Live-action remakes of beloved animated classics are, it seems, inevitable, and a remake of How to Train Your Dragon is next in line. If you believe one of its stars, Gerard Butler, though, this one’s actually going to be pretty good.
Of course, Butler is not the most unbiased source of information. He is reprising his role as Stoick in the new film, a character he voiced in the animated trilogy. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Butler talked about seeing the new film without effects and also said that it was a real struggle to go through costuming for the role.
“It was like five pieces of hell. Hours every day and then another hour just to get into the costume,” he explained. “I’d always wondered making those movies, you know, seeing the animated version, ‘What would it be like to actually have to be that size? To be that character and to live?’ Because, for me, one of the great things about being an actor is you get to live in those other worlds, but you don’t when it’s animated. But now they’ve made the live-action, and suddenly you’re in those arenas, and you’re in that Viking village.”
Stoick, at least in animation, is a burly mass of hair and plays a crucial role in the film’s plot as protagonist Hiccup’s father and the man who he most frequently butts heads with. Butler continued, though, by saying that he’s seen the new film.
“The movie’s incredible. I’ve seen it without effects. It’s amazing. But I cannot wait for the world to see it,” he said.
Given the source of the information, we’ll have to take it with a grain of salt, but that teaser trailer definitely looked enticing.
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?