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Sigourney Weaver will play the villain in Marvel’s Netflix series ‘The Defenders’

Marvel introduced a surprise villain for its upcoming miniseries The Defenders. The stars of Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and the upcoming Iron First was joined onstage by Sigourney Weaver at the 2016 New York Comic Con.

Fans at the 2016 New York Comic Con were treated to a surprise during the Iron Fist panel, as Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Matt Murdock/Daredevil were brought together on one stage for the first time with their partner Danny Rand/Iron Fist.

Mike Colter, Krysten Ritter, Charlie Cox, and Finn Jones will star in The Defenders miniseries on Netflix. The Verge reported that Jeph Joeb, executive vice president of Marvel Television announced the gang before bringing out yet another surprise in the form of a villain.

“We’ve not told you who the villain of the Defenders is,” Loeb said in a video uploaded by Netflix, which elicited boos from the crowd. “And the reason is for that,” Loeb continued, “is because we needed to find somebody that could take on all these guys. She doesn’t require any introduction anywhere she goes in the world. She’ll be joining The Defenders cast. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Miss Sigourney Weaver.”

Weaver came out onstage and hugged her future cast-mates as the audience went wild.

Fans have been waiting for a long time to see who will be the antagonist in the new series, which brings together stars from some of television’s most popular superhero shows. There is no set release date for The Defenders, though we know it will be sometime in 2017. It is rumored that it will be an eight-episode miniseries.

Marvel’s Iron Fist is set to premiere next year on Friday, March 17, with a 13-episode first season. It will be joining the collection of Marvel shows that are already streaming: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the new smash hit Luke Cage.

The Punisher, another solo series from Marvel, has commenced filming in New York City but does not yet have a premiere date. Jon Bernthal stars as the titular character.

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?