The Blade Runner sequel feels like it has been long decades in the making, but now that it is actually happening, progress is happening much faster. Most recently, the cast of the Denis Villeneuve-directed film has grown by two: David Dastmalchian and Hiam Abbass are slated to join, reports Variety.
Dastmalchian has starred in such high-profile films as 2008’s The Dark Knight and Marvel’s 2015 hit Ant-Man. He also previously worked with Villeneuve, playing Bob Taylor in the 2013 thriller Prisoners. The film featured a talented cast, including Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, and more. Dastmalchian has appeared on TV series over the years as well, such as FX’s The League, Showtime’s Ray Donovan, and the BBC’s Intruders.
Abbass has a long list of credits to her name, including numerous foreign films. The Israeli Arab actress has notably starred in Steven Spielberg’s historical drama and political thriller Munich, as well as The Visitor, Lemon Tree, and others. She and Dastmalchian join a cast that includes Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, Barkha Abdi, Dave Bautista, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, and Mackenzie Davis.
The film will pick up decades after the events of the 1982 original. Ford will return as Rick Deckard, his ex-law enforcement agent character who hunted down replicants. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but we do know that the film is written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. Fancher previously collaborated with David Peoples on Blade Runner, which is based on a classic 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The sequel is produced by Alcon Entertainment. Original director Ridley Scott is executive producing, along with Bill Carraro, Frank Giustra, and Tim Gamble. The Blade Runner sequel is set for release on October 6, 2017, finally putting an end to fans’ years of waiting.
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?