It seems that no box-office record is safe from the Galactic Empire-like wrath of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Not only did the film manage to outsell every other film in history on Fandango before it even came out, it set a slew of single-day international records once it actually did hit theaters.
According to Variety, the seventh Star Wars film posted the biggest single-day box-office haul of all-time in the United Kingdom/Ireland ($14.4 million), Germany ($6.8 million), Sweden ($2.7 million), and Norway ($1.1 million). The film also set opening day records in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, New Zealand, Finland, Netherlands, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Iceland, Serbia, Switzerland, Chile, and Peru.
Throw in a record $57 million haul from Thursday’s domestic preview showings and The Force Awakens has already generated a worldwide total of $129.7 million … in two days.
That number is especially impressive in light of the fact that the film has yet to debut in several major foreign markets, including India and China (also known as the two most highly populated countries on Planet Earth).
There’s no indication that these Death Star-sized numbers will subside any time soon, either, as the film has received almost universally positive reviews and word of mouth. According to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film boasts a 95 percent fresh rating with the critics who’ve weighed in thus far, and a 93 percent audience score.
All told, this seems like the perfect storm for a box-office bonanza. While the production budget for The Force Awakens reportedly exceeded $200 million, it doesn’t look like Disney and Lucasfilm’s cash cow will have any problem making that back in the film’s first week. In fact, it will almost certainly hit that number in its first weekend.
Stay tuned for further updates, and to watch the records continue to fall.
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?