There have been plenty of aliens at the box office in recent months, and more are on their way. Paramount Pictures has released its latest trailer for Arrival, an upcoming sci-fi flick focusing on the arrival of a dozen mysterious UFOs.
The new preview highlights the challenge of communicating with the strange species. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, an expert linguist who is enlisted to help the government. Banks is tasked with finding out two vital pieces of information: what the aliens want, and where they came from.
To get answers, Banks is sent up into one of the UFOs with a team of soldiers and fellow experts. The group includes Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) and Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Together, they enter a creepy and cavernous craft where they attempt to communicate with the mysterious aliens.
As one would expect, the stakes are high for the characters and the world. The trailer teases the possibility of global war as countries respond differently to the presence (and perceived threat) of the UFOs. Adams is determined to understand the aliens’ intentions to see if disaster can be averted, but an ominous sequence at the end of the trailer hints that trouble lies ahead.
Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay penned by Eric Heisserer. The film is based on Story of Your Life, an award-winning short story by Ted Chiang. In addition to Adams, Renner, and Whitaker, the cast also includes Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark O’Brien, and Tzi Ma.
We never do find out in the trailer what the aliens want or where they come from, so we’ll have to wait and see when Arrival hits theaters on November 11.
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?