Every time you think the Toy Story franchise might be over, the fine folks at Pixar decide they should make another one. Toy Story 5 is now in production, and Tim Allen, who plays Buzz Lightyear in the franchise, has already done five hours worth of recording for it.
In an interview with Collider, Allen discussed his work on the new movie, saying that he was impressed by the idea for the film.
“Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Yes, I just did the first five-hour session for Buzz, probably a week ago,” the actor said. “It’s really, really weird to get back in it. I can’t tell you anything.”
Collider also reported that Buzz would be the focus of this upcoming project, although the exact details of the plot are still unclear. What’s more, Allen insisted that the folks at Pixar had only returned to the franchise because they had a good story to tell.
“It’s a very, very clever story. Do you wanna do five of these? I don’t really believe it’s about the money,” he said. “I’m sure they want it to be a success, but that’s not why they did it. Had they not come up with a brilliant script, they wouldn’t have done it and they wouldn’t have called me and Tom [Hanks]. It’s really clever.”
Allen explained that he had struggled to get back into Buzz for a few hours before finding the part again and added that they had gotten up to the film’s third act.
“We’ll do the third act. And then, we’ll go back and clean it. And then, I’ll do it about five more times,” he explained.
The movie is expected to hit theaters in 2026, and we’ll find out then whether Allen is being honest about the clever story at the movie’s center.
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?