Fresh off earning the Oscar statuette for Best Director (The Shape of Water) at the 90th Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro has sold a new horror anthology series to Netflix.
The series, to be titled Guillermo del Toro Presents 10 After Midnight, will feature “a collection of personally curated stories that are … equally sophisticated and horrific.” Del Toro will reunite with Shape of Water producer J. Miles Dale, who will serve as executive producer on the project. The series has no official target date or episode count, though based on the name, we’d be willing to guess there will be 10 chapters.
Del Toro is a veteran of the horror genre, having directed films such as 1997’s Mimic and 2001’s acclaimed The Devil’s Backbone. He’s well-known for a fascination with things typically considered creepy or gross — once even admitting to “a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things” — a sensibility made clear by creative costuming and special effects in films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy (not to mention Best Picture winner The Shape of Water, which received Academy Award nominations for cinematography, costume design, and production design, winning the latter).
The director also recently found financiers for his feature-length adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the popular children’s horror book series. Del Toro also has a healthy working relationship with Netflix, as evidenced by the success of Trollhunters, an animated series created and produced by Guillermo himself (in collaboration with DreamWorks), which has its third and final season due for release on May 25.
Del Toro was long rumored to be involved with the upcoming Amazon series Carnival Row, possibly as a co-writer, executive producer, and/or director, but he ended up stepping away from the project due to scheduling conflicts.
10 After Midnight will be Netflix’s first original horror anthology series (Black Mirror began on British Channel 4 before heading to Netflix for seasons three through five). It’s worth mentioning that del Toro (often through no fault of his own) has been associated with an impressively lengthy list of films, television series, and video games wthat never came to fruition. Given Netflix’s hefty resources and the popularity of Trollhunters, though, we’d be surprised if 10 After Midnight ended that way.
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?