Moana and its sequel are two of the most successful movies in the history of Walt Disney Studios, and now, the company has been hit with a lawsuit claiming that the ideas for both Moana and its sequel were stolen.
In the lawsuit, which was filed on January 10 in federal court in California, animator Buck Woodall claims that Disney pulled elements of both films from the script for his project, titled Bucky. According to the lawsuit, Bucky is set in a Polynesian village and follows teenagers who defy their parents by embarking on dangerous voyages to save their homes as they encounter the spirits of animals who guide them on their journey.
The lawsuit came after a ruling in November that Disney could not be sued for copyright infringement over the original Moana because Woodall had filed his suit too late. The release of Moana 2 gave Woodall another chance to sue.
In the original case, the court found that a jury should decide if the works were substantially similar if the statute of limitations had not passed and also that someone at Disney might have seen the script for Bucky prior to beginning work on Moana.
“Disney’s Moana was produced in the wake of Woodall’s delivery to the Defendants of virtually all constituent parts necessary for its development and production after more than 17 years of inspiration and work on his animated film project,” the complaint states.
Among the similarities between the two projects are the Polynesian setting, the way both characters’ journeys start with a turtle, the use of the belief in animal spirits, an encounter with a tattoo-laden demigod who uses a hook, and a giant creature who is disguised as an island.
Woodall is seeking 2.5% of Moana‘s gross revenue, which amounts to $10 billion. Disney contested the claims made in the original lawsuit that the works were similar.
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?