Sony Pictures has been busy of late, dropping the Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle trailer, releasing the first four minutes of Spider-Man: Homecoming free online, and releasing the critically acclaimed Baby Driver in theaters. Amid this flurry of activity, however, the studio still found the time to journey back into the past and preview the upcoming re-release of an iconic film: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
On Monday, while you were cleaning your grill and ornamenting your property with American flag-themed decorations, Sony Pictures posted the video above to its YouTube page. Entitled, This Means Something, the 56-second spot shows mostly images of an air-traffic control screen (with a few, cryptic exceptions), but the audio will have movie fans nostalgic, confused, and giddy all at once. The sound was pulled directly from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that is on many a short list of the greatest sci-fi films of all time.
As reported by Deadline, the teaser was released to coincide with World UFO Day, but you would be forgiven for wondering what exactly it is teasing. We all know Hollywood cannot get enough of reboots/remakes/re-imaginings nowadays and the spot caused some fans to speculate that there might be an updated version of the beloved classic in the works, prompting reactions that ranged from excited to horrified. The truth, however, is far less controversial.
Apparently, Sony Pictures plans to re-release the original in theaters for a week, beginning on September 1. The news makes perfect sense, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind was meant to produce the sort of awe and wonder that only the big screen can deliver.
Getting back to the spot itself, it opens with the words “Every day, air traffic control tracks thousands of planes. But every so often, they see something … that cannot be explained,” scrolling onto the screen and closes with the URL: wearestillnotalone.com. The latter appears to be a sign-up for a mailing list, which allows members to receive information on “UFO sightings,” along with information on Sony Pictures projects.
This looks like it could be a lot of fun for fans of Close Encounters, which starred Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr and was originally released in theaters December 14, 1977.
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?