DT’s weekly entertainment show, Between the Streams, is your guide to all of the hottest, most important, and (of course) dumbest new developments in streaming and entertainment, providing a handy recap of the week that was and a preview for what’s ahead. Follow us here at 2 p.m. PT every Friday, or add us via RSS, iTunes, or Stitcher at the links below to take BtS on the road!
We’re in the midst of the January doldrums, and that means the theater marquees aren’t exactly jumping off the walls at us this weekend. But not to worry, there’s still plenty of wildness happening in the world of entertainment, with maybe the weirdest bit being that Apple (yes, Apple) has won a bidding war to secure the rights to a new Kristin Wiig comedy series. Along with Wiig, Reese Witherspoon will also reportedly have a prominent role on both sides of the camera. The 10-episode series will apparently be based on a book of short stories called You Think It, I’ll Say It, which seems to set it up more like an anthology series of sorts.
But perhaps the biggest news of the week is the synopsis that Disney let slip about its possibly doomed Han Solo origin movie, Solo. Look, we’re not saying this is going to be the worst Star Wars movie of the modern era, but it’s a possibility. Then again, if the movie is set up to suck, maybe we’ll all be pleasantly surprised. This author is a self-professed Alden Ehrenreich fan (from what little I’ve seen of him on film), and it is Disney after all. We’ll chat about the revelations from the basic synopsis, and ask if people are still excited about the film to kick things off this week.
While there’s not much (or anything) new when it comes to blockbuster appeal in theaters this week, there are a few well-reviewed movies hitting wide release that should give fans of great performances something to cheer for. Those options include I, Tonya, which features Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding and explores perhaps the weirdest and most infamous moment in figure skating history, and Call Me By Your Name, the sensual love story starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet that has critics raving.
There are plenty of other tidbits happening in entertainment this week as well, including a new red band trailer for the much-anticipated Super Troopers 2, wild rumors about the new Venom film, more wild rumors about a stand-alone Black Widow film, a Catch 22 miniseries produced by George Clooney, more fuel for the John Wick spinoff series, and more.
So tune in and hit us up live at 2 p.m. PT today, or take us along for the ride with our podcast version by following the links at the top of this story.
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?