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!
Every so often, and usually without warning, you see a film that’s loaded with so much movie magic — such perfect pace, execution, story, and unadulterated spectacle — you immediately want to go back through the turnstiles and take another ride. Thor: Ragnarok, from the wildly hilarious and imaginative mind of filmmaker Taika Waititi, is such a film. Thor 3 raises the bar, not just for Marvel, and not just for action comedies — which it all but redefines — but for blockbusters at large. We’ll be talking about the franchise-reinventing film (spoiler free, of course) on the podcast today, and how it just might be the best Marvel movie ever made.
But of course, there’s much more to the show this week than just gushing over Thor (though we’re sure we could fill the hour easily with that alone). There are actually other films on the theater docket this weekend besides “the best-reviewed Marvel movie ever,” including a so-far 100 percenter on Rotten Tomatoes called Lady Bird. The period piece — if you can call a film set in 2002 a period piece — from director Greta Gerwig is getting rave reviews. It’s the personal story about a mother-daughter relationship that takes a wider look at the country as a whole in a time of shifting ideals as America dove into multiple “wars on terror.” We’d suggest skipping that one and seeing Thor for now, but there’s no doubt it should be a great chunk of storytelling.
Also in theaters this week is Rob Reiner’s LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson as the titular president. The film is getting panned, however, so we’d say it’s another one to save for later — if at all.
Getting back to Waititi, the director’s first movie to hit our radar, What We Do in the Shadows, may be getting the series treatment. The vampire mockumentary, which barely tipped the scales in theaters, is perhaps one of the best of its kind since 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, the genre-defining film from Christopher Guest. After his triumph with Thor, we’re pretty sure Waititi will be getting a blank check from whomever sits in the office of any studio threshold he crosses, so we’re going to go ahead and say this series is a go. We’re hoping it will land at HBO, where the co-director of What We do in the Shadows, one Jemaine Clement, already has a cozy relationship, but that’s yet to be seen.
And of course, we can’t neglect the latest Star Wars: Episode VIII — Last Jedi trailer, which reveals much more, and yet asks more questions at the same time. At this point, we’re just starting to get worried about what this film will mean for the Jedi as a whole, not only in the franchise but in the nostalgia-laden memories from our childhood, and we just want answers. They won’t come until December 15, of course, so we’ll have to just direct our attention elsewhere — patience is a virtue, as they say.
We’ll be talking about much more this week, including a Superman prequel series from FX, The Lion King live-action reboot featuring Beyoncé(why?), Kit Harington’s very British miniseries, American Vandal season 2, and 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.
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?