It’s been nine years since the first installment in the Transformers live action film series was released to mixed reviews. Despite the cool reception for the last chapter to hit theaters, Transformers: Age of Extinction (5.8 on IMDB, 32 out of 100 on Metacritic, and 18 on Rotten Tomatoes), the fourth film in the series earned over $1 billion at the box office. It was the only movie to do so in 2014.
So it should come as no surprise that Paramount Studios announced the release of the next installment. And another. And another. The film studio set the release dates for these three films for the next three years on Friday, as reported by CNET. The as-yet unnamed fifth film will open on June 23, 2017, followed by the sixth on June 8, 2018, and the seventh will come out June 28, 2019.
Michael Bay is of course behind the film franchise, which began with Transformers in 2007. He directed the first four films and will be returning one more time to work on “Transformers 5.” “I still have a great time,” Bay said. It’s fun to do a movie that 100 million people will see. But this is the last one. I have to pass the reins to someone else.”
In March, Bay selected Oscar winning writer Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) to lead a writers’ room that will work on the next three films. Included are Robert Kirkman, Christina Hodson, Lundsey Bee, Zak Penn, Jeff Pinkner, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway. “We decided that we wanted to plot out the next 10 years of the Transformers franchise, so we got together in a room over a three-month period of time,” said Hasbro Studios president Steven Davis in an October keynote.
For the fifth installment in the franchise, Bay will be directing from a script by writers Nolan (Black Hawk Down) and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man). Mark Wahlberg is set to return as Cade Yeager.
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?