The verdict is in: Creed is a hit with both audiences and critics — not to mention that it has already hauled in $115 million against a budget of just $35 million. With that said, it was always a pretty safe bet that this film would be getting a sequel.
According to Variety, a follow-up is already planned, and Sylvester Stallone has already discussed a few ideas with director Ryan Coogler.
The actor told Variety “Ryan has some ideas of going forward and backward and actually seeing Rocky and Apollo together. Think of The Godfather 2. That’s what he was thinking of, which was kind of ambitious.” He went on to tease another potential plotline that would see Adonis Johnson/Creed face off against a ferocious Russian foe, which would of course evoke thoughts of Ivan Drago and the whole “if he dies, he dies” thing.
“The complication will come with the girl’s [Bianca’s] ambition,” said Stallone. “Because she’s not Adrian. She has places to go, things to see, the clock is running on her hearing.”
For his part, Coogler didn’t seem all that thrilled that Stallone had made the world privy to their discussions. When he was approached for a reaction on Stallone’s comments the director reportedly responded with the words “Oh no!” before he sighed and said “there are no secrets with Sly.”
Unhappy though he may have been, he certainly didn’t deny that he and Stallone had had discussions about Creed 2. MGM CEO Gary Barber also seemed pretty open about the whole thing, saying “there’s no doubt that we’re making a Creed 2.”
The studio co-financed the Warner Bros. release and it looks like the strong box-office returns have it itching to get back in the ring.
This is all pretty preliminary but the bit about Rocky and Apollo together again, in particular, is nothing if not intriguing. Would it be done via CGI during a flashback or dream sequence? As part of an alternate timeline? It’s just tough to imagine it not feeling forced and gimmicky, and part of the strength of Creed was that it felt natural, fresh, and … well, not forced and gimmicky.
In any case, if you’ve yet to catch Creed, the film is currently in theaters.
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?