Fox and National Geographic have announced that the Emmy-winning series Cosmos will return for a second season, premiering in 2019. The 13-episode series, subtitled Possible Worlds, will again be hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Seth MacFarlane (The Orville) will return as executive producer, as will producer/writer/director Ann Druyan, who won an Emmy award for writing and a Peabody award for producing the 2014 season.
The original Carl Sagan series from 1980 was, at the time, the most successful public television series ever made. The reboot in 2014, called Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, not only covered astronomical phenomena but also profiles of little-known scientists.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist, head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. He also hosts the popular podcast StarTalk in between his numerous television appearances.
A SpaceTime Oddyssey was the most-watched series internationally ever on National Geographic. The new season will arrive in Spring 2019 and it will air on Fox here in the U.S. and on National Geographic worldwide.
Deadline reports that the two networks originally teamed up on the reboot, due to their corporate relationship within the Fox Networks. They will continue to collaborate on the new season, even as the two networks are going their own separate ways. National Geographic is one of the 21st Century Fox assets that are being sold to Disney as part of their $52 billion mega deal.
The first season of the series was well-received, and the new season promises to “venture to previously uncharted territories.”
National Geographic will also publish a companion book Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan, who’s also Carl Sagan’s widow. The book is a follow-up to the Sagan bestseller Cosmos: A Personal Voyage published in 1980, which is one of the top-selling science books of all time.
“When isn’t it the right time to bring Cosmos back?” executive producer Brannon Braga asked at New York Comic-Con in 2014 when discussing the revival of the series. “There are always dark forces of irrational thinking. Science is always relevant. Reality is relevant. Nature is relevant. A believable view of the world that is real is relevant.”
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?