What do you get when you cross The X-Files with The Goonies? Well, judging by a trailer that premiered Thursday, you get Netflix’s Stranger Things. The first look at the creepy, coming-of-age-y thriller already has the interwebs buzzing, and it appears that this may just be the streaming giant’s next big hit.
The spot is embedded above and features an intriguing melange of nostalgia, horror, and suspense. The cocktail sips something like J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, but this series feels a touch darker and heavier. Here’s a snippet of the official synopsis:
“Set in Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s, Stranger Things chronicles the search for a young boy who vanishes into thin air under highly suspicious circumstances. His mother (Winona Ryder) opens an investigation into the boy’s disappearance with local authorities that unravels a series of mysteries involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl …”
Despite her brief shoplifting-related exile from the acting world, Ryder continues to demonstrate her chops in project after project. From what we can tell so far, she seems to shine as Joyce — the mother of the missing boy — and series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, aka The Duffer Brothers, seem to have a handle on the whole frightening-yet-alluring thing.
This trailer opens up with a shot of a boombox, one of many nods to a bygone era, and as it plays out, we hear a police officer explaining, “This is Hawkins, you wanna know the worst thing that’s ever happened here in the four years I’ve been working here? It was when an owl attacked Eleanor Gillespie’s head, because it thought that her hair was a nest.” To be fair, that sounds like a pretty harrowing ordeal, but we are led to believe that far Stranger Things are in the offing
The series will be available to stream in its entirety on Netflix starting July 15.
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?