Trips to the supermarket are often uneventful, but that’s certainly not the case when Seth Rogen decides to add his own unique spice to the grocery shopping experience. In a promotional stunt for his new R-rated animated comedy Sausage Party, Rogen uses strategically placed animatronic food to prank shoppers.
After hiding remote-controlled and extremely realistic-looking robotic bread, cantaloupe, and sausage around a New York grocery store, Rogen explains to the camera that the goal is to show that “our food has feelings.” What he doesn’t mention — but we soon find out — is that our food isn’t afraid to go blue to express those feelings. Throughout the video, the actor lends his voice to the produce, employing it to scare, taunt, and converse with unsuspecting customers in hilarious ways.
Inappropriate as the animatronic food is, people generally seem entertained by it — once they get over the initial shock of reaching for produce and having it open its eyes and yell at them. Needless to say, the prank makes for some funny exchanges. Among the best are shoppers taunting the robotic food by eating its “family,” and Rogen complimenting a man with a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders on his fried chicken.
The promo showcases some of the fun we can expect from Sausage Party. A spoof of CG animated kids’ films, the movie follows a sausage named Frank (voiced by Rogen) and his supermarket friends on an existential journey. His buddies include a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig), a taco (Salma Hayek), a bagel (Edward Norton), and more. Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, and David Krumholtz also voice chracters.
Rogen penned the screenplay with his Superbad and Pineapple Express co-writer Evan Goldberg, along with Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter. The comedy flick is directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Sausage Party hits theaters today.
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?