Game of Thrones‘ third-to-last episode, The Last of the Starks, aired on Sunday, May 5, bringing with it plot twists, hookups, and a couple of unexpected (and controversial) deaths. As the dust cleared, however, viewers weren’t sharing fan theories or speculating about the preview for next week’s climactic showdown. Instead, they were fixated a rogue coffee cup that appeared during the episode’s post-Battle of Winterfell celebration.
The cardboard coffee cup, complete with a modern plastic lid, can be seen on a table in front of Daenerys about 17 minutes into the episode, while the Mother of Dragons carefully watches Jon Snow and Tormund Giantsbane celebrate the victory over the White Walkers.
https://twitter.com/netw3rk/status/1125285288412995584
Now, HBO has responded, offering its own hot take. “The latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake,” HBO said in a press release, which was later reposted on the official Game of Thrones Twitter account. “Daenerys had ordered an herbal tea.”
The latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake. #Daenerys had ordered an herbal tea. pic.twitter.com/ypowxGgQRl
— Game of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) May 6, 2019
Game of Thrones art director Hauke Richter had a more serious take on the quickly brewing controversy. In an email to Variety, Richter pointed out that odd items accidentally end up in shots in movies and television all of the time. “[The coffee cup error has been] so blown out of proportion [because] it has not happened with Thrones so far,” Richter said.
The Last of the Starks was one of the worst-reviewed episodes of Game of Thrones‘ eighth and final season. Many critics, including our own, claimed that the show sacrificed logic and character consistency in an attempt to bring HBO’s hit series to a quick, spectacle-driven conclusion. On social media, Daenerys’ coffee cup is being used as a symbol of Game of Thrones‘ allegedly careless, slap-dash attitude heading toward the finale. It’s also the source of some pretty great memes.
At the same time, with only two episodes left, it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s stuck with Game of Thrones this long checking out because of caffeinated production errors or haphazard storytelling, and if HBO can stick the landing, it’s likely that fans will forgive many of Thrones‘ sins. For HBO’s sake, they had better; the premium network has not one but three Game of Thrones spinoffs in active pre-production, including one that’s already nabbed Naomi Watts for a lead role.
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?