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!
Today on the podcast, it’s all about robots: Giant battle robots, humanoid robots, Wild West cowboy robots … let’s just say, as dyed-in-the-wool sci-fi fans, it’s a theme we’re not exactly hating over here.
First up, although we already dug into this last week, we have to remind everyone that Blade Runner 2049 is here, it’s awesome, and it’s time to go get your tickets. The film is expected to hit the box office with a solid, yet relatively modest $50 million haul on its opening weekend, beginning a nice run for the fall season following Pennywise and company. But most importantly, it’s still getting stellar reviews — the aggregate score is at a slightly decreased 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but with a still impressive 8.2 out of 10 average.
But it’s what’s to come that is getting our motor humming this week, including adaptations of previously untapped treasures from some of the best sci-fi writers in the genre, as well as something fun and splashy for the kid in all of us.
Continuing our robot theme, we’ll talk about the latter topic first in the just-released debut trailer from the Pacific Rim sequel, Pacific Rim Uprising. Anyone who’s ever played robots as a budding youth knows the joy of the Pacific Rim franchise: It’s humongous robots (with people inside) fighting crazy alien monsters who hail from a crack in the ocean that just so happens to also be an inter-dimensional vortex. There’s a little Voltron, a dash of Transformers, and a healthy helping of Godzilla — and we like that. The trailer, sprinkled with plenty of John Boyega, is as fun as we expected it to be, and Pacific Rim Uprising looks like another wild ride, with even more epic robot action than the original.
There’s plenty of other cool new sci-fi to drool over as well, and it’s no coincidence that Friday’s gush of releases happen to coincide with New York Comic-Con this weekend. Today, we got impressive new trailers for some anticipated projects, including Amazon’s anthology series from the mind of Philip K. Dick (see Blade Runner above), Electric Dreams. It looks a lot like Amazon’s Black Mirror, with its throng of stars in a series of disturbing, dystopian sci-fi tales. We’re not sure exactly what we just saw in the show’s first trailer, but it certainly looks intriguing.
We also got a trailer for a weird new Keanu Reeves movie, in which he apparently resurrects his dead family with the help of Richard from Silicon Valley, aka the Verizon guy, aka Thomas Middleditch. The new film is called Replicas, and while it looks a little cheesy, we’re really digging this dystopian future theme hitting the zeitgeist these days. That said, isn’t there anyone who thinks the future won’t be a pitiless hellscape in which the nature of consciousness and humanity is as ambiguous as the plot of Transformers 5? Ah well, at least it’s not T2 bad in most of the new stories.
Also this week: Some intriguing news about Westworld season 2 (again, robots), Avatar 2 updates, Luke Cage season 2 news, a possible Hugh Hefner biopic starring Jared Leto, a Sonic the Hedgehog movie (bad idea), a Bob’s Burgers movie (also probably a bad idea), 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.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.