An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The trailer for "Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food" promised a sunny if melodramatic story of uplift in a south Indian temple town. A priest's daughter enters a cooking tournament, but social obstacles complicate her inevitable rise to the top. Annapoorani's father, a Brahmin sitting at the top of Hindu society's caste ladder, doesn't want her to cook meat, a taboo in their lineage. There is even the hint of a Hindu-Muslim romantic subplot. On Thursday, two weeks after the movie premiered, Netflix abruptly pulled it from its platform. An activist, Ramesh Solanki, a self-described "very proud Hindu Indian nationalist," had filed a police complaint arguing that the film was "intentionally released to hurt Hindu sentiments." He said it mocked Hinduism by "depicting our gods consuming nonvegetarian food."

The production studio quickly responded with an abject letter to a right-wing group linked to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apologizing for having "hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindus and Brahmins community." The movie was soon removed from Netflix both in India and around the world, demonstrating the newfound power of Hindu nationalists to affect how Indian society is depicted on the screen. Nilesh Krishnaa, the movie's writer and director, tried to anticipate the possibility of offending some of his fellow Indians. Food, Brahminical customs and especially Hindu-Muslim relations are all part of a third rail that has grown more powerfully electrified during Mr. Modi's decade in power. But, Mr. Krishnaa told an Indian newspaper in November, "if there was something disturbing communal harmony in the film, the censor board would not have allowed it."

With "Annapoorani," Netflix appears to have in effect done the censoring itself even when the censor board did not. In other cases, Netflix now seems to be working with the board unofficially, though streaming services in India do not fall under the regulations that govern traditional Indian cinema. For years, Netflix ran unredacted versions of Indian films that had sensitive parts removed for their theatrical releases -- including political messages that contradicted the government's line. Since last year, though, the streaming versions of movies from India match the versions that were censored locally, no matter where in the world they are viewed. [...] Nikhil Pahwa, a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, thinks the streaming companies are ready to capitulate: "They're unlikely to push back against any kind of bullying or censorship, even though there is no law in India" to force them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: SAG-AFTRA signed a deal on Tuesday with an AI voiceover studio that sets terms for the use of artificial intelligence in video games. The union announced the deal with Replica Studios on Tuesday at CES in Las Vegas. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's executive director, said that the terms include informed consent for the use of AI to create digital voice replicas, as well as requirements for the safe storage of digital assets. At a press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said the union wants to channel emerging technology to benefit performers -- rather than trying to stand in the way. "These are the kind of terms that producers can agree to without disrupting their ability to make content," Crabtree-Ireland said. "This is an evolutionary step forward. AI technology is not something we can block. It's not something we can stop. That's not a tactic or a strategy that's ever worked for labor in the past."

AI was a major issue in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. The union ultimately reached a deal with the major studios -- represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers -- that established consent and compensation requirements for the use of AI to replicate actors' likenesses. The deal did not block studios from training AI systems to create "synthetic" actors that bear no resemblance to real performers. SAG-AFTRA is now engaged in a similar negotiation with a coalition of major video game studios. The union has obtained a strike authorization vote, though talks continue. Crabtree-Ireland said that agreement with Replica Studios could help spur those discussions.

Replica Studios launched its AI platform in 2019. The company sells AI voices to video game developers from its library of "ethically licensed" voices. Last year, the company announced a new iteration of "Smart NPCs" -- non-playable characters -- that could use OpenAI or other language models to interact with video game players. Crabtree-Ireland said the agreement will open up new employment opportunities for voiceover performers who want to license their voices for use in video games. The deal pertains only to "digital replicas" -- using AI to re-create the voice of a real performer, living or dead. It does not apply to AI training to create synthetic performances.

smooth wombat writes: The advent of streaming services heralded a new era of movie watching. No longer tied to an inconvenient time at a theater, movies could now be watched at your convenience any time of the day or night in your own home. However, with that convenience comes a sinister side: those same movies disappearing from streaming services. Once the movie is removed from the streaming service you can't watch it again. As a result, more people, particularly younger people, are buying DVDs, and even records, to preserve their ability to watch and listen to what they want when they want. Before his release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan encouraged fans to embrace "a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you". From the BBC article:

Other directors have chimed in to sing the praises of physical media. James Cameron told Variety:"The streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is 'I'm going to buy it, and I'm going to watch it any time I want.'" Guillermo del Toro posted on X that "If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come." His tweet prompted people to reply, sharing evidence of their vast DVD collections. [...]

David Batty reports via The Guardian: [Andrew Scott], best known as Fleabag's "hot priest," has revealed he halted the renowned soliloquy in Shakespeare's play when an audience member took out a laptop to send emails. The actor decided not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous theatre etiquette during his run in the 2017 production of Hamlet at London's Almeida theatre, for which he earned an Olivier nomination. Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was "no way" he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away.

"When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop -- not his phone, his laptop -- while I was in the middle of 'To be or not to fucking be'" said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails. "I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, 'Get on with it' and I was like, 'There's no way.' I stopped for ages." A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped. "He had absolutely no doubts," added Scott, who was on the podcast to promote his current film All of Us Strangers.

An issue with Sony's projectors caused theater chain Alamo Drafthouse to close theaters entirely on New Year's Eve. "As of New Year's Day, however, most theaters and most showtimes now appear to be available, with a few exceptions," reports The Verge. From the report: It's not clear what happened. As New Year's Day is a holiday, we somewhat understandably haven't yet been able to reach Alamo or Sony spokespeople, and not every theater or every screening was affected. That didn't stop Alamo from blaming its Sony projectors for what at least one theater called a "nationwide" outage, however.

"Due to nation-wide technical difficulties with Sony, we aren't able to play any titles today," read part of a taped paper sign hanging inside a Woodbury, Minnesota location. That apparently didn't keep the customer who took a picture of that sign from watching The Apartment at that very same location, though: "When we went to our seats, the wait staff let us know that despite the fact that the previews were playing, we wouldn't know until the movie actually started whether we could see the film or not. If it didn't work, the screen would just turn black. Luckily, the film went through without a hitch."

What might have only affected some screenings at some theaters? I've seen speculation on Reddit that it may have something to do with expired digital certificates used to unlock encrypted films, but we haven't heard that from Alamo or Sony. We're looking forward to finding out. Longtime Slashdot reader innocent_white_lamb suggests that "[a] cryptographic key used to master all movies distributed by Deluxe" was the culprit after it expired on December 30. "This means that almost all Hollywood movies will no longer play on many commercial cinema servers. In particular, many showings of Wonka and Aquaman had to be cancelled due to the expired encryption key." From their submitted story: Deluxe and the movie companies have been frantically trying to remaster and send out revised versions of current movies over the past few days. Nobody knows what will happen to older movie titles since everything mastered by Deluxe since 2011 may be affected and may need to be remastered if it is to be shown in movie theaters again. There are at least four separate threads discussing this matter on Film-Tech.com, notes innocent_white_lamb.

reg writes: Twenty-five years ago today, CmdrTaco innocently posted a story entitled "Collection of Fun Video Clips" in the days of T1 lines and invited anyone with the bandwidth to check it out. Even though the term "Slashdot Effect" had already been coined, this was the first time it took down a site. The site owner got a personal call from their ISP, which was later reported in the comments, where he also noted that he was writing a novella called "She Hates My Futon." Many old timers started reading that, although it's never been finished, despite having a Good Reads page, a Facebook page, and several promises that he'll complete it.

Forbes writes: "I am not sure there could have been a more ignominious end to the DCEU." Aquaman 2 opened with $27.7 million domestically, well under half the $67.8 million opening for the original Aquaman. But it's the overall box office totals that are especially dire, as the film has made just over $138.5 million worldwide. That is about 12% of Aquaman 1's final total of $1.1 billion in 2018, where it is the DCEU's highest grossing entry.

The counter to this is that it perhaps is too soon to run these numbers, as it just came out right? Well, a few extra factors to consider. It is already out in a ton of major markets, so there are relatively few potential surges that can still happen outside places like Korea and New Zealand, which can only add so much. Most importantly Aquaman 2 has already launched in China, where it made $30 million in its opening, again, far below the original's opening at $93 million there, doing even worse there than domestically, in context. Aquaman 1 went on to make $292 million in China, a figure Aquaman 2 will not come within a mile of. Next, what DC, and many blockbusters, have been doing lately are these incredibly short theatrical windows, so the clock is ticking quickly...

Of course this is not exclusive to DC, as we have an extremely direct comparison over at Marvel with The Marvels, which at a $205.6 million global gross, the final figure, that is 18% of Captain Marvel's $1.13 billion total. Aquaman 2 has the advantage of being a true sequel, not a team-up piece from other TV shows you theoretically needed to watch beforehand, but it also has the disadvantage of being the last dying gasp of the DCEU coming after a string of other high profile box office failures from Shazam 2 to Blue Beetle.

There was really no way it was going to avoid its fate, even if it did review well (which it didn't, as at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's one of the DCEU's lowest rated films).

After losing more than $5 billion in the past year, the world's largest traditional entertainment companies -- Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount -- are contemplating cuts and possible mergers to ultimately help better compete with Netflix. The Financial Times reports (via Ars Technica): Shari Redstone, Paramount's billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks. She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say. Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish also discussed a possible combination over lunch with Warner CEO David Zaslav in mid-December. In both cases the discussions were said to be at an early stage and people familiar with the talks cautioned that a deal might not materialize.

Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount's deal discussions were a reflection of the "complete and utter panic" in the industry. "TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing," he said. "Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs." But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution. "For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. "Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill." For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, "the shakeout has begun."

After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals -- most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street's expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers -- the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump. "Netflix has pulled away," says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is "how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they're not working." The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.

A recent video poked fun at the newly announced Legend of Zelda movie by referencing the checkered history of video game adaptations. However, 2023 brought critical and commercial success for games-based projects like The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros Movie, while several comic book films such as The Flash and Ant-Man 3 underperformed.

This shift comes as Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted Marvel may have oversaturated the market. While caped crusaders aren't finished yet, their golden era may be ending. Meanwhile, Mario earned over $1 billion, topping all superhero films this year. Video game movies have struggled in the past, but their time may have finally come. Wired adds: Mario's success will lead to a "deluge" of video game adaptations, argues Joost van Druenen, a New York University business professor and author of One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games. Van Dreunen reckons that superheroes are "going the way of the cowboy," referring to the shifts in Hollywood's dominant genres (think: the rise of zombies a few years back, all the Home Alone-esque family movies in the 1990s). Even a show like The Boys, he argues, with its anti-superheroes, looks like a kind of turning point, akin to the revisionist Westerns, exemplified by Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, that began to dominate the genre at the end of the '60s and into the '70s.

Provided audiences are as tired of superheroes as pundits think, video game protagonists could profitably fill the gap. They come from well-known franchises and have large, engaged fan bases -- two things studios appreciate. Cast your eyes down the development list: God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin's Creed, continued expansion on The Witcher, among others. Nintendo, which has traditionally resisted film spinoffs, is planning a movie a year; Arcane, widely considered the first title (before The Last of Us) to break the curse of such adaptations, is finally getting a second season. Amazon's forthcoming Fallout series is being helmed by the same team as Westworld. [...] Back to superheroes, artist fatigue is one under-explored factor. Inspiration is lacking. Some are undoubtedly tired of the whole enterprise, but many are just tired of poor films: And clearly, these two factors entwine.

Amazon earlier this year announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you'll start seeing them: it's January 29th. From a report: "This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time," the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to "limited advertisements."

"We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership," the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

Major streaming services test releasing children's content on YouTube and cut back on fare for kids. From a report: Netflix's share of U.S. streaming viewership by 2- to 11-year-olds fell to 21% in September from 25% two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, YouTube's share jumped to 33% from 29.4% over the same period. That reality is changing major streaming services' approach to children's entertainment, from what shows and movies they make to where they release them. Many are pulling back on investments in children's content, and some streamers have started content for young viewers on such platforms as Google-owned YouTube and Roblox.

[...] Netflix has also slimmed down its slate of animated children's originals, opting instead to rely more on third parties such as Skydance Animation, with which it just signed a multiyear deal to do animated films. Now, Netflix is focusing its youth programming resources on bigger swings, such as the animated film "Leo," starring Adam Sandler, its biggest animated debut ever in terms of views. The eight largest U.S. streamers, including Netflix, Warner's Max and Amazon Prime Video, added 53 originals catering to children and families in the first half of the year, down from 135 for the first half of 2022, according to Ampere. That represents a decrease of 61%, compared with a 31% decrease in overall originals across these streamers for the same period.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom "is headed for one of the lowest starts in the history of the DC Cinematic Universe," writes the Hollywood Reporter, "with a projected four-day Christmas weekend gross of $40 million, including $28 million for the three days."

"The sequel cost $205 million," notes Variety, "and ranks among the worst debuts of the year for a superhero movie." It's softer than November's misfire The Marvels ($47 million), which ended its run as the lowest-grossing installment in the history of Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Marvels was shocking because it was the rare MCU movie to tumble out of the gate.

By contrast, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is shaping up to be the fourth of four DC movies this year to crumble at the box office. Already in 2023, The Flash ($55 million debut), Shazam! Fury of the Gods ($30 million debut) and Blue Beetle ($25 million debut) majorly flopped in theaters.

December releases are known to start slower but enjoy staying power through the new year. That was the case with 2018's Aquaman, which opened unspectacularly to $67 million and powered to $335 million in North America (and $1.15 billion globally). However, "Aquaman 2" faces choppier waters. Beyond the minimal buzz and terrible reviews, The Lost Kingdom is the final installment before DC's new bosses, James Gunn and Peter Safran, reset the sprawling superhero universe without heroes like Jason Momoa's Arthur Curry to save the day.
A movie consultant tells Variety that superhero films should perform better in 2024 with the release of Joker 2, Venom 3 and Deadpool 3.

As for Aquaman, the Hollywood Reporter writes that "The hope now is that moviegoing will pick up in earnest once presents are unwrapped on Monday. (Hollywood studios never like it when Dec. 25 falls on a Monday since it messes with the weekend.)"

The Verge argues that, for better or worse, Aquaman 2 is the quintessential product of the DC Extended Universe: In Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom, you can plainly see just how much attention Warner Bros. has been paying to the public's response to its own unwieldy franchise of comic book adaptations and to the direction that its competitors like Disney / Marvel have been taking their projects lately. But in the wake of the entire DCEU being shuttered and set aside in favor of a hard reboot, you can also see The Lost Kingdom as a monument to everything that was great (which was not a lot) and terrible about this particular superhero movie experiment.

"Millions of Star Wars fans get nostalgia pangs during the holiday season," reports the Washington Post, "when they are accustomed to seeing broadcasts of their beloved movies.... FX, now owned by Disney, has multiple Star Wars marathons on tap this month, including a marathon on December 23 and 24." The program-planning director at Disney's Freedom channel even calls Star Wars a "Christmas-adjacent" franchise.

And now, long-time Slashdot reader H_Fisher writes... Call it a Life Day miracle, even if nobody was asking for it. YouTube historian and retro-tech enthusiast Perifractic uploaded a restored, mostly-complete 4K upscale of the "infamous" Star Wars Holiday Special to his channel on Wednesday. From the video summary: "Using Topaz Labs [Video AI] with a few other techniques we've meticulously upscaled & restored the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special to 5120x3840, with stereo elements, to the best quality the technology currently allows."

Jokingly labeling the resulting file "5K" (8K video height, but tagged "4K" by YouTube due to its original 4:3 aspect ratio), the upscaled version unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) replaces some songs and omits some segments that were flagged by YouTube's copyright watchdog.

In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning story. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that a Southern California maker of pornographic films named Strike 3 Holdings is also "a copyright troll," according to U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth: Lamberth cwrote in 2018, "Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM." He likened its litigation strategy to a "high-tech shakedown." Lamberth was not speaking off the cuff. Since September 2017, Strike 3 has filed more than 12,440 lawsuits in federal courts alleging that defendants infringed its copyrights by downloading its movies via BitTorrent, an online service on which unauthorized content can be accessed by almost anyone with a computer and internet connection.

That includes 3,311 cases the firm filed this year, more than 550 in federal courts in California. On some days, scores of filings reach federal courthouses — on Nov. 17, to select a date at random, the firm filed 60 lawsuits nationwide... Typically, they are settled for what lawyers say are cash payments in the four or five figures or are dismissed outright...

It's impossible to pinpoint the profits that can be made from this courthouse strategy. J. Curtis Edmondson, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer who is among the few who pushed back against a Strike 3 case and won, estimates that Strike 3 "pulls in about $15 million to $20 million a year from its lawsuits." That would make the cases "way more profitable than selling their product...." If only one-third of its more than 12,000 lawsuits produced settlements averaging as little as $5,000 each, the yield would come to $20 million... The volume of Strike 3 cases has increased every year — from 1,932 in 2021 to 2,879 last year and 3,311 this year.

What's really needed is a change in copyright law to bring the statutory damages down to a level that truly reflects the value of a film lost because of unauthorized downloading — not $750 or $150,000 but perhaps a few hundred dollars.
Anone of the lawsuits go to trial. Instead ISPs get a subpoena demanding the real-world address and name behind IP addresses "ostensibly used to download content from BitTorrent..." according to the article. Strike 3 will then "proceed by sending a letter implicitly threatening the subscriber with public exposure as a pornography viewer and explicitly with the statutory penalties for infringement written into federal copyright law — up to $150,000 for each example of willful infringement and from $750 to $30,0000 otherwise."

A federal judge in Connecticut wrote last year that "Given the nature of the films at issue, defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article.

For the first time, Netflix has released a comprehensive report of what people watched on the platform over a six month period. It includes hours viewed for every title, the premiere date for any Netflix show and movie, and whether a title was available globally. From the Hollywood Reporter: The list includes worldwide viewing for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all had at least 50,000 hours of viewing over those six months, encompassing about 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, vp strategy and analysis Lauren Smith told reporters during a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It is the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever made public.

Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022. The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the "view" formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists.

Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show's first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours. At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours -- barely a drop in the streamer's more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months. The full "What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report" can be downloaded here.

ScreenRant reports that on December 4, "Godzilla Minus One" was the #1 movie in the crucial U.S./Canada "domestic" market (which also includes Guam and Puerto Rico). But the next week was even more impressive, reports Forbes, retaining most of its box office figure with "an incredibly strong 90% hold across the three-day Friday-Saturday-Sunday frame, for what appears to be the best second weekend hold for a wide release in 2023." Through the week, Godzilla Minus One topped the North American charts four out of five weekdays on overwhelmingly positive word of mouth. Good buzz grew through the week as more viewers and critics saw and recommend the film... Godzilla Minus One is already the highest grossing Japanese live-action release of all time in the U.S. The film is a final contender for the Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects, and is widely expected to be one of the final official nominees.
CinemaBlend believes the movie should be nominated for this year's Best Picture award at the Oscars. With a total of 105 critical reviews (at the time of this writing), Godzilla Minus One has a Tomatometer score of 97%...

Godzilla has literally been a metaphor for the atomic bomb since the very beginning. However, Godzilla Minus One isn't as concerned with that idea. Instead, the story is all about sacrifice as well as the hope we have for future generations. It's a story of coming together and living for today, so that our children can be inspired to want to live for tomorrow. The Takashi Yamazaki-helmed feature doesn't present a story about destruction, but rather one about wanting peace and finding conducive ways to deal with trauma. I know you might not believe me if you haven't seen it yet, but the film is just as deep and "important" as Oppenheimer and, for that, it should be nominated.
They argue the movie manages to be both "a layered film" and "a popcorn flick...

"it's more than JUST a film featuring a giant reptile This one actually has something to say."

Five years after founding Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell started work on a chain of pizza restaurants with singing animatronic robots and videogames — called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre. While 600 of the restaurants still operate today, "the company is in the process of remodeling its more than 400 U.S. locations," reports the Los Angeles Times, "and the last 30 or so remaining animatronic bands are being shown the door in favor of interactive dance floors and large screens that feature Chuck E. and pals in animated form." That is, they're being evicted everywhere but Northridge, Los Angeles... The goal — or hope — for the company is to have at least one location that can serve both new generations as well as nostalgia hunters, especially fans of animatronic figures.

Animatronics have long been the stars of themed entertainment, at least as long as Disneyland has been putting mechanical creatures in its rides and shows. In the '80s and '90s, theme parks began switching to screen-based entertainment to mirror blockbuster movies, but today animatronics have been making a comeback. The recent makeover, for instance, of Disneyland's Adventureland Treehouse came with the addition of multiple animatronic figures, and Universal Studios' Super Nintendo World is full of mechanical kinetic energy from an assortment of characters. Additionally, this year's video game-inspired movie "Five Nights at Freddy's" is centered on a haunted pizzeria where the animatronics become sentient. The film is indicative of the cult fandom that has long existed around Chuck E. Cheese and its former competitor Showbizz Pizza Place, as evidenced by the documentary "The Rock-afire Explosion," which charts the pizza and animatronic band wars of the '80s...

Restaurant franchise's CEO David McKillips says the company is acknowledging not just changing technological tastes but the realities of maintaining animatronic groups, which are programmed in Texas but maintained locally. "These are decades old, and we have a dedicated technician at every single location who spends a fair amount of time making sure the animatronics are working properly," McKillips says, adding that "it's a fairly complex issue" to keep the bands up and running.
The animatronic band's final restaurant hopes to become a tourist destination offering "retro glory," according to the article. (The robots are still powered by floppy disks.) And there are fans who still fondly remember the singing robots, judging by an episode of the Simpsons where Homer hunts down the last animatronic robots that sang in a 1970s chain of pizza parlors — titled "Do Pizza Bots Dream of Electric Guitars"

Unfortunately, in the episode Homer has to compete with a reboot-minded J. J. Abrams...

Google Play Movies & TV will be replaced with Google TV on January 17, 2024. 9to5Google reports: Since the 2020 launch of the Google TV platform, that branding has replaced Play Movies & TV in areas such as mobile apps, but that's also led to the choice to do away with Play Movies & TV branding basically everywhere else. In October, that decision also made its way to Android TV, and the app has not been working ever since. Despite some confusion over the past few days, the app currently just redirects to Android TV's "Shop" tab, which has been widely available for months.

In a new post, Google explains that it will do away with the last parts of Google Play Movies & TV in January 2024: "With these changes, Google Play Movies & TV will no longer be available on Android TV devices or the Google Play website.* However, you'll still be able to access all of your previously purchased titles (including active rentals) on Android TV devices, Google TV devices, the Google TV mobile app (Android and iOS), and YouTube."

On January 17, Play Movies & TV will officially cease for good on Android TV. For anyone who does still have the app working -- again, most users cannot use the app already -- the "Shop" tab will become the only option. Similarly, Google says that Play Movies & TV will cease on other remaining platforms that same date. Any cable boxes with the app integrated will also lose it, and in turn pushed to the YouTube app for continued access to purchased content. Web access via play.google.com/movies will also go away, with youtube.com/movies becoming the alternative.

In 2024, the Pixar films that debuted on Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic years when theaters were shut down will be returning to the big screen. Those include Soul, Luca and Turning Red. Engadget reports: Soul will get a theatrical release on January 12, Turning Red will hit cinemas on February 9 and Luca will emerge on a silver screen near you on March 22. Given that these movies have been around for as long as three years, it's unlikely that they'll set the box office charts alight. But the theatrical releases mean you'll have a chance to enjoy these films as originally intended.

Rockstar Games has officially revealed the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, which is coming in 2025. You can watch it on YouTube. IGN reports: The trailer gives us a look at the game's female protagonist, a first for the series. Her name is Lucia, and that she starts off in prison -- "bad luck, I guess," she quips. The trailer confirms, too, that it's set in Vice City with a large sign - not a huge surprise for those who've been following the series, but exciting nonetheless. In addition to lots and lots of quick shots of crime, we also get glimpses of TikToks and live-streams, hinting that social media will be a big part of this game.

It all takes place as Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" plays in the background, appropriate for the many car-related crimes we see. And yes, true to the Florida setting, there are alligators in locations where they shouldn't be. It ends by showing us a little more of Lucia and a male character, seemingly both lovers and partners-in-crime. "The only way we're gonna get through this is by sticking together and being a team," Lucia says at one point. Fans have been talking about GTA 6 ever since GTA 5 was released in 2013, perhaps unsurprisingly as IGN deemed that one a "masterpiece" in our review.