Paramount might soon be adapting another popular video game franchise for the big screen. Puck reported that the media giant is negotiating with Microsoft to acquire the film rights to the Call of Duty franchise.
Paramount CEO David Ellison and studio co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein have reportedly made developing a Call of Duty film a “priority.” No talent is attached to this project at this time.
Ellison has reportedly expressed a desire to make Street Fighter the first theatrical film made from Paramount’s new deal with Legendary Pictures.
Since Paramount has also invested millions of dollars into making the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise into multiple films, this news indicates that the studio is now focusing on adapting games popular with younger audiences, like Call of Duty, into blockbuster movies.
This isn’t the first time that Hollywood has tried to make a film based on Call of Duty. In 2015, Activision announced the development of a Call of Duty cinematic universe. After years of little to no progress, those plans were reportedly left on the back burner and put on hold by 2020.
While adapting a first-person shooter game into a feature-length film is challenging, Paramount successfully adapted Sonic the Hedgehog into a trilogy of successful and acclaimed movies.
Call of Duty also has many popular games with multiple cinematic stories for filmmakers to adapt. Paramount could end up making Call of Duty into another hit film franchise —that is, if they acquire the movie rights.
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?