For the last 27 years, Steve Whitmire has performed as one of the most iconic characters in all of entertainment — even if the nature of the role means that he’s not the most recognizable entertainer around. Whitmire was responsible for the voice and movements of Kermit the Frog, but it’s now emerged that he’s no longer working with the Muppets.
The role of Kermit will go to Matt Vogel, himself a twenty-year veteran of the Jim Henson Company. Vogel will make his first official appearance as the frog in the next installment of the Muppets Thought of the Week web series, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Whitmire began his tenure with the Muppets in 1978, when he was brought in to work on The Muppet Show, and he would go on to contribute to a variety of the Jim Henson Company’s film and television projects. Henson himself originally portrayed Kermit, and when he passed away in 1990, his son Brian hand-picked Whitmire to be his successor.
Kermit was played by Whitmire in the well-loved The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, as well as more recently in 2011’s The Muppets and its sequel, Muppets Most Wanted. It’s perhaps worth noting that Vogel played the latter’s antagonist, Constantine — Kermit’s evil doppelganger.
There was some speculation that changes were being made ahead of today’s official announcement, according to a report from Muppets fan site Tough Pigs. His characters were noticeable by their absence in recent installments of Muppets Thought of the Week, and some fans could tell that he wasn’t the one to voice Statler in a recent advertisement.
After the Muppets’ recent return to the big screen was such a success, it seemed that the franchise might be set for a resurgence. However, the fact that the subsequent TV sitcom failed to make its mark dissipated much of that momentum.
However, the Muppets seem to be very well suited to the format of viral video, with their web series and pop-culture parodies frequently taking the web by storm. As Vogel’s tenure as Kermit gets underway, it seems likely that this kind of content will take up much of his time.
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?