Usually, live-action TV series are not highly anticipated because of the actors doing voiceover work. Amazon Prime Video‘s upcoming new comedy will probably change that. On Thursday, Amazon announced it will stream a new Romanian comedy series Comrade Detective featuring voiceover work from some of the biggest stars in Hollywood today.
When you stream Comrade Detective later this summer you will see the lead roles — Detectives Gregor Anghel and Iosef Baciu– being played by Romanian actors Florin Piersic Jr. and Corneliu Ulici. But, you will hear the Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt lending voiceover dubbing work for the two characters. The live-action series is getting English overdubs because Comrade Detective is set in 1980s Romania and Amazon wants it to stay true to the time. “True to its nostalgic inspiration, the series is presented in Romanian and dubbed in English — as a Romanian show of that time would have been,” reads the press release announcing the show.
The sounds of Gordon-Levitt and Tatum will be joined by a litany of Hollywood A-listers with enough star power to make a hit show of their own together. Award-winning performers Mahershala Ali, Kim Basinger, Bobby Cannavale, Nick Offerman, Chloe Sevigny, Debra Winger, Richard Jenkins, and Fred Armisen will also lend their voiceover dubbing work to Comrade Detective. Other stars joining in on the fun include Mark Duplass, Katie Aselton, Jerrod Carmichael, John Early, Jenny Slate, Jake Johnson, Jason Mantzoukas, and Bo Burnham.
Tatum is also serving as executive producer of Comrade Detective, with Documentary Now co-creator Rhys Thomas serving as director. The series will be produced by A24, the same production company behind the smash hit Moonlight, which took home the Oscar for Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards.
When Comrade Detective becomes available for your streaming pleasure, it may have a widened audience. At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed Amazon Prime Video will be available on Apple TV later this year.
Amazon Prime Video has been one of Digital Trends’ favorite streaming services since it debuted in 2o13. You can expect to stream Comrade Detective on Amazon Prime video starting 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?