Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 57
November 14, 2017
‘Wonder Woman 2’ Moved Up to November 2019
Warner Bros. has moved up Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman 2” six weeks to Nov. 1, 2019, from Dec. 13, 2019.
The studio made the announcement Monday. Patty Jenkins is returning to direct. It’s the first title to land on Nov. 1, 2019. The new date also places “Wonder Woman 2” seven weeks away — rather than a single week — from Disney-Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: Episode IX,” which opens on Dec. 20, 2019. The new Nov. 1, 2019, date is a week before the opening of the 25th James Bond movie.
“Wonder Woman” was a massive hit for Warners with $412 million in domestic grosses and $409 million internationally.
“Wonder Woman” is the fourth installment in the studio’s DC Extended Universe, which launched with 2013’s “Man of Steel” with an opening weekend of $116.6 million, followed by last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” with $166 million, and “Suicide Squad” with $133.6 million. “Wonder Woman,” made for about $150 million, is critically acclaimed, with a 92% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“Wonder Woman” opened with $103 million in North America on June 2-4, but has outperformed the other titles to become the 20th highest domestic grosser of all time. It’s the second-highest-grossing 2017 title after “Beauty and the Beast.”
The New York Post reported on Nov. 11 that Gadot was refusing to do the sequel unless Brett Ratner’s production company was not involved but Warner Bros. has said the story is “false.” RatPac had been a financier on “Wonder Woman” but Warner Bros. severed ties with Ratner on Nov. 1 following revelations of multiple cases of sexual harassment by the filmmaker.
In 2013, Warner Bros. signed a $450-million passive co-financing deal with RatPac Entertainment, of which Ratner is CEO. That deal expires in March 2018, making the involvement of RatPac a moot point. There are five more films that RatPac helped finance but “Wonder Woman 2” is not one of those films.
Source:
‘Wonder Woman 2’ Moved Up to November 2019
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November 13, 2017
‘THE CROW REBORN’ IS ABOUT TO START FILMING, SO PREPARE TO GET PSYCHED
We’ve been hearing about an upcoming reboot of The Crow for nearly a decade. The last we heard: Aquaman and Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa had signed on to play the titular role, and production was slated for January 2017.
At last, it’s actually happening.
Momoa just made a cryptic confirmation that production on The Crow Reborn would begin soon on Instagram.
“I’ve been waiting for sooooo long. @corinhardy let’s do this brother aloha,” he captioned an image of some badass fan art.
Corin Hardy is a British film director who made his debut with the acclaimed 2015 horror film The Hallow. That’s a solid track record for a director about to tackle The Crow, a dark fantasy film about a man who is brought back to life after he and his fiancée are murdered and sets out on a quest for revenge.
The 1994 original film, based on a comic, became an instant classic and immortalized star Brandon Lee, who was killed on the shoot in an incident involving a prop gun. The movie was completed through the use of CGI and body doubles.
Source:
https://www.maxim.com/entertainment/jason-momoa-crow-reboot-teased-instagram-2017-11
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Sony Developing Spider-Man Spinoff About Morbius the Living Vampire
Marvel’s Morbius the Living Vampire is getting his own movie, which is being developed by Sony as part of its Spider-Man spinoff universe.
THR reports that Power Rangers movie writers Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama are handling the script, which has already been submitted to Sony after a secret development process. Sharpless and Sazama also have some supernatural action films under their collective belts; although, since those films are Dracula Untold, The Last Witch Hunter and Gods of Egypt, Marvel fans may not be too thrilled with having them on board.
We here at Comicbook.com recently wrote about 5 Marvel Horror Movies worth making (following the example of Fox’s New Mutants), and here’s what we had to say:
“Morbius is, in a lot of ways, like Doctor Strange: a brash and talented doctor searches for a cure to his affliction, and ends up stumbling into a entire new reality he never knew existed. The main difference is that the Doctor Strange movie transported Marvel movie fans into the metaphysical worlds of “magic” and multiverse theory; Morbius would take a normal man on a journey into a frightening world of the occult, while also providing a great “man vs. his savage nature” thematic arc that has been sorely missing from the modern vampire genre. The crossover potential with characters like Blade, Ghost Rider, or the Darkhold Redeemers also makes this a good pick.”
If you’re not familiar with the character: Morbius “The Living Vampire” is actually biochemist Michael Morbius, who tried to cure himself of a rare blood disease, but instead infected himself with a form of quasi-vampirism, which include both the power (strength, speed, flight) and weaknesses (bloodlust, aversion to light) of a vampire. He was originally a villain who battled characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men, always searching for a cure to his disease, but he eventually became an anti-hero who fed on the blood of the guilty.
Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff universe is steadily shaping up to be a much darker and edgier brand, which will kick-off with Tom Hardy’s Venom movie, and continue with the crime-heist action flick, Silver & Black, featuring Silver Sable and Black Cat.
No word yet on a release date for Morbius, or any casting or director candidates. We’ll keep you updated.
Source:
http://comicbook.com/marvel/2017/11/13/thor-ragnarok-korg-best-moments/
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With immigrants targeted, U.S. farms look to automation
The Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants has hit the U.S. agricultural sector rather hard, especially when seven out of 10 farm workers are undocumented. Rather than fight this policy, many farms are looking to automation and robotics.
“I get calls on a daily basis and it typically starts with, ‘I don’t want to deal with this labor headache anymore’,” Steve Fried, the sales manager for Lely North America, which makes robotic dairy milking and feeding systems tells Reuters.
The administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration has resulted in an increase in arrests and tougher border enforcement, and in turn, has created problems for farmers. There has also been legislation introduced in Congress that would require all employers to check social security numbers against federal databases to ensure their workers are in the country legally. This has been voluntary in the past.
Sadly, this policy change, along with possible tax, trade and environmental changes being considered, has put the agricultural sector in a bind. Commodity prices are at historic lows, and many farmers are continuing to experience net operating losses and mounting debt.
A study in 2014 by the Pew Research Center showed 26 percent, or one in four, of all U.S. farmworkers, were in the country illegally. And more recently, the Federation for American Immigration Reform has estimated that stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws could drive up labor costs by as much as 12 percent.
The industry being forced into technology
This get-tough approach “has created a great deal of anxiety,” said Tom Vilsack, chief executive of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, who was U.S. Agriculture Secretary for eight years under President Barack Obama.
Monitoring a crop using the Internet of Things.
Kakaxi
With new governmental directives, a slipping commodity market, questions over trade agreements and an aging workforce, the agricultural sector is being forced to embrace new technologies in order to survive. And this includes not only farmers but the food companies in the supply chain.
Dairy farmers are being encouraged to buy robots to milk their cows, Poultry companies are streamlining processing and automation is now being seen in crop production and harvesting. Soon, harvesting romaine lettuce by hand will be a thing of the past.
“You’d be a fool to not have a plan that moves you that way,” said Duff Bevill, who owns a vineyard management company in Sonoma County, California.
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Agriculture drone in acrtion.
Ipsos
Futuristic technology for the agriculture industry
Energias Market Research released their Global Agriculture Robots report on November 6, 2017, noting that the global market in agriculture robotics was $1,030.4 million in 2016, and is expected to reach USD $4,721.1 million by 2023. North America accounts for the major market share and is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period.
The report also notes the main drivers in the growth of agricultural robotics is due to three main forces — Increasing population, growing food consumption and the decrease in agriculture labor worldwide. In 2016, driverless Tractors held the major market share of the global agriculture robots market. Field Farming is the largest segment of global agriculture robots market in 2016.
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AI will obliterate half of all jobs, starting with white collar, says ex-Google China president
The upcoming worldwide workforce reckoning that artificial intelligence is expected to bring will happen much sooner than many experts predict, the former president of Google China told CNBC on Monday.
Kai-Fu Lee, now chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, believes that about half of all jobs will disappear over the next decade and be replaced with AI and the next generation of robots in the fastest period of disruption in history.
“AI, at the same time, will be a replacement for blue collar and white collar jobs,” said Lee, a renowned Chinese technologist and investor who held positions at Apple and Microsoft in addition to Alphabet’s Google. But white collar jobs will go first, he warned.
“The white collar jobs are easier to take because they’re pure a quantitative analytical process. Reporters, traders, telemarketing, telesales, customer service, [and] analysts, there can all be replaced by a software,” he explained on “Squawk Box.” “To do blue collar, some of work requires hand-eye coordination, things that machines are not yet good enough to do.”
“The white collar jobs are easier to take because they’re pure a quantitative analytical process”-Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures
Lee knocked down an argument that the jobs lost will create new ones to service and program AI and robots. “Robots are clearly replacing people jobs. They’re working 24 by 7. They are more efficient. They need some programming. But one programer can program 10,000 robots.”
Besides taking jobs beyond factory floors, robots and AI are already starting to takeover some of the mundane tasks around people’s homes. Lee pointed to the Amazon Echo as an example.
“The robots don’t have to be anthropomorphized. They can just be an appliance,” he said. “The car that has autonomous driving is not going to have a humanoid person [driving]. It’s just going to be without a steering wheel.”
Lee said that while economic growth “will go dramatically up because AI can do so many things so much more faster” than humans, it’ll force everyone to rethink the practical and social impact of fewer jobs. “If a lot of people will find happiness without working, that would be a happy outcome.”
But in a Washington Post op-ed last month, Lee argued against universal basic income, the idea of governments providing a steady stipend to help each citizen make ends meet regardless of need, employment status, or skill level. UBI is being bandied about as a possible solution to an economy that won’t have nearly enough jobs for working-age adults.
“The optimists naively assume that UBI will be a catalyst for people to reinvent themselves professionally,” he wrote. It may work among Silicon Valley and other highly motivated entrepreneurs, he added, “but this most surely will not happen for the masses of displaced workers with obsolete skills, living in regions where job loss is exacerbated by traditional economic downturn.”
Lee sees a different plan of action. “Instead of just redistributing cash and hoping for the best … we need to retrain and adapt so that everyone can find a suitable profession.”
Some of the solutions he offered in his commentary include developing more jobs that require social skills such as social workers, therapists, teachers, and life coaches as well as encouraging people to volunteer and considering paying them.
Lee wrote, “We need to redefine the idea of work ethic for the new workforce paradigm. The importance of a job should not be solely dependent on its economic value but should also be measured by what it adds to society.”
“We should also reassess our notion that longer work hours are the best way to achieve success,” he concluded.
Source:
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Pronoun, an ebook service for writers, shuts down
Pronoun, a self-publishing service for authors, is shutting down after promising free ebook distribution for authors. The company, which raised millions in funding and ended up being sold to Macmillan announced the shutdown in an email to authors and on its website.
Two years ago Pronoun set out to create a one-of-a-kind publishing tool that truly put authors first. We believed that the power of data could be harnessed for smarter book publishing, leveling the playing field for indie authors.
We are proud of the product we built, but even more so, we’re grateful for the community of authors that made it grow. Your feedback shaped Pronoun’s development, and together we changed the way authors connect with readers.
Unfortunately, Pronoun’s story ends here.
While many challenges in indie publishing remain unsolved, Macmillan is unable to continue Pronoun’s operation in its current form. Every option was considered before making the very difficult decision to end the business.
As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account or publish a new book. Pronoun will be winding down its distribution, with an anticipated end date of January 15, 2018. Authors will still be able to log into their accounts and manage distributed books until that time.
For the next two months, our goal is to support your publishing needs through the holiday season and enable you to transition your books to other services. For more detail on how this will affect your books and payments, please refer to our FAQ.
The decision follows a long and arguably crazy mission to distribute and sell ebooks for free. The company started out as Vook, a service for creating complex and illustration-rich ebooks and slowly pivoted to its free model. Interestingly, the primary and best Pronoun feature for authors was its “free automated conversion tool that made absolutely beautiful ebooks.”
“They were nicer-looking than most ebooks made by people,” wrote Nate Hoffelder in The Digital Reader.
As the Internet moves away from the user-generated content model it will be interesting to see what other “free” content startups hit the skids.
Source:
Pronoun, an ebook service for writers, shuts down
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‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: The King and I
After two straight weeks of miserable tedium, The Walking Deadrebounds (a bit) with an episode – “Some Guy” – that gets back to one of the series’ core strengths: reducing a sprawling post-apocalyptic epic to a few pivotal moments in the lives of ordinary people. Granted, this hour is also soul-crushingly nihilistic, piling personal pain and loss onto the show’s last remaining upbeat character. But hey … at least it’s exciting while it lasts.
Longtime Walking Dead editor Dan Liu makes his directorial debut here, working from a script credited to David Leslie Johnson, and the first-timer leaves his stamp in the opening minutes, which contain one hell of a jump-cut. He begins with a flashback to King Ezekiel suiting up alone in his room on the morning of the allies’ current multi-pronged attack, followed by a look back at the monarch’s rousing message to his troops about the difficulties they’re going to face. It’s all punctuated by his reassuring catch-phrase: “And yet I smile!” Then, when the crowd’s frenzy is at a peak, an overhead shot of pumped-up Kingdom forces slams right into a similar image of their corpses, freshly mowed-down by the enemy’s machine guns.
The rest of the chapter covers the frantic minutes and hours immediately after that ambush, seen at the end of last week’s episode, “Monsters.” The king scrambles to avoid being eaten by his own zombified subjects, and briefly gets captured by an unnamed Savior before our regent’s hulking bodyguard Jerry cleaves the creep in two with a battle-axe. Meanwhile, Carol does her best ninja impression, sneaking into the enemy compound to complete the original mission of seizing those devastatingly destructive guns before they’re transferred to the Sanctuary.
All of this works fairly well on a “blazing combat” level. Ezekiel’s desperate escape from certain death is suitably white-knuckle. Carol looks cool sneaking around corners and dodging bullets, outsmarting the Saviors. There’s even a thrilling and unexpected last-minute chase sequence, as Rick and Daryl rush in like the calvary, tailing the bad guys (and their weapons) down the twists and turns of the nearby highway. Rick zooms around walkers in his jeep, then pulls an Indiana Jones, leaping from his vehicle into the truck containing the crucial armaments. Everybody watching at home cheers.
True, nitpickers could raise a few beefs with the thrilling business above. Would Rick and Daryl really be able to avoid getting hit by the hail of gunfire aimed directly at them during their high-speed pursuit? Probably not. Doesn’t it seem like Carol keeps getting uncommonlylucky as she scrambles into ceiling crawl-spaces and ducks behind conveniently placed vehicles and boxes? Yes. Yes, it does. And why oh why, with hordes of the undead shambling behind them, does Ezekiel’s captor stop to give him a little mocking lecture? Best not to think about that too hard.
These are all forgivable lapses, however, and all attributable to the usual dramatic license of a pulpy action-adventure. The bigger problem with “Some Guy” is implied by its title. This is an episode all about King Ezekiel – who he was, who he became, who he tries to be. And apparently, it’s his turn to become the cool, likable Walking Deadcharacter who receives an overdue comeuppance. Given that there aren’t that many heroes left on this show who aren’t terminally mopey and wracked with self-doubt, the prospect of facing countless weeks ahead with a humbled king is more than a little depressing.
Making matters worse, there’s a moment late in this story where it seems like the writers are going to let Ezekiel off the hook. He’s in abject despair, because so many people followed him to their doom, and then Carol and Jerry try to encourage him to keep going. After all, his pretending to be a king saved a lot of lives, and gave so many a renewed sense of purpose. He can still reign.
But just then, the big cat Shiva shows up, and gets devoured by zombies. So not only has Ezekiel lost his swagger, the show’s just lost its resident tiger.
As readers of the original comics will undoubtedly note, this turn of events comes straight from The Walking Dead‘s creator Robert Kirkman. But the TV version of this saga hasn’t always treated the printed page as sacrosanct. In the books, Ezekiel has an affair with Michonne, for example. And Carol and Morgan are long-dead by this point (the latter after also having had an affair with Michonne). The bigger question then is: What has the show given up with this latest development? And what does it gain in return?
The answer to the former is simple: Before this week, viewers could tune in and hope that amid all the despair, we still might get to hang out for a few minutes with an awesome, benevolent leader and his badass pet. That’s gone now. Are we going to get anything out of Ezekiel’s upcoming long wallow that we haven’t already gotten from, oh, Rick, Carl, Michonne, Carol, Daryl, Morgan … and every other Walking Dead character who’s been smacked hard in the face and then cowered in a corner for half a season or more?
Don’t misunderstand. This episode is taut, well-staged, nail-biting, and heart-breaking – all things that a TV-watcher could and should want. But it also ends in a place that may leave even die-hard fans wondering if this show has anything remaining to look forward to. And there’s still such a long, long way to go.
Source:
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/recaps/the-walking-dead-recap-the-king-and-i-w511315
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November 12, 2017
November 10, 2017
New Stars Wars and Marvel TV shows planned for Disney’s streaming service
During today’s quarterly financial call for the Walt Disney Company, CEO Bob Iger announced that The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson will be helming his own Star Warstrilogy. But that isn’t all: Disney also plans to create a live-action Star Wars television show for its upcoming online streaming service.
There are no details on what this show might be about. But according to Variety, Iger also revealed that Disney is currently working on shows based on Monsters Inc., High School Musical, as well as a new series from Marvel. The streaming service is expected to launch in 2019.
Historically, Lucasfilm has used television as a way to expand the Star Wars universe with animated shows. The Clone Wars, which was set between Episode II: Attack of the Clonesand Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, ran from 2008 through 2015, while the currently-running Star Wars Rebels first debuted in 2014 on Disney XD. There have also been consistent rumors that a third animated show was also in the works.
As streaming services like Netflix have taken off, various entertainment conglomerates have branched off to form their own independent online channels. Disney announced in August that it was cutting ties with Netflix to create its own service. While Disney has its own massive catalog of content to use for such a site, numerous streaming services have begun to create their own original content to help entice new subscribers to their platforms. CBS launched Star Trek: Discovery on its All Access platform this fall, while MGM is filming its own Stargate prequel show, Origins, for its Stargate Command platform. Disney creating its own ongoing content makes sense considering that it will be fighting for attention in an already-crowded field of streaming sources. New Star Wars content will almost certainly get that attention.
If Disney can pull off this project, it’ll accomplish something that has long eluded the franchise: a live-action show. Lucasfilm has developed various concepts for a standalone show in the Star Wars universe for years. In 2005, George Lucas announced a show at the Celebration III convention, saying it would be set in the underworld of the city planet Coruscant. Various writers and artists were brought on to flesh out the idea, but it was ultimately abandoned in 2010 due to concerns about the show’s budget.
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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia
A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week, and legendary coder Bram Cohen wants to fix that. And considering he invented the ubiquitous peer-to-peer file transfer protocol BitTorrent, you should take him seriously.
Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.
“The idea is to make a better bitcoin, to fix the centralization problems” Cohen tells me. The two main issues he sees in bitcoin are in environmental impact and the instability that arises from the few bitcoin miners with the cheapest access to electricity exerting outsized influence.
Chia aims to solve both.
Bitcoin uses proofs of work to verify the blockchain. That’s because it’s prohibitively expensive to make a fake blockchain as it wouldn’t have as much work demonstrated as the real one. But over time that’s given a massive advantage in collecting the incentives for mining bitcoin to those who operate close to low-cost electricity and naturally chill air to cool the mining rigs.
Chia instead relies on proofs of space in file storage, which people often already have and can use for no additional cost. It combines this with proofs of time that disarm a wide array of attacks to which proofs of space are susceptible.
“I’m not the first person to come up with this idea,” says Cohen, but actually implementing requires the kind of advanced computer science he specializes in.
After inventing torrenting in the early 2000s and briefly working on Steam for Valve, Cohen had been at BitTorrent building a new protocol for peer-to-peer live video transfer. But mismanagement on the business side caused the company to implode. Now it’s limping along, and Cohen says “it doesn’t need me day-to-day.” So while he’s still on the board, he left in early August to start Chia Network.
Cohen has teamed up with early bitcoin exchange Tradehill’s COO Ryan Singer and they’ve raised a seed round for Chia to ramp up hiring. Cohen wouldn’t say how much it had raised, laughing that, “I’m not sure how much we want to announce right now, but it was a very hot round.” The goal is do some early sales of Chia in Q2 2018, with a full launch of its cryptocurrency by the end of 2018, though Cohen says that’s a stretch goal.
Cohen is a brilliant technologist, but it will take more than that to convince people to switch over from bitcoin to Chia. He tells me the plan for Chia is “do some smarter things about its legal status and do a bunch of technical fixes that you can do when starting from scratch.”
It’s too early to guess how this will all play out, but at least someone is trying to address the ecological impact of cryptocurrency instead of just complaining about it. Cohen seems excited though. “It’s technically ambitious and there’s a big meaty chunk of work to do. I’ve done enough raising money and recruiting. Now for the real work.”
Source:
BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia
