Hollywood can be an unpredictable town, but no one in the movie business is harder to pin down than Quentin Tarantino. He’s the type of guy that might start out with a novel called Django In White Hell and end up with a movie called The Hateful Eight.
In fact, according to ScreenCrush, that’s exactly how his latest project came into being. Tarantino recently appeared on the DP/30 video podcast and revealed that he had wanted to continue the story of Django — the eponymous slave-turned-bounty-hunter from Tarantino’s last hit film — but had written him into a cast of characters that seemed a bit too unsavory to have a hero in their midst.
Said the director “[at] a certain point I realized, well, you know what’s wrong with this piece? It’s Django. He needs to go. Because you shouldn’t have a moral center when it comes to these eight characters.”
Eventually, Tarantino replaced the character with Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren and was left with The Hateful Eight. Just your typical, linear, non-abstract creative process.
While those who had hoped to see Django on the big screen again might be disappointed to hear that the character was cut from this film, the glass-half-full crowd would say that the door seems wide open for Foxx to reprise his role in the future.
Another interesting takeaway from this interview is that Tarantino was trying to write a novel. While his screenplays are the stuff of legend, the literary world represents untreaded territory for the director.
If you tuned in for his appearance on the YouTube series What The Flick!?, however, this news probably doesn’t come as a surprise. On the show, Tarantino told film critic Ben Mankiewicz that he sees himself transitioning to “writing novels and writing plays” possibly at the expense of screenplays.
“Since [Kill Bill], my work has taken a turn towards the literary,” he said. “It’s gotten denser and denser, with [The Hateful Eight] probably being the densest of the group. And that seems like where I’m going to be going too.”
It’s interesting to note, however, that the director’s most recent attempt to write a book ended in … well, a movie. That said, we wouldn’t waive goodbye to the Quentin Tarantino we’ve come to know just yet.
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?