From The Imitation Game to the illusion game.
Benedict Cumberbatch has already helped defeat Nazi Germany once, but according to THR, the actor is ready for round two of WWII.
Cumberbatch has signed on to star in The War Magician, which is based on David Fisher’s 1983 book of the same name. The war drama follows the true story of Jasper Maskelyne, a man of magic who used misdirection and illusion to help vanquish the Nazis during the second World War. The British conjurer assembled a special team dubbed,“The Magic Gang” which used various modes of trickery to confound the Germans and conceal high-priority targets.
The Allied armies tried some wacky things during the war, but this wasn’t just some half-baked, quickly abandoned project. Maskelyne pulled plenty of rabbits out of his hat, and was so successful in this endeavor that he actually made Adolf Hitler’s personal blacklist.
Interestingly enough, Cumberbatch is already playing comic book sorcerer Dr. Stephen Strange for Marvel, so we’ll be pretty used to seeing the actor abracadabra by the time this film actually hits theaters.
The War Magician has yet to set a release date and details are still scarce, but you can check out the official synopsis of Fisher’s book below.
“Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s. When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Egypt where the desert war had just begun. He used his skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to ‘hide’ the Suez Canal from them. He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa. On Malta he developed ‘the world’s first portable holes’: fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets. His war culminated in the brilliant deception plan that won the Battle of El Alamein: the creation of an entire dummy army in the middle of the desert.”
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?