After a long, slow, painful wait, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is on your doorstep. The most anticipated film of the year (and possibly of any other) hits theaters on Friday, with some advanced screenings taking place tomorrow.
If that alone isn’t enough to make you giddy, however, we’ve got something that could put you over the top: A 90-second, acapella Star Wars medley performed by Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and the cast of the upcoming film! On its own, the Star Wars soundtrack is enough to stir up nostalgia and excitement in movie fans everywhere, but this joyous, infectious rendition is something special. Watch it from beginning to end and it’s all but guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
The set list (in order) includes the Opening Theme, the Imperial March, the Mos Eisley Cantina, and the Throne Room Theme Song, and there are some fun twists along the way.
It’s not the first time that Fallon and the Tonight Show crew have created a Hollywood Squares-style acapella jam, but with all due respect to Miley Cyrus’ We Can’t Stop, Queen’s We Are The Champions, and any other songs that have received this treatment, this has to be the most fun of the bunch.
So many stars got in on this that it’s tough to list them all, but suffice it to say that the chorus includes Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Gwendoline Christie, Lupita Nyong’o, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, BB-8, four storm troopers, C-3P0, R2-DT, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Happy Holidays, and may the Force be with you.
(Public Service Announcement: There are some pretty serious spoilers floating around, so watch out for Internet trolls looking to ruin you fun.)
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?