We’ve come to expect the videos in Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers to be full of mockery and criticism, but we got a surprise in the series’ take on Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back. The latest Honest Trailer makes a few hilarious jabs, but mostly, it is uncharacteristically complimentary.
Given that The Empire Strikes Back is most Star Wars fans’ favorite movie, it isn’t really a surprise the video series’ narrator had to admit that the film is “one of the best sequels ever made.” The parody trailer sang the film’s praises, highlighting its “excellent directing, great acting, brilliant dialogue, gorgeous music, and iconic moments that will stay with you for a lifetime.” In fact, the few criticisms launched at the film required some serious nitpicking.
When it came down to it, the video managed to find a few fair points of criticism. The narrator brought up the weird relationship between siblings Luke and Leia, noted how Han’s name is pronounced differently throughout the movie, and showed off some of Luke’s more ridiculous decisions. Not even The Empire Strikes Back can be perfect 100 percent of the time.
Of the relatively few digs in the trailer, perhaps the biggest is aimed right at Star Wars’ creator. After heaping praise on the film, the video notes that The Empire Strikes Back “just so happens to be the one where George Lucas was involved the least.” The implication is clearly that Lucas began to have a negative impact on the franchise, an assertion that sadly many fans wouldn’t hesitate agree with.
However you feel about Lucas, though, you’ll appreciate Honest Trailers’ take on The Empire Strikes Back — perhaps almost as much as you do the film itself.
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?