You might think that Marvel’s Captain America films wouldn’t perform very well beyond the borders of the US-of-A (what with the whole emphasis on “America” and all), but you’d be wrong.
In fact, you wouldn’t just be wrong — you’d be very, very wrong.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Captain America: Civil War exploded out of the gates this past weekend, hauling in $200.2 million at the foreign box office. The film’s overseas release came one week before its domestic debut, and the massive ticket sales it has already posted must have folks over at Marvel feeling pretty bullish.
The film’s $200.2 million foreign take is good enough for the fourteenth-best overseas opening weekend of all time, and puts the film in truly elite company. Couple that with a 94-percent positive score from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and Captain America: Civil War seems poised to be a massive hit.
Amazon Offer: Thousands of Movies & TV Shows on Amazon Prime. Try Prime Free!
The newest entry in Marvel’s stable of films nabbed 63 percent of the worldwide box office this past weekend and bested previous releases like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Spider-Man 3 to become the highest-grossing debut of all time in Mexico ($20.6 million), Brazil ($12.3 million), and the Philippines ($7.5 million).
Ironically, its historic $200 million opening puts it well behind another superhero battle royale: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That film opened to the tune of $256.5 million, but was held back domestically by negative press and poor reviews (27 percent on Rotten Tomatoes).
While the main critique of Batman v Superman seemed to be that it just wasn’t fun enough, the early returns seem to suggest that Captain America: Civil War won’t have that problem. We’ll have to wait until May 6, 2016 to find out for sure, but it seems like Marvel has another winner on its hands. The winner of the titular Civil War, on the other hand, is still TBD.
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?