It wasn’t an entirely wonderful weekend for The Great Wall, director Yimou Zhang’s effects-driven $150 million adventure that featured a mercenary played by Matt Damon fending off hordes of monsters from China’s legendary wall. The most expensive movie ever made in China, the film earned a mere $18 million in its U.S. debut, according to early box-office estimates.
The low numbers for The Great Wall — which placed it third among the weekend’s top movies — are offset quite a bit by its strong run overseas, which has already brought its worldwide box-office earnings over $262 million. Given that the film’s $150 million price tag doesn’t include the massive amounts of money spent on marketing and distribution in the U.S. and abroad, it will likely need a few more big weeks internationally if it’s going to make up for its relatively weak debut in the U.S.
As for the weekend’s top two films, the first- and second-place films remained the same for the second consecutive week, with the animated feature The Lego Batman Movie continuing its reign atop the box-office rankings ahead of the erotic thriller Fifty Shades Darker.
Of the other new releases to crack the weekend’s top ten films, “R”-rated comedy Fist Fight earned a modest $12 million, but it only cost around $25 million to make, so it’s not prompting too much concern yet. Ice Cube and Charlie Day star in the film, which follows a teacher who gets fired from a rough school (Ice Cube), only to return and challenge another teacher (Day) to an after-school fight.
What is causing studio concern, however, is the abysmal debut for A Cure For Wellness, Gore Verbinski’s horror thriller that was savaged by professional critics and general audiences alike, and had a surprisingly low $4.2 million debut in the U.S. The film’s opening weekend is the lowest of all Verbinski’s films so far — a list that includes 2005’s Nicolas Cage drama The Weather Man and 1997’s family-friendly comedy Mouse Hunt.
It’s a disappointing start for the film, which follows a young executive (Dane DeHaan) tasked with bringing home his company’s absent CEO from a mysterious health spa, and has shifted the once-promising project firmly into “flop” territory.
This week’s new releases include a pair of thrillers with a significant amount of buzz leading up to their premieres, with writer-director Jordan Peele of Key & Peele fame bringing Get Out to theaters, while unconventional zombie movie The Girl With All The Gifts also shambles into theaters. Will either film challenge the top two films? It’s unlikely, but stranger things have happened in Hollywood.
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?