While movies and TV shows can offer an escape from the drudgery of day-to-day life, when tragedies strike, on-screen events sometimes hit a little too close to home.
That being said, in light of the deplorable acts of terror that took place in Paris on Friday night, many are now finding themselves turned off by the depictions of murder and mayhem that pervade their favorite forms of entertainment. At times like this, even laughing at comedies can make us feel callous or insensitive, if we don’t first acknowledge the more serious elephant(s) in the room.
Saturday Night Live was sensitive to that reality over the weekend, and the show had Cecily Strong lead off its latest episode with a touching, bi-lingual message for the city of Paris and the victims of the attacks. While laughter can be the best medicine, even fictional violence can sometimes further fray already strained nerves. That’s why several TV shows and even a couple of movies have chosen to shuffle their schedules, with some even pulling content entirely for the sake of sensitivity.
Deadline Hollywood reports that Studiocanal has cancelled the French premiere of Legend, the Tom Hardy gangster flick, which was due to debut in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, not far from both the Place de la Madelaine and the Opéra Garnier. The outlet also notes that the UK’s ITV has cancelled content, pulling an episode of Jekyll & Hyde that was originally set to air on Sunday night. Creator Charlie Higson revealed on Twitter that the episode had been postponed due to “shocking events in Paris.”
We’ve postponed #JekyllandHyde tonight due to shocking events in Paris
— charlie higson (@monstroso) November 15, 2015
TV Line reports that Supergirl and NCIS: Los Angeles are making changes as well, rescheduling episodes that were meant to air on Monday due to their similarities to certain aspects of Friday’s attacks.
These actions seem to reflect the entertainment industry’s recognition that, while the show must always go on, it should also respond to what its audience is and isn’t in the mood to see. We support the decision to delay, cancel, and alter these events and programs, and we hope that we can all soon return to some semblance of normalcy.
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?