Howard the Duck is back — and he’s got some famous friends with him. Marvel Television and Hulu are developing four adult-oriented animated series based on second-tier Marvel characters that will culminate in a special one-off crossover event called Marvel’s The Offenders. Basically, it’s The Defenders all over again — except, you know, funnier.
Howard the Duck, which chronicles the struggle between “America’s favorite fighting fowl” and his nemesis, Dr. Bong, comes from cult filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks) and animation industry veteran Dave Willis (Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Comedian Patton Oswalt and American Dad’s Jordan Blum will oversee MODOK, a supervillain story whose star has “a really big head and a really little body.”
Meanwhile, Hit-Monkey by Blades of Glory co-directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon will poke fun at Hollywood revenge flicks, while Marvel’s Tigra & Dazzler Show follows two superheroines in search of Hollywood stardom. Tigra & Dazzler comes courtesy of comedian Chelsea Handler and writer Erica Rivinoja.
The Offenders will combine all five of those heroes join forces into a team that “no one asked for,” and will be overseen by Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb. Loeb hinted that other semi-famous Marvel characters will join the fray in The Offenders, too. “Wait until you see who the Team Leader is,” Loeb teased in an official statement.
This isn’t Hulu and Marvel’s first team-up. In December, Marvel’s Runaways second season launched on Hulu, Marvel parent company Disney is set to control once its acquisition of 21st Century Fox is finalized. It’s possible that the Tigra & Dazzler Show relies on the Fox deal, too. As a mutant, Dazzler is traditionally considered part of Marvel’s X-Men franchise, which was controlled by Fox, not Disney, until the deal was made.
The cartoons aren’t the only television projects that Marvel has in development, either. A number of live-action miniseries starring established Marvel Cinematic Universe characters are scheduled to air on Disney Plus, Disney’s other streaming service.
While all of these characters are established Marvel Universe mainstays — Hit-Monkey, who debuted in 2010, is the newest — these series are the first starring roles for all of them outside of comics, with one big exception. George Lucas’ 1986 Howard the Duck was the very first feature film adaptation of a Marvel property. It is also, according to both critics and audience members, not particularly good.
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?