With Game of Thrones sadly headed into its second-to-last season this summer, we’ll have to get used to seeing its cast members star in other roles. Therefore, the new trailer for Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi flick iBoy is good practice. It features Maisie Williams alongside fellow British actor Bill Milner.
The Adam Randall-directed film centers on Tom (Milner), a normal teenage boy whose life is drastically changed when he and his best friend Lucy (Williams) are brutally attacked by a local gang. When Tom wakes up from a coma, he finds he has strange powers. These new abilities stem from — really suspend your disbelief here — shattered pieces of his smartphone being embedded in his brain.
As one often does in sci-fi, Tom decides to use his powers to take down the bad guys. After failing to be the hero for Lucy before, he makes himself into a vigilante of sorts, and manages to get some payback. That only leads to more trouble, though.
“You don’t call the devil then get upset when he turns up,” a man tells Tom in the trailer.
While Milner is indeed the protagonist, he doesn’t do all of the movie’s heavy lifting. Williams gets in on the action as well, and we see her as both a captive and the one holding the gun. She doesn’t seem quite as able to take care of herself as assassin-in-training Arya Stark, but she may surprise us.
The movie is one of several that Williams has done since making a name for herself on Game of Thrones, with the most recent being 2016’s Book of Love with Jessica Biel and Jason Sudeikis. Meanwhile, Milner last appeared in 2016’s Anthropoid.
iBoy hits Netflix on January 27.
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?