Folks, it seems the Star Wars: The Force Awakens hype machine has fixed its hyperdrive.
From the day that the first trailer dropped, until just a few weeks ago, getting information about the film was like pulling teeth. Disney and Lucasfilm printed scripts on black paper with violet lettering, a part of the police report was changed when Harrison Ford broke his ankle, the release of the novelization was delayed, and director J.J. Abrams wouldn’t even give Star Wars creator George Lucas a straight answer about the film. All of this was done so that the studio could control the flow of information and now, it seems like they’re ready to dump it on us all at once.
On the heels of the EW Star Wars issue’s revelations, last night’s American Music Awards debuted yet another trailer (below) as well as a clip from the film (above). That’s right, 17 glorious seconds of the actual movie. Don’t let its run-time fool you, however, the clip packs a punch and showcases the acting talents of two of the film’s stars.
In the clipped scene, John Boyega (Finn) and Daisy Ridley (Rey) are quite literally running for their lives on what looks like Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet. The pair looks to outrun their pursuers by making a mad dash for a vacant vessel that Rey refers to as a quad jumper. We won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t watched the clip, but let’s just say that plan is quickly derailed and the clip ends on a cliffhanger.
The new trailer, on the other hand, is around 30 seconds long and follows Rey’s story arc. We find out that she’s been waiting for her family, but we then hear a woman’s voice say: “Dear child, the belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.”
With the anticipation for this film already swelled to epic proportions, the bevy of clips and trailers floating around are only adding fuel to an already raging fire. Oh, well. If worse comes to worse and you really can’t take it, you can always gorge on Thanksgiving dinner and slip into a turkey-induced coma until December 18.
Kidding … please don’t do that.
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?