Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Star Wars: The Force Awakens have both come and gone from theaters, but the friendly rivalry between the films’ directors, Zack Snyder and J.J. Abrams respectively, lives on. Snyder recently resumed the back-and-forth by sharing a mash-up video that serves as a trailer for the fictional movie Dark Side Knight v SuperJedi: Dawn of the Alliance.
The exchange kicked off back when both films were shooting, and it involved a variety of Photoshopped images combining their respective film franchises. Along the way, we got to see Batman and his new sidekick “R2BIN,” (better known as R2D2), Superman wielding a lightsaber, and C3PO wearing a dark cape. A video came into play, too — Abrams’ “Hunka Junk” teaser threw shade at the Batmobile while showing off the Millennium Falcon.
In his latest addition to the faux feud, Snyder built on the SuperJedi character he introduced in a July 2014 tweet. He shows Superman as the good guy in his mash-up video, while Batman has a much darker side.
#SuperJedi pic.twitter.com/PyNbELK8UZ
— Zack Snyder (@ZackSnyder) July 24, 2014
Throughout the mash-up, we see and hear familiar Star Wars elements. There are quotes from Yoda in voiceover, Star Wars ships zoom around, and the DC Comics heroes are armed with lightsabers. Basically, what you get is a particularly well-executed fan video.
Snyder revived the ongoing exchange after a long period of quiet. Apparently, he realized he was overdue for more Batman v Superman–Star Wars fun, and the timing allowed him to promote the new social media network Verso by posting it there. He and Abrams may have taken this thing as far as it can go, though. While Snyder has another DC Comics project in the works with Justice League, Abrams isn’t directing the next Star Wars movie. It may be time to accept that all good things must come to an end.
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?