Stephen King is a hot property in Hollywood these days. Although The Dark Tower was a disappointment, It took the box office by storm, setting all kinds of records on its way to becoming the top-grossing horror film of all time.
More King adaptations are in the works, with the upcoming Mr. Mercedes original series from Audience network, the enigmatic Castle Rock series from Hulu (produced by J.J. Abrams’ studio), and the Gerald’s Game film from Netflix.
1922, also from Netflix and premiering on October 20, is based on the Stephen King 131-page novella which was published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. It stars Thomas Jane as Wilfred James, the most unreliable of narrators. Jane has appeared in the previous King adaptations The Mist and Dreamcatcher.
Molly Parker plays his wife Arlette, who wants to sell their farm and move to the big city. Wilfred is not down with that, to put it lightly. “A man’s pride was a man’s land,” he growls in the trailer. Reminiscent of the Edgar Allan Poe classic The Telltale Heart, the story involves a gruesome murder and a resulting hallucinatory descent into madness.
In their review, Variety underscored how the “blunt-force savagery” of the murder takes its toll on Wilfred as a curse he must bear forever. They also give credit to writer-director Zak Hildich for his suspenseful pacing in this slow-burning drama. IndieWire calls it “a poetic take on a King novella,” adding that Jane “gives his best performance in ages.”
2017 is certainly turning out to be a banner year for Stephen King movies, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. A prequel to The Shining has been in the works forever, a remake of the classic Firestarter is also underway, a new adaptation of Pet Sematary may (or may not) be in development at Paramount, a new Children of the Corn movie will arrive this year whether you want it or not, and the multi-part adaptation of The Stand continues to flounder in some sort of no-man’s land, just to name a few.
You can catch 1922 when it premieres on Netflix on October 20, 2017.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?