Welcome to the week of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 news!
First, we found out that David Bowie (RIP) was in talks to make a cameo in the film before his untimely passing, then we found on that Benicio del Toro likely won’t reprise as The Collector, and then yesterday, director James Gunn posted a photo of the completed script on his Facebook page and suggested that he’d be sending it through to the cast shortly.
You can check out Gunn’s post below and — though Bradley Cooper and Karen Gillan’s names are conspicuously untagged — ScreenCrush reports that the director has a simple explanation for the omission: They’re not on Facebook. Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, and Sean Gunn are all included and, though it was assumed that this group would be returning for the sequel, it looks like it’s now officially official.
Coming to you presently, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista (Batista), Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, Vin Diesel.
Posted by James Gunn on Wednesday, January 13, 2016
In other casting news, The Hateful Eight star Kurt Russell is still in talks to play the role of Star-Lord’s father, while Pom Klementieff (Oldboy) has reportedly joined the cast, possibly as Mantis, mistress of the martial arts.
Getting back to Gunn’s post, it looks like this script has gone through several drafts in the past seven months, with white, blue, pink, and yellow revisions all leading up to the finished green draft. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the current iteration of the script is set in stone, as it will probably change quite a bit once it’s in the hands of the actors and actresses, and producers can see what works and what doesn’t. We’ve also got a long way to go before we see pictures, posters, trailers or anything that might give us a true picture of what this sequel might look like.
Either way, this at least brings us one step closer to the return of Peter Quill and his rag-tag band of anti-heroes.
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is currently scheduled for a May 5, 2017, 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?