HBO has given showrunner David Milch the green light to make a new film that continues the story from its 2004 western TV series Deadwood. After months of rumors, HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo told TVLine that he signed off on the project after a conversation with Milch.
“David has our commitment that we are going to do it,” Lombardo said. “He pitched what he thought generally the storyline would be — and knowing David, that could change. But it’s going to happen.”
The cult classic, which only lasted three seasons, was a gritty portrait of the people and politics in a lawless South Dakota town during the late nineteenth century. Though it didn’t last long, the critically acclaimed series won prestige for HBO and elevated the careers of its many stars, including Timothy Olyphant and incoming Game of Thrones player Ian McShane. When asked how the network planned to corral the many stars needed to bring the series back to life, Lombardo said he would “leave that in David’s hands.”
“Some casts and creators form a bond that becomes relevant for the rest of their lives,” he said. “This was a defining moment for a lot of them.”
Milch himself has moved on to new things, and Lombardo said that the Deadwood movie would not move forward until the showrunner completes his current project. Could he still be working on that 2011 adaptation of Heavy Rain? (Probably not.)
In other words, don’t get too excited yet. Even though it’s more than a pipe dream, there are about a million things that could go wrong. Still, Lombardo, at least, seems to have faith that we’ll come back around to Deadwood sooner or later.
“I’ve known him for a while and it feels like it’s something he’s not done talking about,” Lombardo said.
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?