The first trailer for Superman got plenty of people excited about James Gunn’s vision for the iconic superhero. News of a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery over the movie’s release, though, might mean that the movie isn’t available in some countries.
The lawsuit comes from the estate of Joseph Shuster, one of the original creators of Superman, and seeks to prevent the release of the movie in certain key territories, including Canada, Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Mark Warren Peary, the estate’s executor, filed the lawsuit and claims that the studio doesn’t have the right to distribute the movie in those territories. The suit seeks “damages and injunctive relief for Defendants’ ongoing infringement” as well as “declaratory relief establishing the Shuster Estate’s ownership rights across relevant jurisdictions.”
Warner Bros. Discovery has responded to the lawsuit saying that they are ready to fight it in court and that they “fundamentally disagree with the merits of the lawsuit.”
The lawsuit is based on copyright laws in those countries, which state that copyright reverts to the estate of the owner 25 years after their deaths. Since Shuster and his co-creator Jerry Siegel have both been dead longer than 25 years, the lawsuit alleges that the studio has to seek the estate’s permission to release the movie in those areas.
The suit requests a jury trial, saying that “defendants’ acts of direct infringement have been willful, intentional, and purposeful, in wholesale disregard of and indifference to the rights of Plaintiff.”
Warner Bros. has battled similar lawsuits from Peary in the past, but given the timing of this lawsuit, resolution will be key to ensure that the movie gets the global release it had planned.
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?