The DC Extended Universe just lost its Batman, but it gained a new star in December. Aquaman, which starred Jason Momoa in the title role, rode the waves of hype to a $1 billion take at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing film based on a DC Comics property in movie history.
While director James Wan decides whether or not he’ll return to guide Aquaman‘s inevitable sequel, Warner Bros. and DC decided to keep the momentum flowing with a spin-off. The upcoming feature film is called The Trench, and will be a “horror-tinged” take on Aquaman’s bright and colorful submarine world, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Newcomers Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald will write The Trench‘s script. Wan and Peter Safran will serve as producers. The main Aquaman cast is not expected to appear.
Viewers caught a glimpse of the Trench, one of Atlantis’ many clans, in Aquaman when hero Arthur Curry and his bride-to-be Mera are attacked by the Trench’s soldiers en route to an underwater wormhole. The Trench will play up the tribe’s monstrous side, although the spin-off won’t be as lavish as its source material: The Hollywood Reporter claims that The Trench will have a significantly smaller budget than previous DC films.
While Aquaman debuted in 1941’s More Fun Comics #73 in a story written by Mort Weisinger and drawn by Paul Norris, the Trench is a much more recent addition to DC’s canon. The Trench made their grand debut in 2011’s Aquaman #1, which was launched as part of DC’s line-wide “The New 52” reboot. In its first appearance, the Trench attacked a small village and ate its inhabitants before going on to plague Aquaman and, later, the Justice League.
Those stories were written by Geoff Johns, a prolific comic book scribe who also served as DC Entertainment’s chief creative officer from 2010 through 2018, and as its president from 2016 until his departure. While Johns and his production company, Mad Ghost Productions, still work on DC-related projects, it’s not clear if he’ll be contributing to The Trench in any way.
The Trench isn’t the only big DC spin-off in production. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is set to make the move from Suicide Squad to the Birds of Prey in 2020, while A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay is currently developing a film based on DC’s New Gods. Remember the demons who attacked Superman and friends in Justice League? Yeah, those guys.
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?