Just when you think you’ve covered Star Wars: The Force Awakens from every possible angle, here comes Harrison Ford dressed as a giant hot dog to prove you wrong.
Don’t worry, you read that right.
The actor appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live Wednesday night and both interviewer and interviewee were in the Halloween spirit. Kimmel came attired as Princess Leia — complete with 5 o’clock shadow and double Cinnabon hairdo — and Ford came dressed as … a hot dog?
Questionable costume choice aside, Ford had some pretty serious things to say during his first public appearance since breaking his ankle, crashing his plane, and wrapping his reprisal of everyone’s favorite space cowboy.
Chief among them was his guarantee that Star Wars fans would not leave the theaters shaking their heads after seeing the new film. Said Ford, “the new cast: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac are phenomenal, J.J. [Abrams] has made an incredible movie. You will not be disappointed at all, I promise you.”
Wow. Those are some strong words.
Whether Ford is right or not , he sounded as earnest as a man can in a hot dog costume, and really, we’ve been given no reason to suspect that this film we be anything other than epic.
Aside from his Namath-like guarantee, the actor also discussed his well-publicized ankle injury and even suggested that the police report may have been doctored to avoid spoilers. The official report says that a 71-year-old man was injured by a garage door, when in reality, it was the door of the Millennium Falcon that broke Ford’s ankle. J.J. Abrams has moved heaven and earth to avoid details about the film from leaking, but this takes things to a whole new level.
As fun as this interview was, if you’d rather see Ford dressed as Han Solo than as traditional ballpark fare, you don’t have much longer to wait. Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens hits theaters on Dec. 18, 2015.
Until then, may the force be with you.
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?