At this point, the only Star Wars fans who haven’t heard about the upcoming Han Solo anthology film are those who’ve been living inside an Exogorth, which has been living inside an asteroid. But ignore the fact that we’ve just made the nerdiest Star Wars reference we could think of and focus on the fact that The Daily News is reporting this film will likely get the full trilogy treatment.
The outlet quotes an unnamed insider as saying, “They [Disney execs] feel that his [Alden Ehrenreich] character has the right potential to become a central figure in several movies. They’re keeping things under wraps at the moment, but the deal is that he has signed for at least three movies.” The source also gushes over the potential for unique characters and situations to arise during the space cowboy’s adventures: “Given that Han’s early adventures do not need to be tied to the Empire, it leaves story lines open with the opportunity to really give fans something different. They can explore new galaxies and crazy creatures and bring in a wide array of new characters.”
Unnamed insiders always give us a bit of pause, so you’ll want to take this with a teeny-tiny grain of salt — but it does seem to make a lot of sense. Trilogies are pretty much par for the Star Wars course and we live in a world where every reasonably successful film is worthy of at least one sequel — and preferably a franchise.
The news comes with the caveat that the probable trilogy will only take place if the first film does well but — other than death and taxes — few things are more certain than Star Wars properties raking in buku bucks.
In landing the Han Solo role, 26-year old Alden Ehrenreich beat out a huge and talented field that included the likes of Miles Teller (Whiplash) and Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service). Disney reportedly screen tested thousands of actors before landing on the Hail, Caeser! actor.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait quite a while to find out whether or not they’re right. The still-untitled film won’t be hitting theaters until May 25, 2018.
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?