Four years after first debuting as Yelena Belova in Black Widow, Florence Pugh is set to make her return in Thunderbolts*. In a recent interview with the rest of the film’s cast and creative team, Pugh told Empire how different the movie feels than most Marvel fare.
“It ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” she said.
Jake Schreier, who directed the film and also directed the A24-produced Netflix series Beef, was told to make the movie “something different.”
“There’s a certain amount of that Beef tone in it, that does feel different. There’s an emotional darkness that we brought to this that is resonant, but doesn’t come at the expense of comedy,” he explained.
Thunderbolts follows a group of antiheroes, many of whom have appeared in some other Marvel project, as they unite to go on a mission for the U.S. government. It’s a little bit like the Marvel version of The Suicide Squad. In addition to Pugh, the movie also stars Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, and Olga Kurylenko, as well as Lewis Pullman, who plays a new character named Bob.
“Yelena sees parts of herself in him,” Pugh said of her character’s relationship with Pullman’s. “She’s always been someone that wants to look after people. She has a sweet spot for him, and essentially likes looking after him because he’s useless. He’s absolutely useless.”
While Marvel movies have been compared to ’70s conspiracy thrillers in the past, this might be the first time that anyone has compared one to an A24 movie. We’ll see whether the comparison is apt when the movie hits theaters on May 2.
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?