If you’re a fan of the Mad Max franchise, brace yourself for a bit of a gut punch.
Sunday night, at the Golden Globe Awards, director George Miller told Page Six “I won’t make more Mad Max movies. Fury Road with Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Riley Keough was forever getting completed. If you finish one in a year, it’s considered a leap of faith. Start, stop, start again.” He went on to add “I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wildflowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever. We had to wait 18 months and every return to the U.S. was 27 hours. Those Mad Maxes take forever. I won’t do those anymore.”
Ouch. There’s not much equivocating going on there.
It looks like Miller is determined to move on to greener, less post-apocalyptic pastures. Still, actors and directors aren’t always the most reliable of sources when it comes to their own careers, so there’s always the possibility that he may eat his words later.
If he is in fact done with the franchise, he’s certainly ending things on a high note. Mad Max: Fury Road grossed nearly $400 million dollars and was nominated for Best Picture, Drama at the 2016 Golden Globes, while Miller was nominated for Best Director. Though the hardware went to The Revenant and Alejandro González Iñárritu respectively, Fury Road was certainly among the most beloved films of 2015.
Before this news broke, many expected that Miller would return for the upcoming Mad Max: The Wasteland (release date TBA), the sequel to Fury Road, but it looks like someone else will be stepping in to helm that project. No word yet on who that might be, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted.
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?