When it comes to both tales as old as time and songs as old as rhyme, you can bet that they’re going to be made and remade for generations. As we’ve seen with the recent Cinderella and Jungle Book retellings, Disney has been on a bit of a live-action kick lately — and we just got our first peek at the next cartoon classic to be acted out by real live humans.
On today’s episode of Good Morning America, Disney debuted the first teaser trailer for Beauty and the Beast and — if you count yourself among the studio’s scores of overgrown fans — be prepared to have the feels. The teaser (embedded above) opens with a frozen-over version of the iconic Disney castle as the spooky-yet-alluring music from the prologue of the original begins to play in the background. It has been nearly a quarter century since the original hit theaters, but it’s clear that the Alan Menken-composed theme hasn’t lost any of its mysterious power.
From there, we get a tour of the beautifully CGI-ified castle, a quick off-screen back-and-forth between Lumiere (Ewan McGregor) and Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and a shot of the famous Enchanted Rose. The trailer then invites fans to join in on the fun with the iconic phrase: “Be Our Guest.”
As is the case with most teasers, this one is a bit of … a tease. It doesn’t give us much meat to chew on, but the trailer does seem to capture the feel of the original and should certainly be enough to pique the interest of long-time fans.
While this project boasts an all-star cast and a top-notch production team, living up to the enormously high standard set by the original will be tall task. After all, it was one of only three animated films in history to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And the other two — Up and Toy Story 3 — were nominated after the Academy expanded the best-picture field from five films to ten.
Beauty and the Beast stars Emma Watson as Belle, Luke Evans (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) as Gaston, and Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as the titular Beast. It hits theaters March 17, 2017.
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?