If you ever wondered what would happen if the Kingsman movies crossed over with the animated sitcom Archer, 20th Century Fox has released a parody video showing just that. The amusing spoof was unveiled during Comic Con International in San Diego 2017, and it offers a “#TBT to that time Archer met Kingsman,” according to its title.
Like Archer, the video is animated, meaning we get to see a cartoon version of Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (voiced by Taron Egerton) go tearing through London. The spoof opens with him jumping across buildings, hopping over restaurant patrons who are enjoying a sidewalk lunch, and even pushing an elderly woman out of the path of a bus. When he finally gets to the suit shop that serves as a front for the Kingsman secret agents, he finds another challenge: Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin).
The American operative introduces himself as “world’s greatest spy,” which Eggsy takes issue with, and the dislike only mounts when the British agent realizes that Archer has gotten into Kingsman’s weapons stash. Clueless as Archer may seem, he managed to find the group’s secret room. This doesn’t go over well and it leads to guns being pulled before they find a more “gentlemanly” way to resolve their differences: A drink-off.
As fun as this all is, 20th Century Fox didn’t just create the video to entertain. The parody also plugs the upcoming Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which is slated to hit theaters this fall. The nod comes when Archer pulls a foolish move, leading Eggsy to note, “So this is what passes for the ‘world’s greatest spy’ in America. I may need to go there and teach them a lesson.” He does, in fact, end up stateside in The Golden Circle.
A sequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, the upcoming flick follows the secret agents as they team up with an American spy organization to take down an enemy that is threatening the entire world. The film stars Egerton, Halle Berry, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Channing Tatum, Elton John, and more.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is due out September 22.
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?