We’re only five months away from Paul Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot, but we still don’t have a ton of information on the film. We’ve haven’t seen a trailer yet (though it sounds like we’ll get one by the end of the month), plot details are scarce, and — other than a few images — there just isn’t much to work with.
In such cases as these, we find ourselves looking for information in unlikely places … like within the tiny, blocky world of Lego.
As reported by ScreenCrush, Lego released the first pictures of its upcoming, Ghostbusters-themed ECTO-1 and 2 set earlier today, and the images actually give us a few clues about the film itself.
First off, there’s the Kevin the Receptionist (Chris Hemsworth) mini-figure, who is riding a motorcycle labeled ECTO-2 with his glasses askew, and appears to have a pretty pronounced case of red-eye. The piece seems to suggest both that Kevin will get on the ghostbusting action at some point and that he will be possessed by some sort of supernatural being at some point. Since it took until earlier this week to get a simple image of the character, this qualifies as big news.
Beyond that, we also get a peek at some sort of winged demon/ghost, who could be either a new-age Slimer or a new-age Gozer. At first blush, it looks a bit more sinister than the amorphous green guy that fans of the original Ghostbusters grew to know and love, but it’s too early to tell.
While we can’t be sure that this set aligns exactly with the plot of Ghostbusters the movie, it’s something to chew on while we wait to get our first look at the titular, phantasm-fighting team in action.
The Lego ECTO-1 and 2 won’t be available until sometime this summer and has yet to set a retail price, but at least it has given us a tiny peek at what might be in store for us when the film hits theaters July 15, 2016.
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?