As those in the industry can attest, the chief source for Netflix news is … well, Netflix.
The streaming giant controls the flow if its information and releases statistics at its leisure — mostly when it suits whatever narrative the company is trying to promulgate. That said, take the following news with as many grains of salt as you see fit.
ScreenCrush reports that, during the streamer’s keynote at CES, Netflix head of content acquisition Ted Sarandos claimed that Adam Sandler’s wacky western comedy The Ridiculous 6 has taken the platform by storm. According to Sarandos, the film has been streamed more in its first 30 days on Netflix than any film in the service’s history and has hit No. 1 in every single territory with access to the platform.
That’s a bit of a surprise given that — with 28 reviews counted thus far — the film has a 0 percent on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. No, that’s not a typo. As it stands, not a single critic has reviewed the film positively and the site describes the “Critics Consensus” thusly:
“Every bit as lazily offensive as its cast and concept would suggest, The Ridiculous 6 is standard couch fare for Adam Sandler fanatics and must-avoid viewing for film enthusiasts of every other persuasion.”
Either the public’s inexplicable love for Adam Sandler is causing folks to stream a crappy film at a record-breaking rate, or Netflix is interpreting its numbers … creatively. Remember, it recently signed Adam Sandler to a four-picture deal, and it would be awfully convenient if the first of those four was a runaway hit.
Of course, these numbers don’t tell us whether anyone is actually finishing the film, so it may be that a ton of subscribers just got excited to see a Netflix original, streamed five minutes of it, realized it was terrible, and went back to watching House of Cards or Making a Murderer.
Either way, it looks like this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Sandler and the streaming behemoth. Stay tuned.
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?