It’s still early days for the DC Universe. The highly anticipated, multimedia franchise hasn’t even released its first film yet (that’ll be 2025’s Superman) and is only now on the verge of rolling out its debut TV show, an animated Suicide Squad spin-off titled Creature Commandos. Nonetheless, DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn already has some very clear ideas about what he wants the DCU to be, as well as what he doesn’t want it to be.
In an interview with Collider, Gunn said that he doesn’t want the interconnectivity of the DCU to bog down the franchise or make viewers feel like they need to do “homework” in order to keep up with it. “A lot of what DC is, and the fun for me, really, is in the world-building, not just the story-building. I don’t think of DCU as being, ‘Oh, this is a story we’re telling over multiple films and TV shows about one big bad.’ I don’t want to have to do, as an audience member, the homework to have to see every single thing,” Gunn explained. “It is more of a connected universe that exists within one place, which is the DCU.”
Gunn’s comments may come as a surprise to some comic book fans. Previously, the filmmaker has talked heavily about the planned cohesiveness of the DCU, even going so far as to promise that those who voice animated versions of certain characters will usually be the same actors who play whatever flesh-and-blood iterations of them appear in the franchise’s live-action projects. That said, while it sounds like Gunn wants to make sure there are very few continuity issues within the DCU (including in its casting choices), he has also now made it clear that he doesn’t want the franchise’s projects to be weighed down by issues of canon or crossover-style storytelling.
That should come as a bit of a relief, considering that other multimedia franchises — namely, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — have struggled in recent years to manage the increasingly unwieldy size of their multi-year stories and ever-growing in-universe histories. It sounds like that’s one problem that, despite its sizable lineup of forthcoming projects, the DC Universe is already being primed to avoid.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.