MTV changed television forever when it launched in 1981, and now the iconic spaceman is back in the promo announcement for MTV Studios, a new production unit that will focus on revivals of some of the network’s greatest hits as well as a slate of original programming geared towards a growing millennial audience.
Chris McCarthy, president of MTV, told Deadline that the company plans to “open the vault” with a new emphasis on subscription video on demand (SVOD). “MTV has the biggest collection of hit youth franchises that spans more than three decades of content and over 200 titles, part of which have fueled our resurgence,” he said.
The MTV cable channel, which is owned by Viacom, has experienced substantial growth recently, especially in the coveted 18-34 demographic, with viewership up 21 percent over a year ago. The network plans to split its programming between traditional cable broadcasts and SVOD for the younger viewership. “It is a little bit more limiting than it used to be, so the stories that we tell on traditional cable are going to be very different than the stories that we would tell in SVOD,” McCarthy admitted to Variety.
Some of the shows in development include a live-action remake of Aeon Flux produced by Jeff Davis (Teen Wolf) and Gale Anne Hurd (The Walking Dead), the animated series Daria & Jodie written by Grace Edwards (Inside Amy Schumer), and a return of the Emmy-winning reality series Made.
“As mutual lovers of sci-fi and comic books, Gale and I get together between panels at Comic-Con every year to chat and try to find something to work on,” Davis said about the new venture. “Remembering how cool and stylish the original MTV anime was and knowing how the world always needs more badass female action heroes, it felt like a perfect match for this new age of content. And of course, I’d be working with Gale Anne Hurd, legendary producer of The Terminator and Aliens, two movies that convinced me against better judgment to get into this insane business.”
The network is pitching its slate of programming to streaming providers such as Netflix, Apple, and Hulu, although Viacom CEO Bob Bakish has hinted that there may be a Viacom-branded service in the future. “Things that are in the animation space, things that are in pure music longform, things that are in the teen and high school space — those are the things that we’re going to be looking more in the SVOD space,” McCarthy said. “The traditional amplified and louder versions of unscripted reality, we’re going to continue to focus on that in cable.”
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?