Warner Bros. has plans for another stand-alone superhero movie, and the studio has just the director for the project. Marvel vet Joss Whedon is closing in on a deal to write, direct, and produce a Batgirl movie, Variety reports.
Whedon seems like an ideal choice for the project. Beyond the success he had with The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, he is also the creator of the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire, which featured a wildly popular female protagonist. Whedon has earned a reputation for creating captivating and badass heroines.
The success the writer-director has had with Marvel is key. Warner Bros. made a respectable worldwide box office showing with both Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, but both films received mixed responses from critics and fans alike. Marvel has been winning the superhero battles in the eyes of moviegoers, so it makes sense for the DC Extended Universe to snap up one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s proven players in a bid for similar results.
Assuming the deal is finalized, Whedon will be the first producer attached to the new DCEU project. It reportedly originated just within the past month, so the lead actress hasn’t been cast yet. Whedon makes for a great starting point and will surely help the studio attract interest.
The studio has been putting a lot of eggs in the DCEU basket, with strong interest in female-driven projects. Batgirl will follow in the footsteps of fellow heroine Wonder Woman, whose stand-alone flick starring Gal Gadot is coming to theaters in June. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. is also working on a Suicide Squad spinoff centering on Margot Robbie’s popular character Harley Quinn.
We don’t know yet when Warner Bros. is aiming to release the Batgirl film, but whenever it comes, it is overdue. Although Batgirl has been around since the 1960s, she has never headlined a movie.
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?