Let’s be honest: Space fantasies are all the rage right now. Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is in theaters and there’s a chance it will break the massive box office records set by Episode VII back in 2015 — and we’re smack-dab in the midst of a Star Trek renaissance, with CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery currently airing its acclaimed first season and a Quentin Tarantino-helmed Trek film may be on the way!
It looks like a new challenger is approaching, though; Apple — which makes television shows now, in case you hadn’t heard — has given a straight-to-series order for a “space drama” show from Ronald D. Moore, who headed up the 2003 Battlestar: Galactica miniseries and the ensuing Syfy channel series. Per Deadline, the currently untitled show, written by Moore alongside Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi (Fargo), explores an alternate future where the global “space race” never truly ended (which probably means there will be some political unrest in play between America, Russia, and China).
Moore’s project marks the third television announcement from Apple since a series of talent acquisitions, where the tech giant poached big names from the content divisions of Amazon (Morgan Wandell) and Sony (Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who are now heading Apple’s worldwide video programming department); in October, Apple announced it would be producing a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi anthology series Amazing Stories with Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) in charge, and in November, we learned of an upcoming drama series about a morning news show, starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
Moore, who cut his teeth as a writer for three different Star Trek television shows — The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager — has worked on several projects since, many of which went unfinished, including a live-action Star Wars series commissioned in 2011 by Lucasfilm and ABC. Moore worked together with Van Amburg and Erlicht to produce the unnamed series, which is jointly produced by Sony Pictures Television and Moore’s own Tall Ship Productions, as well as the well-received Starz series Outlander, for which the third season finale just aired on December 10.
There is no information regarding the production schedule for the show as of yet.
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?