DT’s weekly entertainment show, Between the Streams, is your guide to all of the hottest, most important, and (of course) dumbest new developments in streaming and entertainment, providing a handy recap of the week that was and a preview for what’s ahead. Follow us here at 2 p.m. PT every Friday, or add us via RSS, iTunes, or Stitcher at the links below to take BtS on the road!
This week, the box office is just one more bummer and we don’t know how to stop it from careening into the pit of despair. Luckily, however, there are still a ton of incredible movies out there to sink your teeth into if you don’t want to see what is apparently one of the worst horror movies of modern times, Winchester. Instead, we recommend checking out one of the many Oscar contenders still in theaters, including The Disaster Artist, The Shape of Water, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the latter of which is a frontrunner for best picture and a film we’ll be talking about on the show today.
Luckily, even if you’re feeling decidedly lazy this weekend, there are plenty of goodies to check out from your home base, including Netflix’s latest big spend, Altered Carbon, which debuts this weekend. Based on a book about a dystopian future in which consciousness is transferred as easily as a backup hard drive, the show cost a mint to make and is getting decent, if not stellar reviews. Regardless, for those looking for some impressive dystopian sci-fi this weekend, Netflix’s latest should fit the bill.
Of course, it’s the Super Bowl this weekend, and although most of us aren’t exactly champing at the bit for this one, in the entertainment world that means commercials and, more to the point, new trailers. We’re expecting the game to unload new looks at a host of movies, including potential new trailers/teasers for Avengers: Infinity War, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Mission Impossible — Fallout, and probably some more Black Panther.
How about all those reboots, huh? No, we’re not talking about the ever-expanding list of movies, we’re talking about … ’80s and ’90s sitcoms? From Roseanne (really?!) and Will and Grace to The Office and freaking Murphy Brown, broadcast networks really are proving these days that, even moreso than movie studios, they are completely out of ideas. The success of Will and Grace in its reiteration has brought on a near-apocalypse of terrible ideas, but we never thought we’d see the day when CBS trotted out a 71-year-old Candice Bergen to play a role she last embraced two decades ago. In the words of one infamous tweeter: Sad!
We’ll be talking about this odd new phenomenon on the show today, and whether or not this sorely desperate attempt at cashing in on the network golden days really does spell the beginning of the end for the Big Four.
One thing we are extremely excited about in the world of broadcast TV, however, is the news we got last week about FX moving forward with a What We Do in the Shadows TV series pilot. For those unaware, the film from Jermaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords, Moana) and Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) is heralded by many (including yours truly) as the best mockumentary since Spinal Tap. We’ll chat about the possibilities on today’s show and why this Kiwi comedy team is one of the best in the business.
Also on today’s show, we’ll talk about the still-untitled Cloverfield sequel, Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, a Duke Nukem film with John Cena, Ant-Man and The Wasp, the Krypton TV series, and much more.
So tune in and hit us up live at 2 p.m. PT today, or take us along for the ride with our podcast version by following the links at the top of this story.
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?