Netflix’s push into live-action interactive storytelling continues on April 10 with You vs. Wild, an eight-episode interactive series starring survival expert and Man vs. Wild host Bear Grylls
As the series’ new trailer demonstrates, You vs. Wild follows the formula established by Grylls’ previous shows. The popular adventurer travels to exotic and dangerous locations all over the world and does his best to survive in the harsh and unforgiving wilderness. This time, however, there’s a twist: Viewers will make some of Grylls’ decisions for him, and then will see how those choices play out via prerecorded footage.
In the trailer, Grylls finds himself in a number of precarious situations, like climbing halfway up a peak only to discover a mountain lion waiting for him at the top. Instead of figuring out how to proceed himself, Grylls turns to the camera and says, “You decide,” forcing viewers to select one of two options. Choose carefully. “If you don’t make the right choices,” Grylls says, “it might not end well for me.”
Despite the life-or-death stakes, don’t expect its various outcomes to be quite as depressing as the ones found in Netflix’s previous’ interactive project, the bleak sci-fi adventure Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. While the Black Mirror spinoff condemned its characters to grim and often deadly fates, You vs. Wild is billed as a family show and won’t be as “dark” as Bandersnatch.
Netflix began experimenting with choose your own adventure-style branching stories in 2017 with interactive episodes of its Puss in Boots and Buddy Thunderstruck animated series. The format didn’t really take off on Netflix, however, until Black Mirror: Bandersnatch debuted in December 2018 and took the internet by storm.
Speaking at a convention in Mumbai, Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product, told audiences that the company would be “doubling down” on interactive projects in the wake of Bandersnatch‘s overwhelming popularity. Future projects won’t necessarily be science fiction stories, however. “It could be a wacky comedy,” Yellin said. “It could be a romance.” Apparently, it could be a survivalist reality show, too.
Man vs. Wild debuted on the Discovery Channel in 2006. The series, which ran for seven seasons, stranded Grylls and his crew in remote and hostile environments and forced them to find their way back to civilization. Man vs. Wild transformed Grylls into a household name, and he’s since published a number of books, hosted many other shows, and lent his name to everything from water bottles to smartphone apps.
Updated on March 27, 2019: Added trailer.
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?