The creators of South Park aren’t ones to run from polarizing characters, so when season 20 arrives this fall, we may see a familiar mustached face. Trey Parker and Matt Stone recently revealed in an interview with Mashable that they are considering bringing back the controversial Reality character, who was killed off in season 19.
Reality’s memorable appearance came in episode 5, Safe Space. The character crashed an anti-shaming fundraiser and was only around briefly before being killed in a public hanging. Viewers’ reaction to him, though, may give him new life.
“People were like, ‘Fuck that character,'” said Parker. “If we get feedback that people are going, ‘Fuck that character,’ our first instinct is like, ‘We’re gonna do a lot with that character.'”
The duo haven’t necessarily decided to go in that direction, but it is a distinct possibility. They seem to have given the idea a lot of thought, in any case. While Stone indicated that they would do something with the character, Parker made the decision seem less certain.
“We are going to do something with Reality this season that will blow people’s minds — unless we decide not to do it,” said Parker.
Reality was involved in a rare arc on the series. The show has long been comprised of unconnected or only loosely connected episodes, but season 19 was more serialized. According to the creators, it wasn’t planned, but they found that they liked doing it.
“That idea of doing ‘serialization light,’ it did give us, like, a new instrument,” said Stone. “We could paint on a bigger canvas.”
There are plenty of possibilities for the upcoming season, so it will be interesting to see where they go with it. We may get a “Reality” check or we may not.
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?