Even if the upcoming Suicide Squad is a bust at the box office, its production has been such a saga that it may one day make for an entertaining documentary. From Jared Leto sending dead rats and condoms to his co-workers, to the cast tattooing each other, to the consternation over the look and feel of almost every one of the film’s characters, it has been a wild ride.
The movie continued to make news Wednesday when ScreenCrush reported that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has officially branded Suicide Squad with a PG-13 rating, citing “sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language.” In a vacuum, this wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy, but with everyone trying to get a handle on what the heck this movie will look like when it actually hits theaters, the rating looms larger than usual.
Remember, this was a film that was supposedly dark enough to necessitate an on-set therapist. Then, it was a film that needed re-shoots because it wasn’t “fun” enough. And now, well, who knows?
There had been some talk early on that Suicide Squad was headed for an R rating, and the PG-13 label seems to suggest that some of its grislier moments may have been either cut or toned down. Of course, there’s also the possibility that it was never really all that dark to begin with.
Usually, we have a pretty good handle on a film once it gets this close to its release, but this one has thrown us for a loop to the point that the final product can’t possibly surprise us one way or the other.
Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, and stars Will Smith (Deadshot), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), and Leto (The Joker).
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?