Universal Pictures has adjusted the release dates for two of its most important franchises. The studio announced that DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek 5 will now hit theaters on December 23, 2026, after having previously been scheduled to hit theaters in July of next year. Minions 3, meanwhile, has moved up to July 1, 2026, after having previously been set for release in June of the following year.
Shrek 5 will reunite Mike Meyers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz and will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first film’s release in 2001. To date, the Shrek franchise has grossed $2.9 billion, but prior to Shrek 5, the most recent release was 2010’s Shrek Forever After, so there will have been more than 15 years between Shrek movies by the time we get the fifth movie in the franchise. In the interim, there were two spinoff movies focused on Antonio Banderas’s Puss in Boots character, with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish hitting theaters in 2022.
Minions, meanwhile, have had almost their entire run of dominance in the time between the two most recent Shrek movies. They first appeared in Despicable Me and were last seen in 2024’s Despicable Me 4. Between the original Despicable Me films and the spinoff franchise focused solely on the Minions, those characters have grossed nearly $5 billion for Universal Pictures and DreamWorks.
While the Minions show no signs of slowing down, it will be interesting to see whether audiences are still interested in checking out what’s happening with Shrek and company. The kids who grew up on those movies are now well into adulthood, but nostalgia has powered mighty box office draws before.
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?