After the departure of both Daniel Craig and director Sam Mendes, the Bond franchise is very much in flux. Though it looks like Tom Hiddleston is the front-runner to become the next 007, he doesn’t lack for challengers, both male and female.
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Case in point: A fan petition from earlier this month that suggested that the superspy’s gender be changed, so that Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) could step into the role as Jane Bond. That idea seems to have intrigued quite a few folks within the industry, including the London-born Emilia Clarke, best-known for playing the universally adored and consistently badass Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s Game of Thrones.
As part of an interview with the U.K.’s Daily Star, the actress admitted that she has “a lot of unrealized dreams,” and added, “I would love to play Jane Bond. My ultimate leading man would be Leonardo DiCaprio. No doubt about it.”
Wow! She certainly has the character’s trademark confidence down pat. Not only is she ready to put her own spin on one of the most coveted roles in all of cinema, she’s ready to make a sidekick out of one of Hollywood’s most revered actors. Someone get this woman a martini — shaken, not stirred.
Even if the current Bond franchise continues to cast men in the role, Hollywood loves itself a spinoff. So why not give Clarke, Emilia Clarke her own series? Sounds like a way for the character to generate even more money — something Hollywood also loves.
We’ll have to wait and see whether she was being serious or just having a bit of fun, but the mere thought of her playing the superspy should be enough to make fans everywhere swoon.
Stay tuned for news and updates on the search for the next Bond.
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?