When you’re casting an actor to play opposite Hellboy, you probably want one with some background in the demon-hunting business. Neil Marshall (The Descent) knows this, which is why he went out and nabbed Milla Jovovich — the veteran of six Resident Evil films — to play the nefarious Blood Queen in his upcoming reboot.
Jovovich is known best for her role as Alice, the main protagonist of the Resident Evil movies, but in Hellboy (formerly titled Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen; the subtitle was dropped earlier this month), she’ll need to switch sides to embody a more sinister character, according to Deadline.
The Blood Queen, also known as Nimue or the Lady of the Lake, was a mythical sorceress from the Middle Ages who used her guile to entrap the sorcerer Merlin in an eternal grave. Eventually, her power-mad ways led other witches to kill her, dice her up into little bits, and hide the pieces in a box buried deep underground. According to the Hellboy wiki, the Blood Queen returned to lead a coven of witches in Britain after Gruagach — one of Hellboy’s many adversaries — poured a village’s worth of blood into the box.
Eventually, Nimue even transforms into a giant, dragon-like monster to do battle against Hellboy. Obviously, we have no idea if any of this will happen in Marshall’s adaptation, but we like Arthurian legends and giant dragons, so we’re holding out hope.
Marshall probably isn’t done recruiting talent, but he does have the building blocks for an promising movie, with David Harbour (Stranger Things‘ Chief Hopper) and Ian McShane (American Gods) set to play Hellboy and Professor Broom, respectively.
The film will be rated-R, which — combined with Marshall’s horror chops — could mean we’re getting a proper Hellboy movie this time around. Despite the involvement of acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman as the titular demon, many fans were disappointed with earlier, toned-down PG13 adaptations. Marshall has no such reservations, as his earlier films, including Centurion and Dog Soldiers, should suggest.
Hellboy will begin filming in September in locations across Europe. No release date has yet been set for the movie.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.