Amanda Seyfried nearly joined the MCU to play Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy.
While speaking with Josh Horowitz for the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Seyfried admitted that she received an offer to play the adopted daughter of Thanos. Despite a “wonderful” meeting with James Gunn, Seyfried did not want to play the character for practical reasons.
“I was really scared of the idea of being stuck and painted a different color because of the amount of time [it takes],” Seyfried said. “I definitely got the offer for it and I mulled over it for a couple days. I didn’t want to live in London for six months out of the year.”
Instead of joining the Guardians, Seyfried opted to work with Seth MacFarlane on A Million Ways to Die in the West.
Marvel is a behemoth in the movie industry. In the early 2010s, the MCU was still in its early stages. Guardians of the Galaxy does not feature recognizable characters like Spider-Man or Captain America. Joining a little-known franchise was a risk Seyfried did not want to take.
“Let’s also remember that being a part of the first Marvel movie that bombs ain’t good for your career,” Seyfried said. “I thought that because this was about a talking tree and a talking raccoon, that it would be Marvel’s first bomb and me and Chris Pratt would never work again. I was wrong! But I was just being smart. It’s not brave.”
Zoe Saldaña signed on for Gamora, and the rest is history. Still, Seyfried does not regret her decision.
“Sitting there for four-and-a-half hours every morning seemed like it wasn’t going to be fun. I had done some green screen stuff, and it wasn’t my best or my cup of tea then,” Seyfried added. “I don’t regret anything. I made that decision for myself. It was good for me then, and it was good for me now.”
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?