Netflix is known for letting its viewers dive deep into hours-long TV binges, where the resolution to cliffhangers often waits just a click away. However, that’s not to say that the streaming service doesn’t know how to tease. A day ahead of the premiere of the new supernatural series Stranger Things, Netflix has dropped a suspenseful and enigmatic first look.
Called The Vanishing of Will Byers, the sneak peek offers viewers a chance to watch the first eight-plus minutes of the creepy series, in which a young boy named Will Byers (played by Noah Schnapp) goes missing. While the series will focus on Will’s friends, family, and local law enforcement seeking out answers and discovering a supernatural mystery, the first look centers mainly on Will himself as it sets the stage for the events to come. We also get plenty of hints about the connection to top-secret government experiments, but the actual forces involved remain obscured, piquing our curiosity.
A so-called “love letter” to ’80s supernatural classics, Stranger Things has numerous familiar elements of horror from empty corridors to a phone receiver left hanging by its cord with the dial tone buzzing. Light is also used very intentionally; throughout the sneak peek, whenever bulbs begin flickering, there seems to be trouble ahead.
In addition to Schnapp, the ensemble cast includes Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Cara Buono, Charlie Heaton, and Matthew Modine. The series is written and directed by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, who serve as co-showrunners and executive producers as well. Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen also executive produce, while Levy also directs.
Prepare yourself for Stranger Things to hit Netflix on July 15. It’ll make you want to sleep with the lights on — or, on second thought, avoid them altogether.
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?