While Netflix sometimes seems to suck all of the air out of the room, series like Mozart in the Jungle and Transparent are reminders that — when it comes to original content — Ted Sarandos & Co. are far from the only game in town.
Case in point: Deadline is reporting that Amazon has just ordered five new pilots with some big/talented names attached.
Carnival Row, a drama from Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) set in a futuristic city inhabited by various unsavory creatures and at least one serial killer.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a dramedy from Gilmore Girls creator Amy-Sherman Palladino about a 1950s housewife who becomes one of the first female stand-up comics.
Strange New Things, a drama from writer Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies) and director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland) that follows an English pastor who journeys into deep space. The project was adapted from Michael Faber’s novel The Book of New Strange Things.
The Legend of Master Legend, a superhero comedy from writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster based on a Rolling Stone article that showcased real-life crime-fighting vigilantes.
Tropicana, a drama from producer Andrea Simon that centers around Cuba’s famous Tropicana Club in the days before the revolution of the 1950s.
There’s plenty to chew on here and — while the headliner among these five is probably del Toro’s project – each of these sounds interesting in its own way. Clergymen in space, trailblazing comediennes, and real-world superheroes are all intriguing premises, and, with Cuba beginning to open up to Americans, Tropicana sounds like it may just be the right show at the right time.
Time will tell if any of these shows catch on but, either way, we’re happy to see streamers like Amazon continuing to seed the TV landscape with creative ideas.
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?