Major entertainment company gives Runway access to vast portfolio to help film-makers ‘augment their work’ Lionsgate has signed a deal with the artificial intelligence research firm Runway, allowing it access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model. According to the Wall Street Journal, the model will be “customized to Lionsgate’s proprietary portfolio” which includes hit franchises such as John Wick, Saw and The Hunger Games. The aim is to help film-makers and other creatives “augment their work” through the use of AI. Continue reading...

MachineGames’ long-awaited tie-in looks set to deliver the most authentic Indy adventure yet. And with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on board, hold on to your hats for an unforgettable ride It’s the spring of 1977, and George Lucas is petrified. Having just wrapped work on his third feature film, Star Wars, he retreats to Hawaii, unable to face the early reviews. Yet as he frets in a five-star resort, Lucas bumps into another Hollywood hideaway – Steven Spielberg. Making sandcastles together under the Maui sun, Lucas pitches Spielberg a story that riffs on the simpler era of 1950s’ serials, an action-packed spectacular about a James Bond-esque archaeologist. This crypt-robbing Casanova’s name? Indiana … Smith. The hero’s moniker certainly benefited from some finessing, and the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) raked in $354m at the box office. Yet as great as Indy’s influence was on cinema, it might have had an even bigger one on video games. It inspired Lara Croft’s tomb-raiding antics and Uncharted’s wise-cracking Nathan Drake. There have also been games starring Indy himself, most notably LucasArts’ brilliant graphic adventures from the early-90s, but it’s been decades since the last interactive Indiana Jones adventure that wasn’t made of Lego. This December, he’ll finally get another crack of the gaming whip with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, from the studio behind Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – in a game that actually looks like the films. Continue reading...

Reactions to the trailer have ranged from ‘awful’ to ‘horrendous’. But what does its target audience think? Nothing makes you feel older than watching someone two generations younger than you play Minecraft – except, perhaps, watching someone two generations younger watching someone else play Minecraft on YouTube. (What are they doing? Why are they always so over-excited?) This might all seem a bit 2011: gen A have generally moved on to watching YouTubers play Fortnite, Roblox and Elden Ring with their minds instead. But there are still millions of people, most of them kids, playing every month, and there’s powerful nostalgia for this blocky virtual-Lego game among the gen Z young adults who grew up with it. A Minecraft movie was inevitable. This film has been on the cards since 2012, originally with Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham FC mate Rob McElhenney on to direct, and Steve Carell to star. Various botched attempts, Covid, and the pesky actors’ strike, meant that filming didn’t start (in Auckland, New Zealand) until early 2024. A Minecraft Movie, out April 2025, is directed by Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, and stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, Jennifer Coolidge, Jermaine Clement and Matt Berry. From the trailer released this week, it’s even more bonkers than you would imagine. Continue reading...

The immersive theatrical experience, which sees your seat move, shake and often spray water, has seen a record summer During this long, hot, languishing summer, I have come to believe in one thing and one thing only: seeing Twisters in 4DX. The Oklahoma-set film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is about a 7/10 movie in 2D – a blockbuster sequel of sorts to the 1996 disaster flick, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as tornado chasers with modest chemistry. But in the immersive theatrical format known as 4DX, in which viewers are buffeted with literal wind and rain, Twisters becomes an unmissable 10/10 experience. In 4DX, you feel every bump and jolt of a truck in an F5 gale, thanks to moving seats that, among other things, punch you in the back and tickle your ankles. When the characters clung to bolted theater seats during a final climactic storm, I too clung to my armrest, lest I get rattled off my wind-ripped chair. Each of the film’s tornado encounters drew loud cheers at my screening, as did the shot of Powell in a tight white T-shirt during a palpable drizzle. I emerged from Twisters with tangled hair and horizontal tear streaks; my friend lost her shoe. In 4DX, you do not just, in the words of Powell’s Tyler Owens, “ride” the storm. You are the storm. Continue reading...

New documentary looks for a woman who was synonymous with typing in the 80s and 90s, with surprising results Before bashing out emails and text messages by thumb became an accepted form of communication, typing was a fully manual skill. In the 80s, “the office” was an exclusive preserve for freaks who could type 40 words per minute at least. Those too modest or miserly to sign up for brick-and-mortar classes could pick up a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for $50. At my Catholic high school, the application was the typing class. The priests just switched on the computers. Launched in late 1987, Mavis Beacon quickly assumed pride of place on home PC desks amid floppy disks for SimCity and After Dark. Among other features, Mavis gamified typing drills and tracked typing progress in explicit detail. Its defining feature was the elegant Black woman with a cream suit and slicked-back bob marching proudly off to her high-rise job on the cover of the software package. But it would take a few more decades for the bigger lesson in the pitfalls of relinquishing control over your image and likeness to corporate interests. Continue reading...

Found-footage horror about YouTube pranksters turns into an online phenomenon, giving its star and creator a Hollywood inroad 2024 is already becoming something of a banner year for horror, with Longlegs making over $100m and Late Night with the Devil earning a whopping 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet the breakout horror of the year might just be an $800 project currently available to watch free on YouTube. Milk & Serial is a 62-minute, found-footage horror by YouTuber Curry Barker, and it manages to be at once ruthlessly effective and wonderfully authentic. Racking up 348,000 views in the two weeks since its release, its popularity has been supercharged by raves on Reddit that have since crossed over into traditional media. Bloody Disgusting called it “one of the year’s best-kept secrets” and this week Barker found himself being interviewed by no less than Variety. Continue reading...

When two horror movie fans took the leap into game development, the last thing they expected was for an actual movie production company to want to get involved In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people’s cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they’d have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that’s what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals. And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time. They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it – but they didn’t know how to market it, and it didn’t sell much. “We were like, OK, I guess that was it,” Bryan tells me. “Let’s go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up.” Fear the Spotlight is released this autumn on PlayStation 5 and PC This interview with Cozy Game Pals took place at Summer game fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation expenses were met by Amazon Games Continue reading...

The future is here, whether some like it or not, and artificial intelligence is already impacting the film industry. But just how far can, and should, it go? Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI – the type that can produce text, images and video – have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers’ ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how. “We realized it was kind of the wild west, and film-makers without any mal-intent were getting themselves into situations where they could be misleading to an audience,” said Antell. “And we thought, what’s needed here is some real guidance.” Continue reading...

It won’t be long till everything from Drag Race to Keeping Up With the Kardashians could be written without humans – and you might be able to write yourself as the hero of a new show. But will robot TV ever be up to snuff? Justine Bateman won’t name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: their show’s team was well into filming its second season when a network executive had an idea. A character in the pilot hadn’t tested well with audiences, so they were just going to go in, use a little AI, and swap in someone else. The showrunner – and Bateman, an actor and director – were understandably incensed. “When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory,” says Bateman. “There’s going to be whiplash for the viewer when they get to episode three or four because what was set up in the pilot got messed with and now doesn’t make sense.” Using AI might have seemed like a simple solution to the executive, but to the showrunner, it was catastrophic. Continue reading...