As an actor, Nicolas Cage has jumped around a variety of different fictional timelines, but his most recent project will take him to the near future. The actor has signed on to star in the sci-fi/action thriller The Humanity Bureau, reports Variety.
In the film, the actor will play a caseworker at a government agency, somewhat ironically named the Humanity Bureau. To combat an economic recession caused by global warming’s impact on the Midwest, the bureau determines which members of society are unproductive, and then sends them away to a colony called New Eden (probably another misnomer). When Cage’s character investigates an appeal by a single mother (Sarah Lind) and her son (Jakob Davies), he starts digging into the bureau’s secrets, according to Deadline.
The action that comes with global warming and a secretive government agency should be no problem for the actor. This is just the latest extreme situation that one of Cage’s characters has faced. His films have involved confrontations with neo-pagans, the world literally burning, the plague, and more.
The cast also includes Hugh Dillon. The Humanity Bureau will be shot in a multiscreen, panoramic format, with some portions to also be shot in virtual reality.
The film is set to start shooting in British Columbia, Canada, this week, with Rob King (Something More) directing. He’ll be working from a script penned by Dave Schultz (Rufus). Andre Relis, Wayne Marc Godfrey, Guy Griffithe, Robert Jones, and Frank While will executive produce, while Kevin Dewalt, Danielle Masters, and Kelly-Rae Buchan will produce. The film comes from Minds Eye Entertainment, VMI Worldwide, and Bridgegate Pictures.
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?