Finn, John Boyega’s AWOL stormtrooper, has been acknowledged as one of the leads in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, but a poster released in China has stirred up some controversy by shrinking the character substantially — very substantially.
In the new poster (contrasted with the U.S. version above), Boyega seems more like an afterthought than one of the stars of the film, tucked away in the corner between Han’s blaster and an enlarged BB-8. ScreenCrush reports that the character was downsized by more than 50 percent for the new poster, and some are suspecting that it may be due to the color of his skin.
While the poster does make other changes — like removing Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), and Chewbacca entirely — that tiny little image of Finn looms the largest.
In a vacuum, it might seem like folks are overreacting, but this is just one of many troubling signs that race is still a factor in the movie business. Some of the emails uncovered in last year’s Sony hack, for instance, contained discussions which acknowledged that films with black lead actors don’t seem to do as well in certain foreign markets.
In addition, Yahoo points out that Lionsgate recalled marketing material for 12 Years a Slave after Italian posters highlighted Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender at the expense of Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played the main character in the film.
Seems like this sort of thing is becoming a trend, and a disturbing one at that.
In today’s movie market, the international box office tends to account for the majority of domestic blockbusters’ overall gross, a reality that has already had an effect on marketing materials, and may be encouraging less principled executives to rethink casting black actors in major roles.
We can only hope that, in the future, studios respond to racial prejudice as firmly and gracefully as Boyega himself did when faced with backlash over his casting in The Force Awakens. Said the actor via Instagram “To whom it may concern … Get used to it.”
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?