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!
Our hearts are all atwitter this week about one of the weirdest ideas that’s come down the cinematic pike in the last decade. No, it’s not the Tonya Harding movie, although the fact that Harding is played by one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood might qualify it for the running. But we’re talking about Quentin Tarantino’s wild plan to make an R-rated Star Trek movie — and, more importantly, Paramount and J.J. Abrams’ plans to make it happen.
If you haven’t heard about this and you need some time to let it settle, go ahead and take a moment — and if necessary, pause the broadcast. We’ll wait. Alright, back to the story at hand. It seems Tarantino has been on this kick for a while, and this isn’t the first we’ve heard of it. But the fact that Deadpool made three quarters of a billion dollars as an R-rated superhero film has essentially changed the game in Hollywood — we think for the better. Not only is Tarantino’s idea reportedly a go from both Abrams and the studio, per Deadline, but the magazine is reporting that Tarantino and Abrams have held meetings this week with potential screenwriters, including Oscar-winning The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith. We’ll be discussing our thoughts on how this project could roll out, if and when it actually goes into production, and what ramifications it might have.
While we’re sure we could probably take up the whole show with this Tarantino madness, there’s plenty more to discuss today — and we’re not just talking about Patrick Stewart’s comments about how he’d actually return to play Jean-Luc Picard if Quentin asked him.
In fact, there’s a lot of weird things going on in Hollywood this week, and thankfully not all of them involve sexual harassment. Disney, for instance, is said to actually be moving closer to its $60 billion (or so) bid to buy most of 21st Century Fox, which would include, among many other assets, the rights to the entire X-Men franchise. Apart from Disney’s ever-expanding stranglehold on all things superhero and sci-fi, this would potentially mean the mega-studio could remake the X-Men to its fancy, and reshape how the franchise fits into its never-ending Marvel expansion.
There’s plenty more to talk about this week, including a new Jurassic World sequel trailer (the first), a remake of Pet Sematary (of course), John Wick Chapter 3 news, Iron Fist 2 casting, and much 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?