Black Mirror will return to Netflix for a fifth season this summer, the streaming service has announced by way of a new trailer. All three episodes of the abbreviated new season will arrive on June 5, 2019, and if you’re a dedicated Black Mirror fan, the new footage will look very familiar — maybe too familiar.
While Netflix didn’t release any episode titles or summaries, the trailer seems to be made up of a trio distinct plotlines. In one, a young woman falls prey to a cute and seemingly well-meaning digital assistant that appears to have darker intentions. In another, a family man finds himself tempted to cheat on his wife after browsing a dating app. Finally, a third story depicts a man with a gun who looks like he’s been driven mad by constant digital surveillance.
Like recent Black Mirror installments, the new season of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian sci-fi anthology series stars a number of A-list celebrities, including Miley Cyrus and Avengers star Anthony Mackie, who’s positioned to be a major player in the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Djib Mo’s “Lonely Feelings” plays over the trailer, riffing on Black Mirror‘s main theme, i.e., how technology isolates people instead of bringing them together. Near the end of the trailer, buzzwords like “technology,” “the future,” “connection,” and “sex” flash across the screen.
In other words, Black Mirror season 5 looks like more of the same, and the trailer works hard to drive that point home. That’s not a complaint, exactly. Black Mirror has never been subtle, and its twisty, satirical take on modern life is still unlike anything else on TV. At the same time, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Black Mirror‘s best episodes have already covered some of this material.
Take video games, for example. In season four, the episode “U.S.S. Callister” combined a Star Trek send-up with a hard-hitting look at how ethics become warped in virtual reality. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which arrived between seasons, is both a satire about the video game industry and a choose-your-own-adventure-style video game itself. In that vein, the season5 trailer concludes with an extended Street Fighter parody. It’s starting to feel a little repetitive.
Ultimately, more Black Mirror is still a treat for sci-fi fans, and the brief season (which was likely shortened due to Bandersnatch‘s demanding production schedule) could surprise us. After all, unexpected twists are what Black Mirror does best. Black Mirror made its name by taking big risks, and it’d be a shame to see one of the most innovative and influential sci-fi series of the past few years start to play it safe.
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?