Although Kylo Ren and Supreme Leader Snoke are supposed to be the villains in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens, there’s a third bad guy that might be the most insidious of all: spoilers.
Director J.J. Abrams has addressed this pestilence with a Galactic Empire-like iron fist, and yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported on yet another potential spoiler that met the same fate as Alderaan.
You know those tie-in novels that release alongside most major motion pictures? The ones that a small percentage of the movie-going population reads in tandem with seeing the film? Well, if you’re the type of person who gets excited about them, you’re going to be disappointed this time around.
Amid concern about spoilers, Disney has reached an agreement with Del Rey Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) to delay the release of the hardcover novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book has been pushed back three full weeks from its original release date of Dec. 18, 2015 — which would have put it on the same trajectory as the film — and will now arrive on Jan. 3, 2016. The text will still be available digitally on Dec. 18, however.
While we understand that these novels give away essentially the entire plot, we have to say, this seems a tad extreme. After all, what’s to stop someone who sees the actual movie from posting the same spoilers on social media? And what’s to stop someone from reading the book online and then spoiling it for those who haven’t seen the film? The only way this makes any sense is if Disney and Lucasfilm are trying to protect people with poor impulse control from themselves. But in the process, they’re asking the people who actually have patience to exercise more of it.
Short of having the entire cast’s memory wiped with an MIB-style memory eraser, we’re not sure that Abrams & Co. can do anything more to prevent spoilers, but we’re willing to bet that this won’t be the last story we post on this subject.
Oh, well. In six short weeks we can dispense with all the secrecy. Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters Dec. 18, 2015.
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?