The only thing your average moviegoer loves more than a good heist is an honorable thief. Set a story that involves both in the bowels of a steampunk-ified Victorian city and you got yourself a movie, or a video game, or both.
According to Deadline, Thief — a cult-classic video game franchise — is being adapted for the big screen. Square Enix owns the rights to the series and the film will be produced by Straight Up Films. Adam Mason and Simon Boyes will co-write the screenplay.
In the most recent installment of the video game series, a master thief named Garrett skulks in the shadows of The City, a dystopian metropolis ravaged by the plague and the equally oppressive blight of poverty. The titular burglar extraordinaire uses the chaos created by disease and violence to steal from The City’s richest residents, who hoard their wealth in effort to insulate themselves from the ugliness that surrounds them.
While video game adaptations have a rather dubious big-screen history, the plot of Thief certainly sounds like it could translate well. In fact, the game has often been compared to the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, which was recently adapted by director Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard starring.
For the time being, details on this adaptation are very scarce and we don’t yet have any indication of who might star, who will direct, or much of anything aside from the above. We’ll be sure to keep you updated as information becomes available, as this is definitely one to keep an eye on going forward.
In the meantime, if you’re a gamer — or a fan of stealthy, hooded, acrobatic protagonists — you’ll be able to catch Assasin’s Creed in theaters starting December 21, 2016.
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?