Marvel revealed last month that Tony Stark is retiring his familiar armored suit and letting a new character, Riri Williams, step into his shoes come November, leaving fans to wonder what superhero moniker the new female character would adopt. We now have the answer, thanks to Wired, and it turns out Williams will be known as Ironheart.
It took some discussion for editors to agree on a name. Perhaps the most obvious suggestion, Iron Woman, was rejected because it “seemed old-fashioned to some,” writer Brian Michael Bendis told Wired. Other options were thrown around, but in the end, it was writer, editor, and artist Joe Quesada’s idea that won out.
The superhero name is fitting for a number of reasons, according to Bendis; it “speaks not only to the soul of the character but to the Iron Man franchise as a whole,” he said. He added that although Stark and Williams’ reasons for putting on the armor are different, they’re both “heart-related.”
“When people see her story, you’ll be amazed at how simple and brilliant Joe’s suggestion was,” said Bendis.
Williams will take over from Stark in Invincible Iron Man #1, which is due out this fall. While many readers will be sad to see Iron Man go, he won’t be absent in every sense. Editor Tom Breevort assured Wired that Williams’ in-armor A.I. will be based on the beloved superhero’s personality and that he’ll be “soaring along with her spiritually.”
Williams suit will be different from that of her predecessor in some ways, though. Apparently, being the science prodigy that she is, she reverse-engineered hers in her dorm room. We will see what else she is capable of in the coming months when Invincible Iron Man #1 debuts.
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?