Reports of the death of the Suicide Squad have been greatly exaggerated.
Sure, it may have seemed like the title brought with it some measure of finality, but this is modern-day Hollywood we’re talking about — a sequel is never off the table. According to Variety, Will Smith (Deadshot) and director David Ayer will work together on the upcoming Bright, but the production is being scheduled so that the pair will be freed up to shoot Suicide Squad 2.
This film was likely always intended to spawn a franchise, so the news shouldn’t come as a total shock, but the ride to its release has, at times, been very rocky. There was outrage over the Joker’s tattooed appearance, head-scratching over some underwhelming art, an on-set therapist, and even a hipster-themed parody trailer from Nerdist that played on fans’ worst fears about the film.
All that said, the trailers that have been released thus far seem to have assuaged fans’ anxiety a bit, and execs seem confident enough to forge ahead, despite the initial flurry of negative PR.
The sequel is set to shoot sometime in 2017 but — aside from Smith and Ayer — it’s unclear if anyone else will return. While the “suicide” portion of the title has proved a misnomer, it also wouldn’t be much of a “squad” if no one returned to star alongside Smith.
Apparently, the cast got pretty chummy during production and even got matching tattoos to show solidarity. Sounds like a recipe for a reunion to us.
We’ll keep you updated as news breaks but, in the meantime, the first Suicide Squad is set to hit theaters on August 5, 2016. The film stars Jared Leto (the Joker), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Jai Courtney (Captain Boomerang), and Cara Delevingne (Enchantress), among others.
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?