Writer, director, and actor Jordan Peele gave fans of his debut horror film Get Out a wonderful Christmas gift by sharing the first peek at his terrifying-looking follow-up Us.
In it, we see Black Panther actors Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke and their family attacked by evil mirror-image versions of themselves while out on a beach getaway in Northern California. In the trailer, we see the family’s youngest son encounter his doppelganger while at the shore during the day, with the entire evil version of the family later appearing at night outside their beachside getaway.
Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, was a massive critical and commercial success, earning him a Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and garnering over $176 million at the box office — a pretty penny for any film in such a divisive genre.
Where Peele’s first effort was centered around deep-seated issues of race in America, his second film is focused on more hyperpersonal issues. The mirror-image monsters in the film are called The Tethered and are meant to showcase our own inner battles with ourselves.
“I think the main idea that went into writing this film is that we’re our own worst enemy, and that idea created this monster, The Tethered,” said Peele in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I wanted to forge this new mythology that explored our duality and the duality of the characters. To the actors, I knew this was the ultimate fun because who doesn’t want to play two roles in a movie; when you’re tired in one, you get to jump into the other. But I think what was a fun challenge for actors, was finding the connections between the characters and their counterparts.”
Those who have been waiting on pins and needles to see what Peele will come up with next won’t have long to wait — Us is scheduled to hit theaters across the United States on March 15, courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Peele has other creepy things in store for his fans. The director has reportedly been working on a 10-episode version of The Twilight Zone for CBS, with production on the show already well underway.
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?