Comedy fans will soon get to weigh in on Amazon’s latest lineup of prospective series. The online retail giant/streamer announced today that it is bringing three pilots — The Tick, Jean-Claude Van Johnson, and I Love Dick — to viewers on August 19. Amazon also released new images, offering fans an early look at the shows to come.
Perhaps the most anticipated is The Tick, a reboot of the popular 1994 animated TV series of the same name, which centered on a satirical superhero. Amazon’s version will be live-action, starring Peter Serafinowicz (Guardians of the Galaxy) as the titular character. The series also stars Griffin Newman, Jackie Earle Haley, Valorie Curry, Yara Martinez, and Brendan Hines.
In the fictional world presented in The Tick pilot, superheroes are known to exist. Little do the people know, though, a supervillain believed to be dead rules a city. When an accountant tries to prove that the supervillian is alive, he ends up teaming up with the titular blue superhero. The series is written by Ben Edlund and directed by Wally Pfister. Edlund also executive produces alongside Barry Josephson and Barry Sonnenfeld, while the series is co-produced with Sony Pictures Television.
The pilot lineup also includes a series with action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. He plays a “global martial arts and film sensation,” who is secretly a retired undercover contractor with a history of taking on dangerous work fighting bad guys. Not surprisingly, his character will come out of retirement to try to save the day again. Apparently, he’ll be drawn out after he reunites with a lost love.
Jean-Claude Van Johnson also stars Kat Foster, Moises Arias, and Phylicia Rashad. The pilot was written by Dave Callaham and directed by Peter Atencio. Van Damme, Atencio, Ridley Scott, and David W. Zucker all executive produce. The series comes from Scott Free Productions.
The last of the three, I Love Dick, is adapted from a well-known novel of the same name by Chris Kraus. The series centers on a couple, Chris (played by Kathryn Hahn) and Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), who move to Marfa, Texas, and meet a man named Dick (Kevin Bacon). Their relationship with Dick challenges how they view love and monogamy, giving the show a chance to follow how a marriage changes. The pilot is directed by Transparent‘s Jill Soloway and written by Sarah Gubbins. Both women executive produce, along with Andrea Sperling.
Amazon Prime members will be able to watch and weigh in on the comedy pilots when August 19 rolls around.
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?