Yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter posted a video interview with actor John Boyega. In what was meant to be a fun, lighthearted spot, the young actor fielded a few softball questions, smiled for the camera, and casually tossed off what could be a major revelation about the upcoming Star Wars film.
In describing the moment he found out that he we was being cast as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Boyega said “J.J. Abrams sat me down and said, ‘you’re the new star of Star Wars.'”
If you’ve been following our Star Wars coverage, you’ll remember that — based on the latest trailer — we felt that Daisy Ridley’s Rey would be the star of the upcoming film. The official poster points in that direction as well, as Rey is larger than Finn and is positioned front and center.
If Boyega did just reveal that he’s the main character of the upcoming film, it would be enormous news, especially in light of the fact that Disney and Lucasfilm have been taking extreme measures to cut spoilers off at the source. But of course, there’s always the possibility that we’re just taking his words too literally.
Maybe Boyega just meant that Abrams told him that he was one of the stars of Star Wars. Maybe we’re reading too much into his words. Maybe, the studio should just push up the release of the film so we can all stop driving ourselves crazy with speculation.
In the course of the interview, Boyega also said that Robert Downey Jr. had helped mentor him and that Han Solo was his favorite character from the franchise, but until his “star of Star Wars” comments are confirmed, denied, or clarified, everything else is just a side note.
Keep calm, all of your questions will be answered on 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?