There is no shortage of video game adaptations, but the good ones are sadly few and far between. Unfortunately for the Mortal Kombat films, they didn’t escape the notice of Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers series, and they were both called out as being among the ones that “suck” in the latest video.
The Honest Trailers narrator brought the action flicks into the ring, only to pepper them with enough high punches and low kicks to leave both Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation bloodied. The mock trailer comes out swinging, opening with, “Before Assassin’s Creed tries to shake off the stink of all the video game movies that came before, two films will challenge the rule that game adaptations suck — and more or less confirm it.”
There is no letting up, either. The trailer calls out everything from the exposition contained in the script to the use of dragons — or, as the narrator calls them, “some animator’s bad CGI demon fetish.” The Mortal Kombat actors, including those who appeared only in the sequel, get extra attention; they’re described as “fighters who can’t act, actors who can’t fight, and people who can’t really do either.” In fact, the biggest compliment for protagonist Liu Kang (played by Robin Shou) is for his “luscious mullet.”
The games were all about the action, but Honest Trailer concludes that on this score as well, neither of the films measured up. Instead, they featured “generic martial arts battles” and an absurd amount of rules the characters have to fight and live by. Plus, the narrator points out unnecessary added elements that just don’t work, like the “underground hamster ball.”
Needless to say, this round — and the entire tournament — goes to Honest Trailers.
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?