Vince Gilligan is responsible for creating one of the signature antiheroes in all of TV history with Breaking Bad, but now, even he thinks that Hollywood spends too much time focused on bad people. In a speech accepting the Writers Guild Award’s top writing honor, the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement, Gilligan said that Hollywood should spend more of its energy telling stories about good people.
“Walter White is one of the all-time great bad guys,” Gilligan said. “But all things being equal, I think we I’d rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring. In 2025 it’s time to say that out loud because we are living in an era where bad guys, the real life kind, are running amok. Bad guys who make their own rules, bad guys who, no matter what they tell you, are really out for themselves. Who am I talking about? Well, this is Hollywood, so guess.”
Gilligan said that stories about bad guys have now become too appealing and that many of them send the wrong message to their audience.
“I really think that, when we create characters as indelible as Michael Corleone or Hannibal Lecter or Darth Vader or Tony Soprano, viewers everywhere, all around the world, they pay attention,” he said. “They say, ‘Man, those dudes are badass. I want to be that cool.’ When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the cautionary player that they were created to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational. So maybe what the world needs now are some good, old-fashioned, Greatest Generation types who give more than they take. Who think that kindness, tolerance and sacrifice aren’t strictly for chumps.”
One of the longest-running critiques of Breaking Bad was that, even though Walter White was obviously a bad dude in the world of the show, far too many people saw him as aspirational. Now, it seems Gilligan is taking those critiques to heart, and trying to tell a different kind of story.
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?