The vault is empty — or it will be, soon enough. In an investor meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed that the company’s upcoming streaming service, Disney Plus, will eventually host “the entire Disney motion picture library,” including the studio’s complete slate of animated films.
“The movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a ‘vault’ and brought out basically every few years will be on the service,” Iger said, noting that the full Disney lineup should be available on Disney Plus “at some point fairly soon after launch.”
That’s a huge change to Disney’s company policy. Currently, 34 of Disney’s animated films — a group that includes both classic features and their direct-to-video sequels — reside in a theoretical space known as “the vault.” Every film in the vault is released on home video once every ten years. Once that allotment of DVDs and Blu-Rays sells out, new copies of the film won’t be printed until the film’s next time in the vault cycle comes due.
The program was designed to keep Disney’s animated offerings fresh for young audiences and to inflate demand for its home video products. It’s also a frustrating policy for parents and Disney fans. For example, as The Verge observes, there’s currently no way to buy or stream new copies of Disney’s original Aladdin even though the live-action remake is making headlines thanks to its divisive trailer.
Disney won’t be stingy when it comes to adding new movies to Disney Plus, either. Iger said that new movies, like Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: Episode IX, will arrive on Disney Plus within a year of their release date.
The addition of Disney’s previously vaulted films makes Disney Plus an even more attractive proposition for customers, although it’s not the service’s only selling point. In addition to Disney’s classic films, Disney Plus will also host original content, including multiple television series based on Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a Monsters Inc. spin-off, remakes of Disney movies like 3 Men and a Baby, and shows based on High School Musical and High Fidelity.
Disney Plus is expected to launch sometime before the end of 2019.
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?