A large-screen IMAX documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope "has just opened in 300 theaters across North America," write an anonymous Slashdot reader, noting that it's playing for one week only. "And it gets a rave review in Forbes." Imagine venturing to the beginning of time and space, exploring cosmic landscapes so vast and beautiful that they've remained unseen by human eyes until now.

This is the promise of "Deep Sky," an extraordinary IMAX presentation that brings the universe's awe-inspiring mysteries closer than ever before. Directed by the Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn and narrated by the equally acclaimed actress Michelle Williams, "Deep Sky" is a monumental journey through the cosmos, powered by the groundbreaking images captured by NASA's Webb Telescope... "Deep Sky" is more than a documentary about a space telescope; it's an immersive experience that invites audiences to see the universe as never before. Through the power of IMAX, viewers are transported across 13 billion years of cosmic history, to the very edges of the observable universe. Here, in stunning clarity, we witness the birth of stars, the formation of galaxies, and the eerie beauty of exoplanets — planets that orbit stars beyond our own Sun. These images, beamed back to Earth by JWST, reveal the universe's vast beauty on a scale that seems only the giant IMAX screen can begin to convey...

What makes "Deep Sky" particularly captivating is its ability to render the incomprehensible beauty and scale of the universe accessible. The IMAX® experience, known for its breathtaking visuals and sound, serves as the perfect medium to convey the majesty of the cosmos.
The review says the film celebrates the achieve of thousands of people working across decades, "aiming to answer some of humanity's oldest questions: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Are we alone in the vastness of space?"

The reviewer also spoke to JWST telescope scientist Matt Mountain — in another article applauding the film for "encapsulating the grandeur of space exploration on the IMAX canvas." In "Deep Sky," viewers are taken on a journey from the telescope's construction to its deployment and early operational phases. The documentary highlights the international collaboration and engineering marvels behind the JWST, featuring insights from key scientists and engineers who brought the telescope to life. The film aims to rekindle a sense of wonder about the universe and our place within it, emphasizing the human desire to explore and understand the cosmos.

Earlier this week, Netflix found itself embroiled in an AI scandal when Futurism spotted AI-generated images used in the Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did.. The movie's credits do not mention any uses of AI, causing critics to call out the filmmakers for "potentially embellishing a movie that's supposed to be based on real-life events," reports Ars Technica. An executive producer of the Netflix hit acknowledged that some of the photos were edited to protect the identity of the source but remained vague about whether AI was used in the process. From the report: What Jennifer Did shot to the top spot in Netflix's global top 10 when it debuted in early April, attracting swarms of true crime fans who wanted to know more about why Pan paid hitmen $10,000 to murder her parents. But quickly the documentary became a source of controversy, as fans started noticing glaring flaws in images used in the movie, from weirdly mismatched earrings to her nose appearing to lack nostrils, the Daily Mail reported, in a post showing a plethora of examples of images from the film. [...]

Jeremy Grimaldi -- who is also the crime reporter who wrote a book on the case and provided the documentary with research and police footage -- told the Toronto Star that the images were not AI-generated. Grimaldi confirmed that all images of Pan used in the movie were real photos. He said that some of the images were edited, though, not to blur the lines between truth and fiction, but to protect the identity of the source of the images. "Any filmmaker will use different tools, like Photoshop, in films," Grimaldi told The Star. "The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her. The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source." While Grimaldi's comments provide some assurance that the photos are edited versions of real photos of Pan, they are also vague enough to obscure whether AI was among the "different tools" used to edit the photos.

Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: "As we've noted in previous letters, we're focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics -- and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction," the company said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. "In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential." Netflix said now that it is generating substantial profit and free cash flow -- as well as developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password-sharing crackdown -- its membership numbers are not the only factor in the company's growth. It said the metric lost significance after it started to offer multiple price points for memberships. The company said it would still announce "major subscriber milestones as we cross them."

Netflix also noted that it expects paid net additions to be lower in the second quarter compared to the first quarter "due to typical seasonality." Its second-quarter revenue forecast of $9.49 billion was just shy of Wall Street's estimate of $9.54 billion Shares of the company fell around 4% in extended trading. Netflix reported first-quarter net income of $2.33 billion, or $5.28 per share, versus $1.30 billion, or $2.88 per share, in the prior-year period. The company posted revenue of $9.37 billion for the quarter, up from $8.16 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.) Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more.

How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That's quite surprising -- both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time. But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

Movie exhibitors still face "serious risks," the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday: Attendance was on the decline even before the pandemic shuttered theaters, thanks to changing consumer habits and competition for people's time and money from other entertainment options. The industry has demonstrated an over-reliance on Imax-friendly studio action tent poles, when theater chains need a deep and diverse roster of movies in order to thrive... It remains to be seen whether the global box office will ever get back to the $40 billion-plus days of 2019 and earlier years. A clearer picture will emerge in 2025 when the writers' and actors' strikes are further in the past. But overall, there's a strong case that moviegoing has proved to be relatively sturdy despite persistent difficulties.
Which brings us to this year's CinemaCon convention, where multiplex operators heard from Hollywood studios teasing upcoming blockbusters like Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Transformers One, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Exhibitors pleaded with the major studios to release more films of varying budgets on the big screen, while studios made the case that their upcoming slates are robust enough to keep them in business... Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada is expected to total about $8.5 billion, which is down from $9 billion in 2023 and a far cry from the pre-pandemic yearly tallies that nearly reached $12 billion... Though a fuller release schedule is expected for 2025, talk of budget cuts, greater industry consolidation and corporate mergers has forced exhibitors to prepare for the possibility of a near future with fewer studios making fewer movies....

As the domestic film business has been thrown into turmoil in recent years, Japanese cinema and faith-based content have been two of movie theaters' saving graces. Industry leaders kicked off CinemaCon on Tuesday by singing the praises of Sony-owned anime distributor Crunchyroll's hits — including the latest "Demon Slayer" installment. Mitchel Berger, senior vice president of global commerce at Crunchyroll, said Tuesday that the global anime business generated $14 billion a decade ago and is projected to generate $37 billion next year. "Anime is red hot right now," Berger said. "Fans have known about it for years, but now everyone else is catching up and recognizing that it's a cultural, economic force to be reckoned with.... " Another type of product buoying the exhibition industry right now is faith-based programming, shepherded in large part by "Sound of Freedom" distributor Angel Studios...

Theater owners urged studio executives at CinemaCon to put more films in theaters — and not just big-budget tent poles timed for summer movie season and holiday weekends... "Whenever we have a [blockbuster] film — whether it be 'Barbie' or 'Super Mario' ... records are set," added Bill Barstow, co-founder of ACX Cinemas in Nebraska. "But we just don't have enough of them."

A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force AI companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. From a report: The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.

The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies.

"AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections," Schiff said in a statement. Whether major AI companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff's bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT -- data that is usually kept private.

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. "The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids," she says. "No video production is required."

Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.

Disneyland is a proposing part of its park be dedicated to James Cameron's Avatar, reports SFGate. "The rendering isn't a carbon copy of the Pandora land in Disney World's Animal Kingdom; instead, it's themed more closely to the recent sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water." The teaser was dropped as part of Wednesday's company shareholders meeting. The concept art shows a large lake in the middle of the land, surrounded by the signature floating mountains that loom over Animal Kingdom's Pandora. Boats filled with guests can be seen in the water, suggesting some sort of ride. No attractions have been announced for the land yet. Animal Kingdom has two: the spectacular flight simulator Flight of Passage and bucolic indoor boat ride Na'vi River Journey...

There's no timeline for construction to begin. Disney officials have consistently referred to it as a "potential" project, often calling it an "experience" rather than a land.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...]

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

Disney said Thursday it planned to crack down on password sharing [non-paywalled link] for its streaming services starting with a few countries in June before implementing a wider rollout in September. From a report: Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger unveiled the timeline to limit password sharing in a CNBC interview Thursday morning, a day after the company defeated activist Nelson Peltz in a bruising proxy fight. Iger didn't say which countries would be first.

The company for months has said a crackdown was coming as it looks to cut costs and make Disney+ and Hulu profitable. Since Iger returned as CEO in 2022, the company has trimmed its streaming losses. Iger said the company is on track to have a profitable streaming business by the fourth quarter this year. "That's a huge, huge improvement," he said on CNBC. "Now what we have to do is turn it not just into a profitable business, into a growth business."

Godzilla x Kong "stomped all over expectations," writes Deadline, "with an $80M opening, the second best start of the year so far, $2.5M behind the $82.5M opening of Legendary's other big pic this spring, Dune: Part Two...

"EntTelligence reports that GxK is expected to pull in more than 5.5M admissions this weekend, the most attended opening weekend for any movie year-to-date." No one saw this coming... International delivered $114M for a great $194M global start. The Adam Wingard directed movie, not including preview night, commanded 56% of all foot traffic and 89% of all premium format admissions. Imax and PLF drove 38% of the gross with 3D responsible for 19%... Beamed Warner Bros Domestic Distribution Boss Jeff Goldstein, "This is a huge, fun Easter movie for the whole family...." For a fifthquel to bounce back the franchise, GxK being the second best start in the Legendary Monsterverse after Godzilla's $93.1M ten years ago, is pretty remarkable.
The article speculates that the first installments (of both the Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong franchise) underperformed because of their mid-pandemic release dates, with their sequels earning more in 2024. The pure theatricality of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire "clearly underscores the value of the IP on the big screen, and moviegoers' preference to see such monster mashing in no other place but a theater." (Deadline calls the movie "a really fun creature feature with a lot of heart; heck, it's even better than Jurassic World: Dominion. Seriously.")

It also earned "the fifth best Easter weekend opening ever," the article points out, coming in behind Batman v. Superman ($181M), Super Mario Bros Movie ($166.4M), Furious 7 ($161.2M) and The Fate of the Furious ($107.3M), according to the article. Their headline? "They Have Risen: 'Godzilla x Kong' Conquers Easter Box Office..."

In 2019 Los Angeles film/TV producer Brian Morrison painted Blockbuster's logo onto an old newspaper box — and then filled it up with used DVDs. "The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction," reports the New York Times — aided at times by social media — "and eventually more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain."

Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.

Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said.

Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University...

Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts).

But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."

It was March 24, 1999 that The Matrix premiered, premembers the Wall Street Journal. "To rewatch The Matrix is to be reminded of how primitive our technology was just 25 years ago. We see computers with bulky screens, cellphones with keypads and a once-ubiquitous feature of our society known as 'pay phones,' central to the plot of the film."

But the article's headline warns that "25 Years Later, We're All Trapped in 'The Matrix'". [I]n a strange way, the film has become more relevant today than it was in 1999. With the rise of the smartphone and social media, genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously. Today many people, like Cypher, would rather spend their time in the imaginary realms offered by technology than engage in a genuine relationship with other human beings.

In the film, one of the representatives of the AI, the villainous Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, tells Morpheus that the false reality of the Matrix is set in 1999 because that year was "the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization." Indeed, not long after "The Matrix" premiered, humanity hooked itself up to a matrix of its own. There is no denying that our lives have become better in many ways thanks to the internet and smartphones. But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making...

For today's dwellers in the digital cave, the path back into the light doesn't involve taking a pill, as in "The Matrix," or being rescued by a philosopher. We ourselves have the power to resist the extremes of the digital world, even as we remain linked to it. You can find hints of an unplugged "Zion" in the Sabbath tables of observant Jews, where electronic devices are forbidden, and in university seminars where laptops are banned so that students can engage with a text and each other.

Twenty-five years ago, "The Matrix" offered us a modern twist on Plato's cave. Today we are once again asking what it will take to find our way out of the lonely darkness, into the brilliance of other human souls in the real world.

CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..." "File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies...

It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....

Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."

"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."