Space Balls has long been one of Mel Brooks’s most beloved films, in large part because it lovingly parodies the Star Wars universe. In fact, that film has become so beloved in and of itself that a sequel is in the works from actor Josh Gad, who co-wrote the sequel script with Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit.
In a recent interview on Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa, Josh discussed development for the new film and explained that he had to do a lot of explaining for the 98-year-old comic legend. When Space Balls was released in 1987, the original trilogy was just a few years old, and in the years since, there have been eight new Star Wars movies that Gad had to walk through.
“Mel is incredibly involved. I’ll share a funny story that I haven’t yet shared,” Gad explained. “When we were pitching him the original concept for what we wanted to do with the film, at the beginning, he goes, ‘I’m just telling you now, I want you to really go into detail because I don’t know a lot about the new Star Wars films.’ And I said, ‘OK.'”
“So I pitch for 40 minutes. It’s literally like, I am a combat vet just going to war in front of one person,” the actor continued. “I’m sweating, I am getting into every line and every beat and every comedic set piece, every reveal. I’m painting all of it and I’m speaking to how this speaks to a certain Star Wars moment, etc. Then there’s silence, and at the end of it, he goes, ‘Wow. Josh, it really sounds like you’ve got your finger on the pulse!’ That is the greatest compliment I could have ever gotten, even though there’s no context for it for Mel. He really just trusted everything I had to say.”
Gad didn’t disclose any additional details about the movie, but it seems like Gad and his co-writers might have the sequel trilogy in their sights. “The process of working on this with and alongside Mel Brooks has been one of the highlights of my career,” Gad told Forbes.
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?