Disney is giving Star Wars fans more of what they love, courtesy of a documentary series focusing on the hit Disney+ show The Mandalorian — which hopefully means more of its adorable breakout star, Baby Yoda, aka The Child.
Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian will premiere on Star Wars Day, May 4, on Disney’s streaming video service. The eight-part series will cover a different facet of The Mandalorian in each episode, and will feature behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with the cast and creative team, and roundtable conversations hosted by series creator Jon Favreau.
The episode topics announced by Disney so far include “the filmmaking process on The Mandalorian, the legacy of George Lucas’ Star Wars, how the cast brought the characters to life, the series’ groundbreaking technology, the artistry behind the show’s practical models and effects, … the creative influences, the iconic score, and connections to Star Wars characters and props from across the galaxy.”
The premiere of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian is one of several big events Disney has planned for Star Wars Day, the celebration of the sci-fi saga held on May 4 each year. The annual event was born of a pun on the franchise catchphrase “May The Force be with you,” which — after it was widely embraced by fans — became officially recognized by Lucasfilm and Disney in recent years.
Although The Mandalorian concluded its first season in December 2019 in the U.S., the series won’t finish its original run in most of Europe until May 1, several days before Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian premieres worldwide.
New episodes of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian will debut every Friday on Disney+.
The first season of The Mandalorian introduced the titular bounty hunter and the Force-wielding toddler — officially known as “The Child” — that Mando is initially tasked with bringing to an ex-Imperial operative. He later rejects the original mission and takes The Child back, hoping to find a new, safe home for it, but both are pursued by another, even more brutal former Imperial officer.
Season 2 of The Mandalorian began filming during the first season’s run, with former Disney CEO Bob Iger later saying that the second season would premiere in October 2020. With so many television projects and movies delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, it’s not clear whether that premiere window will change.
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?