Worlds and universes are about to collide. It was revealed today that Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will write and produce a new series of Star Wars films.
The announcement, which was made on the official Star Wars website, said the new films will be separate from the ongoing Skywalker saga, as well as the upcoming Star Wars trilogy from Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson. Benioff and Weiss are hard at work on the final season of Game of Thrones, which is expected to air on HBO in 2019. The pair assured fans waiting for the latest tales from Westeros that the Star Wars series will not start development until after Game of Thrones is completed.
“In the summer of 1977, we traveled to a galaxy far, far away, and we’ve been dreaming of it ever since,” Benioff and Weiss said in a joint statement. “We are honored by the opportunity, a little terrified by the responsibility, and so excited to get started as soon as the final season of Game of Thrones is complete.”
The pair were chosen to helm a new Star Wars series in part due to their masterful work at world building and crafting characters so popular that their not being dead is headline news. “David and Dan are some of the best storytellers working today,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, in a statement. “Their command of complex characters, depth of story, and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push Star Wars in ways I find incredibly exciting.”
The Game of Thrones creators’ new Star Wars films will not be the first instance of overlap between HBO’s hit drama and Disney’s Star Wars films. Emilia Clarke, who plays the ruthless Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones will play Qi’Ra in the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story. Ian McElhinney, who plays Barristan Selmy on Game of Thrones, played General Dodonna in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
As of now, there are no release dates or casting details for Benioff and Weiss’ upcoming Star Wars series. If the films are anything like Game of Thrones, we should be in for a bloody good time.
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?