On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
An unknown producer from Uruguay decide to make a video and post it on YouTube. He spends $300 shoots the file uploads it on YouTube and heads home for the weekend. Opens his email on Monday and finds his inbox filled with offers from top producers in Hollywood. Unfortunately, this script will never play out in Hollywood because it is too realistic . Yes, too realistic! This is the story of Fede Alvarez , an unknown producer who just signed a monstrous contract with Sam "Spiderman" Raimi's Ghost House Pictures, to the tune of $30 million. What is he going to do for all that money? He is going to create a feature-length version of his viral YouTube picture; "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack!) The four-minute short will remain in its place online, while Alvarez starts from scratch and attempts to "wow" you again but this time in a theater. The deal rings of this summer's surprise hit District 9 , which started as a short film called Alive to JoBur...