With the latest installment of the Alien franchise in the works, thrills and chills are sure to be in our future. The latest photos from Alien: Covenant, shared on the anthology’s official Twitter account, offer proof: They show blood, weapons, and a generally eerie and dark atmosphere.
None of this should be a surprise. Not only is Alien: Covenant a sci-fi horror flick, it is directed by Ridley Scott, a man who takes the genre to another level. He has already revealed that the film’s rating will be a “hard R,” as reported by Slash Film, so these photos are likely only the tip of the iceberg.
The goriest of the bunch, shared Thursday, shows only the aftermath of a clearly violent encounter, with blood splattered all over. That doesn’t bode well for somebody. Eek.
224612072104 pic.twitter.com/pA2x6TNiR9
— Alien Anthology (@AlienAnthology) December 22, 2016
The other photos, which were posted over the course of December, aren’t as visceral, but they do tease more darkness and danger in the film as the passengers on the colony ship find themselves on an uncharted planet. Although they’ll initially think it’s a paradise, things won’t go so well for them there, as the latest images seem to indicate. While there, they’ll meet David (played by Michael Fassbender), a synthetic android who is still ticking after the failed Prometheus expedition.
In Covenant, Fassbender will be joined by his Prometheus co-stars Noomi Rapace and Guy Pearce. The film’s cast also includes Danny McBride, Katherine Waterston, Demián Bichir, and Billy Crudup, among others. Scott returns as director, continuing the prequel series to 1979’s Alien, which he also helmed.
Alien: Covenant — and all its gore — is slated to hit 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?