At this point, we’ve lost count of how many Fast and Furious films there have been, but the franchise has aged well and the original remains a classic for those who love the smell of burnt rubber in the morning.
The 15th anniversary of that film is coming up and, according to Entertainment Weekly, Universal plans to celebrate by re-releasing The Fast and the Furious for a short theatrical run. The film opens nationwide on June 22, 2016 and tickets are already available for pre-order on Fandango.
You can check out the original trailer above if you need a refresher, but be warned: Seeing the late Paul Walker as a young, smolderingly good-looking man is a tad bittersweet. If you can get past that, however, there’s plenty of gasoline-tinged nostalgia to be had. Here’s what Vin Diesel told EW about the occasion:
“Fifteen years ago my life changed forever. Dom was born … Little did I know back then what that really meant. The brotherhood formed with Brian, the love personified in Letty and the sense of family initiated by Mia … It is surreal that this film has held up all the years and led to so much more. Proud of our Fast saga family. From studio to crew, thank you all.”
Fast & Furious films are planned through at least 2021, but if you’re ready to put the pedal to the metal, hit the NOS, and travel back in time to where it all started, you’ll soon be able to do so.
If you’re curious about the future of the franchise, Fast 8 is filming now and is helmed by Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray. The film stars Vin Diesel, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jason Statham, and Charlize Theron, who will play a villain known as Imperator Furiosa Cipher. You can catch that film April 14, 2017, while Fast & Furious 9 and 10 are on tap for 2019 and 2021 respectively.
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?