Article Image

Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn movie, ‘Gotham City Sirens,’ lands director

Margot Robbie isn't the only Suicide Squad alum interested in a Harley Quinn spinoff: Director David Ayer has signed on. The film, titled Gotham City Sirens, will follow an all-female group of DC villains.

Suicide Squad standout Margot Robbie wasn’t the only one to become enamored with the idea of a spinoff featuring the colorful villainess Harley Quinn. Apparently, it also won over director David Ayer. He has decided to team up with Robbie again for the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter .

Called Gotham City Sirens, the film will center on a group of female DC characters. Although we can’t say for sure yet which ones will join Harley Quinn in the movie, the recent comic series also featured Catwoman and Poison Ivy. The screenplay is reportedly in the works, with screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Sherlock Holmes 3) doing the job.

Robbie has been said to be a major driver of the project, which was previously confirmed by THR and she will also serve as a producer under her LuckyChap Entertainment production company. THR’s sources revealed that the actress became invested in DC’s female characters while delving into her role and evidently saw the potential for another film. She found a writer herself and brought the project to the studio.

Quinn was originally introduced in the Batman: The Animated Series television show as the Joker’s girlfriend and sidekick, but the quirky character became a fan favorite and eventually made the leap into the DC Comics canon. Meanwhile, both Catwoman and Poison Ivy are familiar to fans as well, with the former sometimes appearing as Batman’s love interest and the latter stirring up trouble for him with toxic plants. The characters are by no means traditional, but if Deadpool proved anything when it opened in February, it’s that audiences don’t just want the same old superheroes.

Suicide Squad may have been met with mixed reviews, but given how Harley Quinn stole the show, we have high hopes for Gotham City Sirens.

Article originally published in September 2016. Updated on 12-14-16 by Stephanie Topacio Long: Added the film’s title and David Ayer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet’s involvement in the project.

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?