Star Trek: Discovery has been granted a third season at CBS All Access. The next season of the sci-fi drama will debut on the streaming service in 2020. Michelle Paradise, a former executive producer on The CW’s The Vampire Diaries spin-off, The Originals, will join current Discovery head Alex Kurtzman as showrunner when the show returns.
“Michelle joined us midway through season 2 and energized the room with her ferocious knowledge of Trek,” Kurtzman said in a press release. “Her grasp of character and story detail, her drive and her focus have already become essential in ensuring the Trek legacy.”
Paradise will be Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth showrunner over the course of three seasons. The latest installment in television’s premiere science fiction franchise was developed by Hannibal and Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, who ultimately left the series in order to work on Starz’s American Gods. Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts oversaw Star Trek: Discovery season 1, while Kurtzman, who co-wrote J.J. Abrams’ two big-screen Star Trek adventures and helped create Fox’s paranormal drama Fringe, took over for season 2.
Paradise’s promotion doesn’t mean that Kurtzman is leaving the final frontier behind. In addition to Discovery, the veteran writer and producer is currently overseeing a number of Star Trek projects for CBS All Access. Those include a Discovery spinoff starring recurring Discovery cast member Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians), an animated comedy called Lower Decks, and a Star Trek: The Next Generation sequel that will see Patrick Stewart return as the former Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Star Trek: Discovery, which is currently in the middle of its second season, stars The Walking Dead‘s Sonequa Martin-Green as Commander Michael Burnham, a science officer onboard the titular starship. The show takes place about 10 years before the first Star Trek series, which was created by Gene Roddenberry and aired from 1966 to 1969.
Despite the earlier timeline, Discovery is full of nods to classic Trek. Discovery‘s first season had an extended storyline centered on Star Trek‘s fan-favorite “Mirror Universe,” while season 2 features Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, who captained the USS Enterprise before James T. Kirk. In addition, Discovery‘s second season added Ethan Peck as Spock, the Vulcan science officer originally portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.
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?