Brace yourselves, Marvel movie fans: Things are going to get weird in Marvel’s cinematic universe with the arrival of Doctor Strange, the superhero sorcerer with a penchant for bending reality as we know it to defend the mortal realm from supernatural threats.
Created by legendary artist and writer Steve Ditko in 1963, Doctor Strange will make the leap from comics to the big screen later this year, with Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch (as seen in the behind-the-scenes images above) playing the lead role in the film. While the film is expected to formally introduce occult elements to Marvel’s movie universe, fans of the character know that the adventures of surgeon-turned-sorcerer Stephen Strange have long been a magnet for the bizarre stories — both in print and outside the pages of the comics.
What could be so strange about the history of the man called “Doctor Strange,” you ask? You’ll find 10 examples in the gallery above along with some fun footage from the film set.
If that’s not strange enough for you, you don’t have long to wait for more superhero sorcery. Doctor Strange hits theaters November 4.
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?