film many, many moons ago. It was the first time that I did an accent for a whole job. From when I got in the car to leaving the set, I was always in the accent. So there was a fundamental Scottish connection with Paul. It was nice to dust it off.
MCEWEN I’m sure [MacKay’s] is much better than mine.
MACKAY No, no! You’re sweet.
MCEWEN I think there were many times during this that I was like, “Paul, this is really bad. You’ll cut it, right?” So I think the editors helped me out.
What do you hope resonates with audiences watching Mission in Edinburgh?
MACKAY I hope that people question a way of being. There are no answers in it really, just more questions. I think genuinely, the biggest thing is about a process of work. Whatever people think of the film, it was endeavored to be made with purely with the process at its heart. The most important thing was the way the film was made, rather than what the film became, and I think that is so so valid. And films like that need festivals to hold them because they are harder to grasp some of the time. I’m so grateful that Edinburgh is celebrating it and championing it. But I hope that people are thrilled by the experimentation.
MCEWEN I think you’re right. I hope people leave with questions. And to me, the film is about freedom. Are you asking yourself questions about the way you’re living your life? Are you actually happy? Are you doing the things you really want to be doing? I think the literal context of what Dylan gets up to is not necessarily the most important nor the right answer, as you said. But I think it’s more like, what if I just said that thing that I’m really wanting to say? What if I actually break up with that person? We can get so subdued in the monotony of life and big changes feel scary. I hope it helps people ask themselves questions about freedom.
Both of you have extremely big projects currently out or coming out — big studio stuff. George, you have Sense and Sensibility. Rosy, you have Scarpetta. What pulls you back to independent film?
MACKAY For me, this project was really about Paul. I’m so grateful to Paul for the first project that we did together 14 years ago. It really did change my life in four weeks. It was so special. So I always want to work with Paul, and I feel so privileged that he’d asked to work with me again. In terms of independent film, the very nature of independent film is they are oftentimes smaller, and inherently in the way they’re put together, you can be a bit autonomous in your creative choices. Because you’re not bound financially to a higher power, and that has its merits for creative experimentation. And I think it’s really important that we keep experimenting, whether those experiments always come off perfectly or not. The value is in the experimentation in itself. Without those experiments, you don’t get new stuff. So I think that’s a reason to always come back to it
MCEWEN To be honest, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an actor who wouldn’t want to solely do great indie films. I just feel like that’s actually most people’s dream. But the reality of life is that you have to make money. And I’m not downplaying these studio things. We endeavor to pick jobs that inspire us, but these things that happen in a more intimate setting — that is where I learn. You’re right, George. Experimentation. It’s where I feel like I grow. That’s where I feel like I’m not just moving through the motions. These big studio ones, it’s a totally different beast. It uses a different skill set, whereas the freedom you get on these smaller sets. This is where I become a better actor. And if you’re not growing, what are you really doing?
This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity. The 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival runs Aug. 13-19.
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” led the box office again on Friday despite competition from Anne Hathaway and a horde of hungry dinosaurs.
The Warner Bros. sci-fi thriller “The End of Oak Street” landed in second place on opening day with $8.1 million from 3,446 North American theaters. Rivals estimate the film will earn about $18.7 million domestically by Sunday. That’s a soft start since “Oak Street” cost more than $80 million to produce. Reviews (84% on Rotten Tomatoes) and word-of-mouth (”B” grade on CinemaScore exit polls) have been positive, so there is a chance “Oak Street” sticks around in theaters and justifies its price tag.
“It Follows” filmmaker David Robert Mitchell wrote and directed “The End of Oak Street,” which chronicles a suburban family whose neighborhood is suddenly blipped to prehistoric times. Hathaway stars alongside Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery and Jordan Alexa Davis.
This weekend’s other major newcomer, “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie,” took third after earning $7.35 million on Friday from 3,545 North American cinemas. The animated family adventure should dig up about $20 million for Paramount through the weekend. That projection aligns with its predecessor, “The Mighty Movie,” which opened with $22 million and grossed $205 million by the end of its run.
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” still reigned supreme with $19 million domestically on Friday. Through its third weekend, the Marvel-Sony tentpole is targeting $67 million, which represents about a 53% decline from last week’s numbers. That would push “Brand New Day’s” North American revenues to roughly $783 million.
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is still holding strong at No. 4 through its fifth weekend. The Greek epic added $6.5 million domestically on Friday and is expected to pull in $23 million through the weekend. That would put the film’s North American haul at $504 million.
Finally, in fifth was “Katseye: Wild Hearts.” The documentary, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the global girl group, made an estimated $2.2 million on Friday from just 724 theaters. By Sunday, it’s expected to gross about $3.8 million.
Sony Pictures‘ Brand New Day pulled in $19 million on Friday as it heads to $67 million, which will top the domestic box office for its third consecutive frame. This would bring the Tom Holland-led feature’s North American total to $782.8 million for its first 17 days to stand at No. 5 on the all-time domestic chart, just behind Avatar at $785.2 million and topping the No. 6 total of $718 million for Top Gun: Maverick.
Warner Bros.’ dinosaur-centric sci-fi survival feature The End of Oak Street grossed $8.1 million on Friday, including Thursday previews, as it eyes an opening weekend around $20 million. Earning a B CinemaScore from audiences, David Robert Mitchell‘s film launched in 3,400 North American theaters and carries an $80 million production budget.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor star in the movie about a family in the early 1980s whose suburban neighborhood has landed in a place teeming with prehistoric predators. It holds an 85 percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating from critics, while its audience score stands at 77. In his review of The End of Oak Street for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney called the movie “mindlessly entertaining in a big-dumb-fun kind of way.”
PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie chased down $7.3 million on Friday, including previews on Thursday and last Saturday, as Paramount Pictures now expects it to also land in the vicinity of $20 million domestically for its opening weekend. Earning an A CinemaScore from audiences to match what the previous sequel PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie received, Dino Movie opened in more than 3,500 locations in North America and has added $38.3 million from 52 overseas markets. It has a $39.5 million production budget.
Carter Young, Mckenna Grace, Terry Crews, Jennifer Hudson and Snoop Dogg are among the voice stars for director Cal Brunker’s film that brings the Paw Patrol canine heroes to a world containing dinosaurs. The previous sequel, 2023’s The Mighty Movie, opened to $22.7 million domestically in late September. That project’s $205 million global run improved upon the $144 million worldwide total for 2021’s original PAW Patrol: The Movie, which adapted the series that first launched on Nick Jr. in 2013.
PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie holds an 84 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. THRcritic Frank Scheck wrote that, “while the material is thoroughly juvenile, the films impart valuable messages to their impressionable viewers.”
With Oak Street and Dino Movie battling it out for third place, Universal’s The Odyssey will remain at No. 2 in its fifth weekend as it looks to collect $23 million to bring its domestic cume to $504.4 million.
Meta filed a patent for cameras that use facial recognition to tag people by name and auto-generate clips around their detected actions.
The system is assistant-driven: it serves pre-sorted “who did what, when” highlights to a phone or headset on request.
It’s a continuation of a 2022 parent application and sits at “Ready for Examination”—not granted, and far from a shipping feature.
Meta Platforms Technologies, the entity that holds Meta’s R&D and hardware intellectual property, published a patent for a camera system that identifies people by face and logs what they do.
The filing describes cameras feeding footage into an AI that tags individuals in frame, detects their actions, and bundles both into media clips served on demand to a phone or headset.
This isn’t a bolt-from-the-blue idea. Meta’s camera hardware has been on faces for years: the Ray-Ban smart glasses, now not so affectionately referred to as “pervert glasses” by much of the internet, built with EssilorLuxottica and first shipped in 2023, record first-person video and let the wearer ask an AI about what it sees.
The same Meta entity behind those frames and the Quest headsets owns this filing, and the drawings show a glasses wearer observing a room of people. Facial recognition would take that hardware from “records what I point at” to “knows and names who’s in the room.”
How the pipeline runs
The patent lays out a four-step loop. Cameras capture live or recorded footage and pass it to the system. A facial-recognition layer scans the frames to flag who is present—not just that a person is there, but which specific person.
A separate action-detection layer runs on top of that, reading movements like picking something up, leaving a room, or a group gathering. Finally, the system bundles its findings into individual media files, each tagged with a person, an action, or both.
What makes it more than a smart doorbell is the assistant layer. The filing frames retrieval as conversational: a connected device can request footage by query, and the system composes the answer from the tagged clips rather than making you scrub. The drawings map both server-side and on-device processing flows, with a natural-language understanding pipeline feeding the clip composer.
The part that draws fire is the capability itself—identifying and logging specific people by face without their active consent. That’s the exact worry Democratic senators raised when they pressed Meta over facial recognition in its smart glasses. As previously reported by Decrypt, the senators’ warned that real-time face ID could expose people to stalking and harassment.
Meta’s own hardware already sits at the center of that fight. Owners of the recently released Ray-Ban glasses from Meta were able to quietly record strangers in public and contractors reviewed private footage. A wearable camera that also names the strangers would widen the gap between Meta’s “helpful assistant” framing and what the tech can do—and the public is already building defenses.
It’s a patent, not a product. The status is “Ready for Examination,” with Patentlyze rating grant likelihood as medium. Meta has filed similar computer-vision work for glasses before, and publication means the idea is on the record, not that the feature is built or approved.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Nate Bargatze and his “Big Dumb Eyes” just set a Guinness World Record.
The Tennessee-born comedian has officially sold the most tickets for a stand-up comedy tour, surpassing the previously record held by Jeff Dunham.
Bargatze will be presented with the Guinness World Record onstage at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on Saturday. Ahead of the show, his “Big Dumb Eyes” world tour had sold approximately 2,016,254 tickets, passing Dunham’s “Spark of Insanity” tour, which sold 1,981,720 tickets. The final ticket number on Bargatze’s Guinness World Records certificate will be confirmed later this weekend.
Bargatze accomplished the feat at an impressive pace. To achieve the previous record, Dunham sold 1,981,720 tickets across 386 venues between Sept. 13, 2007, and Aug. 21, 2010 (35 months and 8 days). Bargatze’s “Big Dumb Eyes” tour, which began on April 6, 2025, crossed the 2 million mark after just 16 months and 10 days — and across only 128 venues. (There were also no puppets on the Bargatze tour.)
Along the way, Bargatze broke 84 venue records, according to his reps, which included becoming the only comedian to sell out three consecutive performances at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena in a single calendar year — a feat matched only by Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks.
Bargatze, whose clean, deadpan comedy has made him famous among all age groups, was crowned by Pollstar as the highest-grossing stand-up comic, with $77.5 million reported in 2025 alone. Earlier this year, he crossed over onto the silver screen with his movie “The Breadwinner,” and he is currently planning to build a $350 million theme park in his home state of Tennessee called Nateland.
Bargatze is repped by Brillstein Entertainment Partners, UTA, Ginsburg Daniels Kallis and 2PM Sharp.
Crypto mining was banned in Moscow, the surrounding Moscow Region and parts of Kursk, with the restrictions set to run through Dec. 31, 2032.
The measure, established under government decree No. 936, also prohibits participation in crypto mining pools. The decree was signed on July 25 and published on July 31, local media reports.
Russia as a whole accounted for an estimated 175 exahashes per second, or 16.4% of Bitcoin’s global computing power, in the first quarter, according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. That placed it second behind the U.S., although it’s unclear what capacity was located in the newly restricted region.
The country’s Energy Ministry said a year-round restriction was needed to reduce the risk of power-capacity shortages as energy-intensive mining facilities connect to regional grids. Mining currently consumes roughly 1 gigawatt in the Moscow power system, while the region’s target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Interfax reported after the decree was first signed.
Mining is also linked to the country’s Western sanctions.
Russian companies had been using domestically mined bitcoin in international payments after legal changes designed to counter Western restrictions, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in December 2024.
“Mutrion,” a short film set in the Venice lagoon by 26-year-old Italian director Marco Cavazzin, has scooped the best director award at the Locarno Film Festival’s Pardi di Domani (Leopards of Tomorrow) section.
“Mutrion,” which is the only Italian entry in the section, stars Manfredi Marini, who previously starred in Giovanni Tortorici’s “Nineteen,” and Giulio Maroncelli and is produced by the independent studio Etimo. The short, shot entirely on the lagoon islands, is supported by the Veneto Film Commission and distributed by Italy’s Cattive Produzioni.
“In a lagoon suspended in time, legend has it that sooner or later every inhabitant loses the toenail of their right big toe,” says the synopsis. “It has never happened to Marco. But now that he has returned, something inside him is beginning to crack.”
The story follows Marco (played by Manfredi Marini), who in childhood was nicknamed “Mutrion” (which means “sulky”). Marco left the lagoon area at age twenty. Unlike the other locals, he never lost his toenail. Returning four years later, he faces the community’s tacit expectations and structural isolation, causing something deep within him to fracture as the landscape shifts between physical reality and psychological projection.
“This short stems from the desire to tell a story of return, the attempt to reconnect with a place that has become both familiar and distant over time. In the Venetian lagoon, rituals, superstitions and family stories are still present and continue to shape collective identity,” Cavazzin said in his directors’ statement.
Locarno’s Leopards of Tomorrow selection was judged by a jury panel made up by Lebanese director Mounia Akl; South African producer Steven Markovitz and Italian director Antonio Piazza. Mutrion was the only Italian entry among 20 works from all over the world, including France, the U.K., Iran, Qatar, China, Taiwan, the U.S. and Ukraine.
Crypto traders are betting that Unitree Robotics will be worth more than four times its IPO valuation when the Chinese robot maker debuts on the public markets.
Unitree priced its Shanghai STAR Market offering at 150.80 yuan ($22.37) per share, valuing the company at roughly $9 billion. Pre-IPO perpetual contracts trading through Hyperliquid, however, were between $92 and $94 on Friday, equivalent to a valuation of about $38 billion, blockchain analytics firm Allium said in a report.
The premium reflects lofty expectations for one of China’s closely watched robotics companies. Founded in Hangzhou in 2016, Unitree makes four-legged and humanoid robots for research, industrial and consumer applications. Revenue reached $253 million last year, up 335%, while humanoid robot shipments topped 5,500, according to Allium’s report.
The firm’s IPO was reportedly 8000 times oversubscribed by retail traders, with trading expected to begin between Aug. 17 and Aug. 21.
Unitree pre-IPO market on Hyperliquid
Pre-IPO perps
Unitree’s public-market debut is also shaping up to be the latest in a corner of crypto derivatives that has recently expanded rapidly: pre-IPO perpetual futures.
Banking giant UBS, with over $7 trillion in assets under management, has reported a more than 24-fold quarterly increase in call option exposure tied to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) in the second quarter.
That increase, which gives it the right to acquire IBIT shares at a later date at a set price, came as its outright IBIT holdings rose about 12%, according to a regulatory filing this week.
The Swiss banking group reported calls representing 1.95 million underlying IBIT shares as of June 30, up from 80,000 three months earlier. UBS separately held 407,890 IBIT shares worth about $13.6 million, compared with 364,371 shares at the end of the first quarter, according to its Q1 filing.
Put option exposure, giving UBS the right but not the obligation to sell IBIT at a set date and price, moved in the opposite direction. UBS reported puts representing 143,300 underlying shares, down about 53% from 303,300 at the end of March.
Its direct IBIT position also remained below the 548,614 shares reported at the end of 2025, according to its fourth-quarter filing.
UBS 13-filing for IBIT. (CoinDesk)
The disclosure also does not include strike prices or expirations, making it difficult to determine UBS’s net directional exposure from the filing alone.
