It’s a safe bet to say that someone — and more likely, many, many someones — will die during Game of Thrones season 7, but calling who will be killed off first is much more difficult. That doesn’t mean that viewers aren’t trying, though. Sports Betting Experts has released the results of a 10,000-fan poll on what to expect when the show returns, EW reports.
With so many characters on the show, the votes were spread across almost two dozen possible victims. Unfortunately for Theon Greyjoy (played by Alfie Allen), he looked to many fans like the likeliest target. He received 14 percent of the vote, almost double the 8 percent of second-place character, Melisandre (Carice van Houten).
Just because fans predicted Theon’s death doesn’t mean he’ll die, of course. The poll’s predictions are just based on opinions and could be completely wrong. Major characters like Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), and Jon Snow (Kit Harington), for example, were all considered very unlikely to die early on, but the showrunners could pull off a crazy twist.
If they’re right and Theon dies first, he’d probably hope for a quick and relatively painless death given the horrific torture he previously endured. There could be much worse in store for him, though. The poll asked fans to speculate on the cause of death, and White Walkers were considered a big threat.
Beyond the first death and its cause, there were questions about who Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) will take down next, whether the season 7 premiere will attract over 8 million viewers, the religion of the final ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, and if the ratings can top the season 6 finale. There’s so much to ponder while we wait for new Game of Thrones episodes to resume this summer.
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?