How big has Star Wars: The Force Awakens become? Big enough to play a part in the race for the nation’s highest office.
Okay, so it’s probably not going to have an effect on the election, but according to the Hollywood Reporter, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has used the film in a new attack ad against President Barack Obama. Set aside for a moment that he’s attacking Obama — whose term as president is up in 2016 — and not Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or any of his current Republican or potential Democratic opponents, and focus on the fact that Star Wars is now officially everywhere.
Related: Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ villains not evil enough for Vatican City reviewer
Entitled We need a real President!, the ad opens as an imitation Imperial March plays in the background. The words “we are in a serious war” flash on the screen. This is followed by an unnerving montage of basically anything frightening that The Donald could get his hands on, which cuts out as the text flashes on screen again: “our President is busy with another war …”
Cut to Obama ending a press conference by saying “OK everybody I gotta get to Star Wars” before the ad wraps up with “time for a real leader with real priorities.”
We don’t like to delve too deeply into politics here, but we have to say that — judging by the box-office numbers — it seems that skipping Star Wars would have been the least presidential thing to do in the period following the film’s release. In this day and age, if an American president is to be well versed in domestic affairs, they had better know their Star Wars.
We kid, of course. You can form your own judgment about the merits of Trump’s ad, but for us, nothing can compete with Luke Skywalker 2016: A new hope for America!
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?