Theron vs. Thurman: Critics aren't impressed with ‘The Old Guard 2'
The sequel experienced significant production and post-production delays, attributed by star Charlize Theron to leadership changes at Netflix.
Critics widely panned the film, describing it as an 'emotionally inert slog' with a 'dull and underdeveloped script,' and criticizing its perceived cheapness and excessive exposition.
Despite the overall negative reception, the addition of Uma Thurman to the cast was highlighted as a positive by some reviewers, including The New York Times.
The original 2020 film was a record-breaker for Netflix, but the sequel's critical reception suggests it has struggled to meet expectations.
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Metro
41 minutes ago
- Metro
Netflix fans fume after outrageous murder-mystery is axed
Netflix viewers are in mourning after the streamer cancelled one of its 'best shows', The Residence, in a shock move. The eight-episode murder-mystery series starred Orange is the New Black actor Uzo Aduba as Detective Cordelia Cupp who must get to the bottom of a murder at the White House. After coming out in March, fans have had nothing but praise for the quirky show with an eccentric cast of characters, including pop icon Kylie Minogue herself as well as Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito, Always Be My Maybe's Randall Park. In fact, people were rooting for multiple seasons of the show with our bird-obsessed detective solving a new mystery every time, Knives Out style anthology series. With an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score and a tidy 6.4 million views in the first four days alone – there's no denying there was appetite for more. Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. Unfortunately, the Shonda Rhimes show won't be making a grand return to screens with Netflix axing it. The show was undeniably an expensive endeavour for the streamer featuring the biggest ever recreation of the White House built on seven stages and featured 10 miles of moulding, 200 working doors and 144,000 pounds of flooring. Per Deadline, sources say that there had been discussion to reduce the budget for a second season, which ultimately didn't work out. Over on Reddit, fans were complaining about the decision. 'That's a bummer! I really enjoyed her character. I liked the backstory flashbacks a lot too. I thought there was a lot to work with in further building her character,' user runamokamok said. 'I liked this show a lot more than I would've thought. Sucks its been canceled but at least we had a complete series with an ending,' SilverRoseBlade wrote. 'Why does Netflix only cancel quality shows like this?? That was genuinely so fun and thrilling,' kjsah9026 shared. 'This is on brand for Netflix. Cancelling shows that are actually good and renewing shows that suck,' explanationhead3753 reflected. 'Awww man. This was such a lovely, cozy show. I really wanted more,' vmetdear posted. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video HollasforDollas asked Netflix to 'get their priorities in order' while eightyfish called it a 'pity' and shidog agreed 'Netflix missed it on this one'. On X, the sentiment was similar. 'The Residence is one of the best shows I've ever watched and did what it needed to do that one season. I don't think they could have topped this going forward, anyway. I'm not mad,' blurrypinks declared. 'I'm so salty about The Residence getting cancelled,' ingirksnob agreed. 'Shondaland better find a way to save The Residence I need the murder mysteryaissance to continue!!!' Pomgrenatecity echoed. One minuscule consolation is that at least the plot of season one is contained with a satisfying resolution, which means fans won't have to deal with a devastating cliffhanger that never gets answered. Alongside The Residence, another fresh show on the platform, Pulse, about a group of ER doctors navigating crisis after crisis at a Miami hospital, has also been cut. Meanwhile, Netflix thriller No Good Deed, which came out in December starring Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano, has been paused indefinitely. Netflix has a track record for prematurely cancelling TV shows and evoking uproar among fans. In 2023, co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Bloomberg the metric by which they measure whether a show gets that all-important greenlight. 'We have never cancelled a successful show. A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget. More Trending 'The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever,' he said. This year alone has seen the unceremonious end of Noah Centineo's The Recruit, period drama The Empress and Greek mythology series Kaos. This is alongside a slew of major shows coming to an end, including Squid Game, The Sandman, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Big Mouth, Cobra Kai and Outer Banks. View More » The Residence season one is available to stream on Netflix. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Hidden gem streaming service cheaper than Netflix is perfect for thriller fans MORE: BBC thriller that fans hailed 'perfect' soars up Netflix top 10 chart MORE: Neil Gaiman allegations explained as Netflix drops Sandman season 2 part one
Geeky Gadgets
44 minutes ago
- Geeky Gadgets
Create Entire Game Worlds in Seconds with Runway AI
What if creating an entire game world was as simple as describing it in a sentence? Picture this: you type 'a misty forest with glowing mushrooms and ancient ruins' into a platform, and within seconds, a fully realized, interactive environment appears before your eyes. No coding, no months of development—just instant creativity brought to life. Bold claim? Not anymore. With the rise of Runway AI, game development is being reimagined, breaking down barriers that once made creating immersive worlds the domain of only the most skilled developers. This isn't just a tool—it's a revolution, putting the power of dynamic storytelling and world-building into the hands of anyone with a vision. In this overview, Olivio Sarikas explore how Runway AI is reshaping the gaming landscape, offering tools that allow creators to generate rich, interactive worlds in mere moments. From adaptive narratives that respond to player choices to AI-driven characters with evolving motivations, this platform is more than a shortcut—it's a gateway to endless creative possibilities. Whether you're an aspiring game designer or a seasoned developer, Runway AI promises to make your imagination the only limit. But how does it work, and what does this mean for the future of gaming? Let's unravel the potential of this new technology. Runway AI Game Design Core Features of Runway AI Runway AI simplifies the process of game creation by transforming your ideas into fully realized, interactive game worlds. Its core features include: World Building: Simply describe your vision—whether it's a sprawling dystopian metropolis, an enchanted forest, or an alien planet—and the platform generates a detailed, visually stunning environment to match your imagination. Simply describe your vision—whether it's a sprawling dystopian metropolis, an enchanted forest, or an alien planet—and the platform generates a detailed, visually stunning environment to match your imagination. Customization: Tailor every aspect of your game, from art style and gameplay mechanics to genre and tone, making sure the final product aligns with your creative goals. Tailor every aspect of your game, from art style and gameplay mechanics to genre and tone, making sure the final product aligns with your creative goals. No-Code Development: By eliminating the need for programming skills, Runway AI allows anyone with an idea to bring it to life, making game design more inclusive and accessible. This approach provide widespread access tos game development, making sure that creativity takes center stage, while technical expertise becomes secondary. Dynamic Storytelling: Evolving Narratives in Real-Time One of Runway AI's standout features is its ability to create dynamic, adaptive storylines that evolve in real-time based on player interactions. This ensures that no two playthroughs are ever the same. Key storytelling capabilities include: Character Depth: AI-generated characters come with rich backstories, unique motivations, and the ability to evolve based on your decisions, creating a sense of realism and emotional engagement. AI-generated characters come with rich backstories, unique motivations, and the ability to evolve based on your decisions, creating a sense of realism and emotional engagement. Interactive Narratives: Your choices directly influence the storyline, shaping the game world in unpredictable and personalized ways. For instance, a character's loyalty might shift depending on how you interact with them, or the overarching plot could take a completely different direction based on your decisions. This level of responsiveness keeps players engaged and ensures a fresh experience with every session. How Runway AI Makes Game Worlds In Seconds Watch this video on YouTube. Browse through more resources below from our in-depth content covering more areas on AI game development. Enhanced Gameplay and Immersive Interactivity Runway AI improves gameplay by tailoring it to your preferences and playstyle, creating a deeply immersive experience. Key gameplay enhancements include: AI-Driven NPCs: Interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) that respond dynamically to your actions, making the game world feel alive and reactive. Interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) that respond dynamically to your actions, making the game world feel alive and reactive. Personalized Gameplay: The platform tracks your progress, preferences, and behavior, adapting challenges, quests, and storylines to suit your unique playstyle. The platform tracks your progress, preferences, and behavior, adapting challenges, quests, and storylines to suit your unique playstyle. Dynamic Environments: Game worlds evolve in response to your decisions, creating a sense of unpredictability and immersion. Whether you're solving intricate puzzles, managing resources, or navigating complex storylines, Runway AI ensures that every aspect of the game feels tailored to you, enhancing both engagement and replayability. Fostering Creativity and Collaboration Runway AI is not just a tool for individual creators; it also serves as a platform for collaboration and community building. It encourages users to connect, share, and inspire one another through features such as: Exploring User-Created Games: Play and learn from games designed by other users, gaining fresh perspectives and inspiration for your own projects. Play and learn from games designed by other users, gaining fresh perspectives and inspiration for your own projects. Collaborative Creation: Work with other creators to share ideas, strategies, and feedback, fostering a sense of community and shared innovation. Work with other creators to share ideas, strategies, and feedback, fostering a sense of community and shared innovation. Participating in a Creative Ecosystem: Contribute to a growing network of gamers and developers, enriching the platform's overall experience and potential. This collaborative environment not only enhances the creative process but also positions Runway AI as a hub for innovation and shared creativity. Expanding the Boundaries of Gaming Runway AI's applications extend far beyond traditional gaming, offering tools that can be used in a variety of creative and interactive contexts. These include: Creating Rich Lore: Generate detailed histories, world events, and character backstories to deepen the immersion and complexity of your game world. Generate detailed histories, world events, and character backstories to deepen the immersion and complexity of your game world. Interactive Streaming: Integrate with live-streaming platforms, allowing audiences to influence game elements in real-time, creating a participatory experience. Integrate with live-streaming platforms, allowing audiences to influence game elements in real-time, creating a participatory experience. Collaborative Storytelling: Engage players and viewers in shaping the narrative, making gaming a more interactive and communal activity. These features push the boundaries of what games can achieve, opening up new opportunities for storytelling, audience engagement, and creative expression. Examples of Unique Gameplay Scenarios The versatility of Runway AI is evident in the diverse gameplay scenarios it can generate. Imagine: Surviving on an Alien Planet: Navigate a hostile, ever-changing environment where your decisions shape the challenges you face. Navigate a hostile, ever-changing environment where your decisions shape the challenges you face. Ghost-Hunting Adventures: Solve AI-generated mysteries with evolving clues, unexpected twists, and dynamic interactions. Solve AI-generated mysteries with evolving clues, unexpected twists, and dynamic interactions. Dynamic Role-Playing: Assume character roles with unique abilities and backstories, influencing the game world in meaningful and unpredictable ways. Each scenario is designed to feel fresh, engaging, and deeply immersive, making sure that every playthrough offers a unique and memorable experience. The Future of AI in Game Development As artificial intelligence continues to advance, platforms like Runway AI are set to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the gaming industry. Potential advancements on the horizon include: Enhanced Visuals: Improved graphics and animations that bring game worlds to life with greater realism and detail. Improved graphics and animations that bring game worlds to life with greater realism and detail. Complex Narratives: Deeper, more intricate storylines that respond intuitively to player input, offering unparalleled levels of immersion. Deeper, more intricate storylines that respond intuitively to player input, offering unparalleled levels of immersion. Greater Responsiveness: AI systems that adapt even more seamlessly to player actions, preferences, and behaviors. These developments promise to make gaming more interactive, creative, and immersive than ever before, further blurring the lines between player and creator. Empowering the Next Generation of Creators Runway AI represents a significant leap forward in game development, providing tools that empower users to create dynamic, personalized game worlds. By removing technical barriers and fostering creativity, it makes game design accessible to everyone, regardless of their experience level. Whether you're crafting a sprawling fantasy epic or a small, intimate story, Runway AI equips you with the resources to bring your vision to life. As AI technology continues to evolve, the platform's potential will only grow, paving the way for a new era of gaming innovation. Media Credit: Olivio Sarikas Filed Under: AI, Gaming News, Top News Latest Geeky Gadgets Deals Disclosure: Some of our articles include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, Geeky Gadgets may earn an affiliate commission. Learn about our Disclosure Policy.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘You're stealing my identity!': the movie voiceover artists going to war with AI
When Julia Roberts gets in Richard Gere's Lotus Esprit as it stutters along Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990 film Pretty Woman, Germans heard Daniela Hoffmann, not Roberts, exclaim: 'Man, this baby must corner like it's on rails!' In Spain, Mercè Montalà voiced the line, while French audiences heard it from Céline Monsarrat. In the years that followed, Hollywood's sweetheart would sound different in cinemas around the world but to native audiences she would sound the same. The voice actors would gain some notoriety in their home countries, but today, their jobs are being threatened by artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major point of dispute during the Hollywood actors' strike in 2023, when both writers and actors expressed concern that it could undermine their roles, and fought for federal legislation to protect their work. Not long after, more than 20 voice acting guilds, associations and unions formed the United Voice Artists coalition to campaign under the slogan 'Don't steal our voices'. In Germany, home to 'the Oscars of dubbing', artists warned that their jobs were at risk with the rise of films dubbed with AI trained using their voices, without their consent. 'It's war for us,' says Patrick Kuban, a voice actor and organiser with the dubbing union Voix Off, who along with the French Union of Performing Artists started the campaign #TouchePasMaVF ('don't touch my French version'). They want to see dubbing added to France's l'exception culturelle, a government policy that defines cultural goods as part of national identity and needing special protection from the state. Dubbing isn't just a case of translating a film into native languages, explains Kuban, it's adapted 'to the French humour, to include references, culture and emotion'. As a result, AI could put an estimated 12,500 jobs at risk in France: including writers, translators, sound engineers, as well as the voice actors themselves, according to a study by the Audiens Group in 2023. 'Humans are able to bring to [these roles]: experience, trauma and emotion, context and background and relationships,' adds Tim Friedlander, a US-based voice actor, studio owner, musician, and president of the National Association of Voice Actors. 'All of the things that we as humans connect with. You can have a voice that sounds angry, but if it doesn't feel angry, you're going to have a disconnect in there.' Since the introduction of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has grown to be an industry worth more than $4.04bn (£2.96bn) globally. It was first adopted in Europe by authoritarian leaders, who wanted to remove negative references to their governments and promote their languages. Mussolini banned foreign languages in movies entirely, a policy that catalysed a preference for dubbed rather than subtitled films in the country. Today, 61% of German viewers and 54% of French ones also opt for dubbed movies, while Disney dubs their productions into more than 46 languages. But with the development of AI, who profits from dubbing could soon change. Earlier this year, the UK-based startup ElevenLabs announced plans to clone the voice of Alain Dorval – the 'voix de Stallone', who from the 1970s onwards gave voice to Sylvester Stallone in some 30 films – in a new thriller, Armor, on Amazon. At the time, contracts did not state how an actor's voice could be re-used: including to train AI software and create synthetic voices that ultimately could replace voice actors entirely. 'It's a kind of monster,' says Kuban. 'If we don't have protection, all kinds of jobs will be lost: after the movie industry, it will be the media industry, the music industry, all the cultural industries, and a society without culture will not be very good.' When ChatGPT and ElevenLabs hit the market at the start of 2022, making AI a public-facing technology, 'it was a theoretical threat, but not an immediate threat', says Friedlander. But as the market has grown, including the release of the Israeli startup Deepdub, an AI-powered platform that offers dubbing and voiceover services for films, the problems with synthetic voice technologies have become impossible to ignore. 'If you steal my voice, you are stealing my identity,' says Daniele Giuliani, who voiced Jon Snow in the Game of Thrones, and works as a dubbing director. He is the president of the Italian dubbers' association, ANAD, which recently fought for AI clauses in national contracts to protect voice actors from the indiscriminate and unauthorised use of their voices, and to prohibit the use of those voices in machine learning and deep data mining – a proposal that's being used as a model in Spain. 'This is very serious. I don't want my voice to be used to say whatever someone wants.' AI's tentacles have had a global reach too. In India, where 72% of viewers prefer watching content in a different language, Sanket Mhatre, who voices Ryan Reynolds in the 2011 superhero film Green Lantern is concerned: 'We've been signing contracts for donkey's years now and most of these contracts have really big language about your voice being used in all perpetuity anywhere in the world,' says Mhatre. 'Now with AI, signing something like this is essentially just signing away your career.' Mhatre dubs more than 70-100 Hollywood movies into Hindi each year, as well as Chinese, Spanish, French films; web series, animated shows, anime, documentaries and audiobooks. 'Every single day, I retell stories from some part of the world for the people of my country in their language, in their voice. It's special,' he says. 'It's such an inclusive exercise. In India, if you're not somebody who speaks English, it's very easy to be knocked down and feel inferior. But when you are able to dub this cinema into Hindi, people now understand that cinema and can discuss it.' He's noticed a decline in the number of jobs dubbing corporate copy, training videos, and other quick turnaround information-led items, but he thinks his job is safe at the moment as it's impossible for AI to adapt to cultural nuances or act with human emotion. 'If the actor's face is not visible on screen, or if you're just seeing their back, in India, we might attempt to add an expression or a line to clarify the scene or provide more context.' When there are references to time travel movies in a sci-fi film, he explains, a dubber might list Bollywood titles instead. But as AI learns more from voice actors and other humans, Mhatre is aware that it is a whole lot quicker and cheaper for companies to adopt this technology rather than hire dubbing actors, translators, and sound engineers. 'We need to stand against the robots,' says Kuban. 'We need to use them for peaceful things, for maybe climate change or things like that, but we need to have actors on the screen.'
