Disney’s Rocketeer reboot is flying on a new path. The project, which is titled The Rocketeers, will reportedly center on a black female pilot, according to THR.
Although the original film came out 25 years ago, in 1991, the sequel-reboot will pick up just six years later. Times have changed, though, because this time around, a female character will serve as the protagonist. The Rocketeer, Cliff Secord, was previously played by Billy Campbell.
The Rocketeer, based on the 1980s comic by Dave Stevens, was set in 1938. The story followed Secord, a stunt pilot, who discovered a rocket pack that needed to be kept away from Nazis, mobsters, and even the FBI. The hero was described as “an airborne Indiana Jones.”
At this point, the reboot is still in the early stages of development. However, basic plot elements are (not surprisingly) similar: The pilot will also find a jet pack, and she’ll have to keep it out of the hands of a corrupt rocket scientist. While Secord is supposed to have vanished, the fact that the title is reportedly The Rocketeers seems noteworthy. Perhaps we can expect to see more than one jet-packed hero flying around.
The idea of a reboot of The Rocketeer has been floating around in recent years, but this is the first time made we’ve heard of the project featuring a female lead. The move was apparently made in part to differentiate the Rocketeer character from Iron Man, but it also has the added benefit of bringing much-needed diversity to the big screen. Women and minority groups are notoriously underrepresented in lead film roles, as numerous studies have pointed out.
The script for the project is being written by Max Winkler and Matt Spicer, while Brigham Taylor and Blake Griffin are set to produce. Disney’s Tendo Nagenda and Chaz Salembier are overseeing the project. No timeline for its release has yet been announced.
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?