Following a brief teaser, Apple has released the first full trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s new Apple TV+ series, Servant, and as per Shyamalan tradition, it’s full of big twists — and more than a few creepy mysteries.
In Servant, Toby Kebbell (Kong: Skull Island) and Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) star as Sean and Dorothy, a married couple with a young child named Jericho. Here’s the thing: Jericho isn’t real. As Kebbell’s character explains during the trailer, the actual Jericho died as an infant, and adopting a doll — which the couple treat like a real baby — was the only way to keep Dorothy from going mad.
Amazingly, that’s not the weird part. Ambrose’s character is so devoted to maintaining the illusion that Jericho is still alive that she hires a nanny named Leanne, played by Nell Tiger Free (Game of Thrones), to take care of the doll. Before long, Sean begins to suspect that Leanne, who’s oddly nonplussed about her new duties, is much more dangerous than she seems.
Servant was created by British writer Tony Basgallop, who co-produces alongside Shyamalan. Shyamalan also directed Servant‘s pilot. The first installment of Servant’s 10-episode season hits Apple TV+ on November 28, 2019.
Apple TV+ is the new streaming service from tech giant Apple, and it launched on November 1. It costs $5 a month, and gives subscribers access to a handful of original series produced by and starring some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities.
While Apple is pouring a ton of money into Apple TV+ — the service’s flagship series, the Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Morning Show reportedly costs more per episode than Game of Thrones — its offerings have been met with a collective shrug by critics. Still, Apple is forging ahead with even more expensive series, including a new WWII drama from Band of Brothers producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
It remains to be seen if Apple’s focus on a small number of prestige series starring big names will pay off, especially as it faces increased competition from other brand-specific streaming services like Disney+, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, all of which are expected to launch within the next year.
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?