We’re used to seeing Thomas Middleditch struggle with startup life in the HBO comedy Silicon Valley, but his latest role will have him deal with another — and much more literal — beast. Sources say the Canadian actor has joined the cast of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, according to Variety.
Character details have not been revealed yet, but assuming Middleditch has indeed officially joined the project, he will star alongside Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) as well as Kyle Chandler (Bloodline). The cast also includes Vera Farmiga (The Judge) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton). Zach Shields and the film’s director, Michael Dougherty, wrote the script.
Although Middleditch has played Richard Hendricks on Silicon Valley for four seasons so far and is set to return for the show’s newly renewed season 5, the actor has managed to appear in numerous films in recent years. He can be seen in several that have come out or are due out in 2017 alone, including Once Upon a Time in Venice, Henchmen, and Replicas, plus a voice role in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie and a small off-screen cameo in Kong: Skull Island. With the range of roles he has taken on in a variety of genres, he shouldn’t have any problems switching gears for a monster flick, even though it is hard not to think of him as his nerdy Silicon Valley character.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters will be a particularly high-profile project for the actor, but his work on his HBO sitcom has been notable, too; he was nominated for an Emmy in 2016. We look forward to seeing what he brings to Godzilla: King of Monsters when it opens on March 22, 2019, not to mention whether or not he survives to appear in its cross-over sequel, Godzilla vs. Kong, which is slated for a 2020 theatrical release.
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?