If you’re a fan of The Merlin Saga, T.A. Barron’s epic, sprawling, eleven-book fantasy series, you likely knew that a film adaptation was on the way — but yesterday brought some additional, intriguing news on that front.
Deadline Hollywood reports that rights-holder Disney has brought in Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, to pen the script for the upcoming film, and it’s hard to imagine how they could have made a better hire in this spot. Boyens worked alongside Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh on six separate Tolkien adaptations (three Lord of the Rings films and three Hobbit films), so at this point, the scribe is well versed in how to bring fantasy novels to the big screen.
The Merlin Saga (AKA The Lost Years of Merlin) tells the tale of the legendary wizard’s youth and — while the character is famous throughout the world — he is almost always depicted as an older, grey-bearded man. Everyone loves a good origin/coming-of-age story and we’d guess that — with major studio backing — young Merlin shouldn’t have any problems putting butts in movie theater seats.
If you’re not particularly inspired by this news, take a second to remember what happened the last time a studio adapted a series of young adult novels about an adolescent wizard. Yep, we ended up with the Harry Potter films, the second-most profitable movie franchise of all-time, trailing only the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
While we don’t have many details yet on how this adaptation will be handled, who will be cast, or even when it might be released, Disney’s hiring of Boyens should help give fans an indication of the direction of the project.
We’ll be bringing you updates as they become available, so stay tuned.
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?