Avatar director James Cameron has plans to visually stun us once again with at least four sequels, and it sounds like he’s on the right track with the first of the follow-ups. Avatar 2 star Sam Worthington recently opened up to We’ve Got This Covered about the franchise’s progress and he promised that the first of the films will be unique. If you thought you saw all there was to see of Pandora, prepare to be wrong.
“This film is going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Worthington said. “The world is bigger than the first one.”
Avatar 2 won’t just be hours of jaw-dropping visual effects, though. Worthington highlighted that “it’s a movie about family,” and we’ll see how Jake Sully has grown. The sequel picks up eight years after the events of Avatar and centers on his the life he built in Pandora and his family dynamics.
Cameron has been looking well beyond Avatar 2. He has finished all the sequels’ scripts and according to Worthington, may shoot the films concurrently.
“The plan is to have some time in between, I think, but these things are always ambiguous until they start,” the actor said.
Production on Avatar 2 is to begin this summer, and the finished product could hit theaters as early as 2018. The film was previously slated to open in 2017, but it was delayed so that Cameron could work on the scripts. As a bonus, the push made it so the sequel could avoid competing with Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi at the box office. Of course, Avatar 2 should be formidable itself — its predecessor is still the world’s highest-grossing film at the box office.
Whenever Avatar 2 premieres, we will look forward to a return to Pandora with stars Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang.
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?