With the official Assassin’s Creed movie set to debut later this year, the marketing machinery is beginning to spool up. The latest effort by the production company to advertise the Michael Fassbender vehicle is a new poster which features his assassin ancestor standing tall atop a viewpoint, much like you do in the game to open up new quests and other content in an area.
Viewpoints are an important component of the Assassin’s Creed games. They provide a challenge for the player to climb atop the tower, spire or other structure, and make it possible to find missions, shops, and other important points of interest in an area. However they also serve another purpose: showing the players how pretty the game is.
As challenging as the task of climbing towers can be, towers also offer a great opportunity to showcase how good the game engine looks, and they make for great game trailer moments, too.
Not too unlike what’s being done with this movie poster.
The image of the Assassin character standing atop the tallest point in the city is not just iconic. This pose is typically the one performed by the player just before making a “Leap of Faith,” where they dive from a high point into a surprisingly cushioning bale of hay far below.
If we were to get into a discussion of symbolism, we might say that the fans of the series may feel like they are making a leap of faith when watching the movie, but in reality it is more likely to be a reflection of the character confronting such decision points throughout the film.
It seems safe to say that the poster and trailer suggest that the Assassin’s Creed movie will be full of high-flying action when it releases this December. Who’s excited?
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?