Each week, DT’s newest show Between the Streams is your guide to all of the hottest, most important, and (of course) dumbest new developments in streaming and entertainment to recap the week that was.
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Just in time for our official show premiere, this week was loaded to the brim with epicity (is that not a word?), and nothing is more epic than the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer. I mean, seriously, this thing had everything: ancient magical pyramids, nuclear holocaust, hurricane spouts exploding into bridges, and a giant god inside the X-Men house just tearing the place up. We actually had to go lie down afterwords, it’s exhausting.
Aside from the eye candy, the latest trailer was notable for revealing most of the cast for the new flick, old and new, including new cast members in Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, The Force Awakens) as the super-villain Apocalypse, Alexandra Shipp as Storm, Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler, Ben Hardy as Angel, Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, Olivia Munn as Psylocke, and Lana Condor as Jubilee. Returning actors include all of the second-gen crew, from James McAvoy as Professor X to Michael Fassbender playing a disheveled Magneto who’s recruited as one of Apocalypse’s four horseman.
We also mentioned David Hasselhoff’s triumphant (?) return as Michael Knight in our Between the Cracks segment, which selects one enticing morsel from the world of film/TV you may have missed. No one knows what this will be, but you can get a small glimpse of it in the trailer below.
X-Men wasn’t the only intriguing trailer on the block this week. We also got a look at Seth Rogen’s strange and hilarious new R-rated animated film, Sausage Party. Reportedly spawned from a joke by Jonah Hill and Rogen, who would constantly tell people their next film was called Sausage Party, the two decided to make the running gag into an actual movie — because, why not? The film dives into a sort of prolonged version of the Little Mermaid kitchen scene (remember, all those fish being diced up in front of her) in which all the main characters are groceries, completely unaware that their final destination is being cut in half by gnashing teeth and swallowed alive.
It’s a hilarious premise, and looks to be as weird and fun as you’d expect from Rogen and Co.
Our viewer poll of the week is up on Facebook as well. The question: Would you pay $50 to see a movie the day it’s released in theaters? Follow the link and put in your vote.
Would you pay $50 to rent a movie the day it comes out in theaters? Let us know why in the comments.
Posted by Digital Trends on Friday, March 18, 2016
Finally, we’re also highlighting Daredevil season 2 as our pick of the week.
Those topics and so much more are discussed above, so join us online live every Friday at 2 p.m. PST, and check out our podcast to catch up on the road!
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?