Netflix got us hooked on Stranger Things in 2016, and while we wait for the hit series’ second season to arrive this fall, the streamer is giving us a new way to appreciate what we’ve already seen. The streamer released a new promo Wednesday that reimagines the first season as an old-school arcade game.
The video’s theme is well-executed, making the promo fun for fans, even though we already saw the moments it features when we watched season 1. This time, they get a new spin, including points being gained or lost, depending on what happens in a particular scene. For example, at one point, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) gets a “sass bonus” for letting Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) pick up and drop a Millennium Falcon model that he wants her to use her powers on.
With its fresh take, the video amplifies Stranger Things‘ already high level of 1980s nostalgia by incorporating elements familiar to anyone who has ever played an arcade game. We get all of the wonderful graphics, for example, from text boxes offering choices to a game over alert (there is no justice for Barb, unfortunately). Stranger Things staples are woven in as well, including the game keeping track of an inventory of waffles.
The video game theme is fitting not just because the show pays homage to the ’80s, but also it builds on the second season’s most recent trailer. That preview opened with Dustin, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will (Noah Schnapp) hanging out and playing an arcade game. The new promo manages to simultaneously encourage fans to rewatch Stranger Things season 1 and get ready for a return to Hawkins, Indiana, in season 2.
When the show resumes, we’ll pick up a year after the traumatic events of season 1. Will, in particularly, will be struggling to deal with what happened, but he won’t be the only one. New evil forces — ones that are supposed to be even more terrifying than anything we’ve seen so far in the series — will threaten everyone.
Stranger Things season 2 is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on October 27.
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?