Through the first four films in Robert Eggers‘s career, the director has made movies set in different time periods and with wildly different tones. What unites each of those movies, though, is that they are set in a time long before the advent of modern technology, one where it felt more possible to believe in magic and mysticism.
In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Eggers made it clear that his long-ago settings are a highly intentional choice.
“The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill,” Eggers said. “And the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death. And to make a contemporary story you have to photograph a cellphone — it’s just how life is — so no [I won’t be making any modern-set films].”
Eggers, who has made The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu, has set his films as far back as the 800s, but he has yet to set a movie past the 19th century.
When he was asked exactly how modern he might go, Eggers said that he could make a movie that was closer to living memory, but not that close.
“I don’t know. I might go potentially to 1950 but before World War II is more inviting for my imagination,” he said.
Eggers’s comments follow the news that he is working on Werwulf, a werewolf horror movie that is reportedly set in the 13th century and a sequel to the 1986 film Labyrinth. Nosferatu, the director’s most recent project, was a massive financial success, so maybe Eggers should just keep doing what’s working for him.
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?