The 1975 film Death Race 2000 was based on the premise that hit-and-run incidents would no longer be illegal in the year 2000. In fact, they would constitute the national sport, and a way to get bonus points while participating in a fictitious event named the Transcontinental Road Race.
The new millennium has come and gone and motorists still get jail time instead of Grand Theft Auto-style bonus points if they plow down a pedestrian. Death Race 2000, however, has become a cult classic, so it’s not surprising that a remake named Death Race 2050 is in the works. The movie is scheduled to come out early next year.
The movie’s official trailer reveals that the United States of America no longer exists in 34 years’ time. It’s been re-named the United Corporations of America, and the states have been replaced by bigger regions with satirical names such as Onepercentia, Gasarcana, and Pharmatopia. Eight racers line up at the starting grid to participate in a deadly, highly-speed jaunt across the nation called simply Death Race.
Pedestrians stand a better chance of surviving an impact with a car today than ever before thanks to modern safety standards that dictate what a car can and can’t look like, and thanks to tech features like automatic emergency braking (AEB). None of this matters in 2050, though, and the racers are sitting behind the wheel of cars specifically modified to inflict as much damage as possible to innocent bystanders. Fins, spikes, and other sharp, metallic objects help each team score as many points as possible. Adults in the prime of life are merely worth ten points, while senior citizens are worth 50 points each.
The film is directed by Roger Corman, the storied 90-year-old independent producer and director who made the original film over four decades ago. It’s a straight-to-video flick so it won’t hit the big screen, but it’s coming out on Blu-Ray on January 17, 2017.
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?