The first trailer for The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars TV show, is here, and it delivers exactly what was promised: A Western-style adventure set in the darkest, grimiest corners of the Star Wars universe.
The Mandalorian is the brainchild of director Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Lion King). Favreau says he wrote four scripts for the series before even pitching the project to Disney, and cites the first third of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope as his main inspiration.
“I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars,” Favreau told The Hollywood Reporter. “What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child.”
The Mandalorian‘s trailer, which debuted at Disney’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, shows that influence loud and clear. The first look at the The Mandalorian is filled with sandy desert plains, Mexican stand-offs, mounted gunslingers, and all kinds of nefarious characters.
As the flagship series for Disney’s new streaming platform, Disney+, The Mandalorian premieres on November 12, 2019, the same day the service launches. The show is just one of many Star Wars projects planned for Disney+. A Rogue One prequel starring Diego Luna, who played Rebel spy Cassian Andor in the film, is in development, as is a seventh season of the fan-favorite animated series The Clone Wars. A miniseries starring Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi is also in the works, and was confirmed by Disney during the D23 Expo.
According to the official synopsis, The Mandalorian “follows the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.” It is one of Disney’s first projects set between the original Star Wars trilogy and the recent sequels, and should help keep the Star Wars franchise relevant while the feature films take a three-year hiatus.
In addition to Pascal, who’s perhaps best known for his gruesome Game of Thrones death scene, The Mandalorian stars Gina Carano, Nick Nolte, Carl Weathers, critically acclaimed director Werner Herzog, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Ming-Na Wen, Breaking Bad villain Giancarlo Esposito, and many others. The Star Wars Universe may not be the loveliest place to live, but it certainly isn’t lacking for star power.
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?