Dwayne Johnson just does not stop. Even though July 4 was a holiday, the actor took the time to promote his upcoming video game-inspired action flick, Rampage. He did so by sharing a new on-set photo on social media, one in which he looks a little worse for wear.
In the photo, posted Tuesday on Johnson’s Instagram account, he sits alongside what seems to be a U.S. military aircraft. It has clearly been a long day for his character, given the dirt all over him and the bloody wound on his head. Yet, battered as he may be, he doesn’t look defeated. Johnson’s caption underscored that; he quoted the Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
Johnson also tied his post into Independence Day and showed his gratitude to the entire crew for putting so much effort into the film. Their task isn’t easy: Video game-inspired movies have often proven to be big letdowns for fans in the past. They hope to buck that trend with Rampage, which takes a classic 1980s arcade game and gives it a plot.
From what Johnson has revealed over the past several months, we know that his character heads an anti-poaching unit in Rwanda and has a close bond with a gorilla. When his primate pal and two other animals are infected with a serum that makes them aggressive and dangerous, a rampage ensues. Naturally, it is up to Johnson’s character to save the day.
The film has a lot of promising elements so far. Not only did Johnson sign on to star in it, the cast includes Joe Manganiello (Magic Mike), Malin Ackerman (Showtime’s Billions), Naomie Harris (Moonlight), and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (AMC’s The Walking Dead), among others. The project also boasts director Brad Peyton, who teamed up with Johnson again after their work on the 2015 box office hit San Andreas.
Johnson has been teasing the movie throughout their time filming. He has been generous with on-set photos, showing off the cast and technology bringing the story to screen. The movie is not due out till 2018, so we are enjoying his updates while we wait.
Rampage is set to take over theaters on April 20, 2018.
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?