Count Olaf will soon be terrorizing the Beaudelaire orphans in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the latest adaptation of Daniel Handler’s beloved book series. This time, Netflix is bringing the books’ beloved characters to the small screen with a cast that features Neil Patrick Harris, Joan Cusack, Patrick Warburton, and more. In preparation for the series’ January debut, the streaming service has unveiled its first full trailer.
After a previous teaser showed us what to expect from the evil Count Olaf (played by Harris), the new preview gives us a better idea of the plight of the Baudelaire orphans — Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes), and Sunny. As you’d expect, they will find themselves dealing with some very, well, unfortunate events. It’s not easy being without parents, but a diabolical guardian makes it all the more awful.
Count Olaf has plenty of tricks up his sleeve in the new series, but he doesn’t appear to bee the most competent villain. The trailer shows the kids managing to thwart him — if just barely — and his many not-so-tricky disguises. He fails pretty miserably in one scene in particular: He tells the Baudelaires that he’ll have their fortune by the time the sand in an hourglass runs out, only to have to amend his statement when it does so more quickly that he expected.
The count is just one of the adults in the series who seems a little ridiculous. Throughout the trailer, the Baudelaires come into contact with a string of people who don’t inspire a lot of confidence in their ability to help. These characters are played by skilled actors, though, including K. Todd Freeman, Alfre Woodard, and Don Johnson.
The series, which is set for eight episodes, is written by Handler himself, who executive produced alongside Barry Sonnenfeld. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events hits Netflix on January 13.
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?