It may be Ridley Scott’s birthday, but his fans also received a present on Wednesday: a new, behind-the-scenes Alien: Covenant photo. The image shows Scott working hard on the set; he may be 79 now, but he does not seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.
Alien: Covenant is set to follow 2012’s Prometheus, making it the second film in the Alien prequel series. It is also the sixth film in the Alien film series (not counting the two that also feature Predators), which kicked off nearly four decades ago with Scott in the director’s chair. Scott helped the franchise with 1979’s Alien.
The official Alien anthology Twitter account shared the image Wednesday, wishing Scott a happy birthday and saying, “a new kind of horror was born.”
And a new kind of horror was born. Happy Birthday, Ridley Scott. #AlienCovenant pic.twitter.com/cACEx8bVW8
— Alien: Romulus (@AlienAnthology) November 30, 2016
Covenant will bring us aboard a colony ship on its way to a planet in a remote part of the galaxy. Along the way, the crew will discover an uncharted planet — one they initially believe to be a paradise but that turns out to be anything but. There, they’ll encounter David (played by Michael Fassbender), the sole survivor of the Prometheus expedition. In addition to Fassbender, Noomi Rapace and Guy Pearce are reprising their Prometheus roles. The cast also features newcomers Danny McBride, Katherine Waterston, Demián Bichir, and Billy Crudup, among others.
Scott’s hard work on not just the latest installment in the anthology but over his entire career is worth noting, of course. In fact, it was just announced this week that he will receive the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Achievement in Motion Picture Direction, according to Collider. The guild’s president, Paris Barclay, called him “masterful in any genre,” and praised him for his groundbreaking work. Not a bad birthday present, right?
Alien: Covenant is due out in theaters on August 4.
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?