Count Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson among the people hoping to see a fan campaign to remake the movie succeed. The director recently responded to a tweet from the Twitter account Remake The Last Jedi and offered a surprising — if not necessarily totally genuine — show of support.
Remake The Last Jedi has been gaining attention through its presence on Twitter and via a website, where it explains that it hopes to “provide Disney an opportunity to course-correct with the Star Wars franchise.” It argues that between “poor storytelling” and abandoning its “core goal,” the franchise is now “divisive and in disarray.” According to the campaign, it has a team of producers that will put up the money for a remake. In the meantime, it is looking to gather the fan support needed to convince Disney to remake the recent movie.
Our team of producers is offering to cover the budget for a remake of The Last Jedi in order to save Star Wars. Share this and spread the word to let @RobertIger & @Disney know you want this! This isn't a joke, we're ready to have the convo now! #RemakeTheLastJedi #StarWars
— Remake The Last Jedi (@RMTheLastJedi) June 20, 2018
The campaign garnered enough attention for it to end up on Johnson’s radar, as CNET noted. He gave the campaign his support, albeit in what seems like a more amused than genuine way. “Please please please please pleeeeeeeaaaase please actually happen please please please please please,” Johnson wrote, throwing in a lot of prayer emojis for good measure.
please please please please pleeeeeeeaaaase please actually happen please please please please please 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 https://t.co/mNpSjgovax
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) June 21, 2018
Even actor Seth Rogen, who is not tied to the famed film series, weighed in on the movement, but he had more of a reality check for the people behind the campaign. In multiple tweets, he estimated that they will need $200 million to remake the film and questioned how they could raise that much money without key elements such as a script, actors, and the movie rights.
How did you get investors without a script or stars or director or legal ability to make this movie? Those have been important elements in the past.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) June 21, 2018
The plan may not be perfect, but it does serve as a solid example of how much controversy there has been around the Star Wars franchise in recent years. Not only did fans seem to have a love-it-or-hate-it response to The Last Jedi, the recent spinoff Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t make the box office splash Disney had surely hoped to see. In fact, there have even been rumors that Lucasfilm is putting Star Wars spinoff on hold for the time being, Collider reported.
Still, as divided as the fandom has become, we still won’t hold our breath for a Star Wars: The Last Jedi remake anytime soon.
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?