In spite of its hefty budget and impressive worldwide box office numbers, the Warcraft movie wasn’t exactly considered a runaway success — at least not stateside. Critics and audiences alike had their fair share of complaints,and now Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers series is airing its own.
Like the Honest Trailers before it, the Warcraft one calls out the film’s flaws, from its overabundance of complicated storylines to its unsatisfying climax. The narrator does not mince words. He calls it “overly ambitious” and a “high-budget mess” — albeit a “gorgeous-looking” one. However, he argues that we are taking baby steps away from video game movies that are “crappy-looking, low-budget messes” and moving toward maybe, someday getting a good one.
The video also references the enormous discrepancy between the film’s box office performance in North America compared to overseas. While Warcraft‘s domestic performance was disappointing at roughly $47.23 million, it pulled in $386.31 million internationally, according to Box Office Mojo data.
Not all of the criticism is terrible — the film did earn a 75 percent rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, after all. The narrator likens Warcraft to Game of Thrones given its intriguing themes of betrayal, warring sides, and heroes and villains. The problem, he suggests, though, is that the film feels like an entire season of the HBO hit “crammed into two hours.”
After poking fun at the actors’ performances, suggesting the expansion pack will have a real ending, and calling Warcraft “the world’s most expensive unskippable cut scene,” the video has one last treat in store for viewers: Matthew Patrick — aka MatPat. The Game Theory stars jumps in after the “noob” narrator calls for help wading through the many characters. They exchange barbs, closing out the trailer with a fun and fitting cameo.
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?