"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

As reported by Bloomberg, Netflix plans to open a number of brick-and-mortar retail locations, called Netflix House, in 2025. Engadget reports: The stores will sell merchandise based on hit Netflix shows, so you can finally snag that Lincoln Lawyer coffee mug you've always dreamed of. Netflix House establishments will also offer dining and curated live experiences. To the latter point, the two initial locations are going to feature an obstacle course based on Squid Game. This seems to miss the point of the show's brutal satire of modern capitalism, but that's been par for the course since it took the world by storm back in 2021.

Netflix House will also boast rotating art installations based on hit shows and live performances to excite fans. Additionally, the in-house restaurant will serve cuisine and drinks originally featured on the streamer's many unscripted food-based reality shows. The menu will range from fast casual to high-end dining.

The first two locations should open up in the US some time in 2025, though Netflix hasn't said where, with more global outlets to come at a later date. Why the big global push? Josh Simon, the company's vice president of consumer products, told Bloomberg that its customers "love to immerse themselves in the world of our movies and TV shows, and we've been thinking a lot about how we take that to the next level." [...] The company's still finalizing details regarding menus, locations and just about everything else. It has more than a year, after all, to set up shop.

According to The Digital Bits, Best Buy will exit the physical media business as soon as the end of the first quarter of 2024. From a report: Best Buy has been phasing out DVDs from its stores, but The Digital Bits reports that Best Buy would even stop offering it on its site as well, signaling a complete break from physical media. The report noted that some studios have shifted their inventory of Blu-Ray and 4K Steelbook titles toward Amazon.

The move is another hint at the possible end of physical media as consumers gravitate towards streaming services and their extensive libraries, or digital downloads. This comes as one of the largest distributors of DVDs and Blu-Rays, Ingram Entertainment, said it was exiting the business just as Walmart is looking to take over management of Studio Distribution Services (SDS), which handles the distribution of physical media. Disney ceased selling physical media in Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here's how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps' features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab.

For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls "the personal cloud computer." The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it's the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. "Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century," he says, "when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don't own it anymore. It's just somebody else's computer." Deta wants to give it back. [...]

Deta's idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It's an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta's trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer -- and everything on it -- is yours and no one else's. Because your computer should be yours -- even if it's on somebody's server.

Sony is bringing its own movie streaming service to PlayStation consoles beginning today. From a report: Previously known as Bravia Core, the service is being rebranded to Sony Pictures Core as it arrives on the PS5 and PS4. "Once you sign up for Sony Pictures Core, you will be able to buy or rent up to 2,000 movies straight from your console," Sony's Evan Stern wrote in a blog post. "At launch, this will include blockbuster hits such as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Uncharted, The Equalizer, No Hard Feelings, Bullet Train, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, among others."

Now, you can rent or buy those movies in any number of places. If you're wondering why you'd want to use Sony's service, the answer is video fidelity. As noted on the Bravia Core website, it includes what the company calls Pure Stream, "which can stream HDR movies at up to 80Mbps -- similar to 4K UHD Blu-ray -- on a wide range of content." That is a significantly higher bitrate than anything Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Vudu, or other streamers will give you. So, if you're a stickler for picture quality and have the right TV for it, you should notice greater detail when using Pure Stream. In addition to all that, Sony also claims it has the largest collection of IMAX Enhanced films of any streaming service.

At the beginning of The Creator a narrator describes AI-powered robots that are "more human than human." From the movie site Looper: It's in reference to the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick, which was adapted into the seminal sci-fi classic, "Blade Runner." The phrase is used as the slogan for the Tyrell Corporation, which designs the androids that take on lives of their own. The saying perfectly encapsulates the themes of "Blade Runner" and, by proxy, "The Creator." If a machine of sufficient intelligence is indistinguishable from humans, then shouldn't it be considered on equal footing as humanity?
The Huffington Post calls its "the pro-AI movie we don't need right now" — but they also praise it as "one of the most astonishing sci-fi theatrical experiences this year." Variety notes the film was co-written and directed by Gareth Edwards (director of the 2014 version of Godzilla and the Star Wars prequel Rogue One), working with Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser (Dune) after the two collaborated on Rogue One. But what's unique is the way they filmed it: adding visual effects "almost improvisationally afterward.

"Achieving this meant shooting sumptuous natural landscapes in far-flung locales like Thailand or Tibet and building futuristic temples digitally in post-production..."

IndieWire gushes that "This movie looks fucking incredible. To a degree that shames most blockbusters that cost three times its budget." They call it "a sci-fi epic that should change Hollywood forever." Once audiences see how "The Creator" was shot, they'll be begging Hollywood to close the book on blockbuster cinema's ugliest and least transportive era. And once executives see how much (or how little) "The Creator" was shot for, they'll be scrambling to make good on that request as fast as they possibly can.

Say goodbye to $300 million superhero movies that have been green-screened within an inch of their lives and need to gross the GDP of Grenada just to break even, and say hello — fingers crossed — to a new age of sensibly budgeted multiplex fare that looks worlds better than most of the stuff we've been subjected to over the last 20 years while simultaneously freeing studios to spend money on the smaller features that used to keep them afloat. Can you imagine...? How ironic that such fresh hope for the future of hand-crafted multiplex entertainment should come from a film so bullish and sanguine at the thought of humanity being replaced by A.I [...]

The real reason why "The Creator" is set in Vietnam (and across large swaths of Eurasia) is so that it could be shot in Vietnam. And in Thailand. And in Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, and several other beautiful countries that are seldom used as backdrops for futuristic science-fiction stories like this one. This movie was born from the visual possibilities of interpolating "Star Wars"-like tech and "Blade Runner"-esque cyber-depression into primordially expressive landscapes. Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer's dusky and tactile cinematography soaks up every inch of what the Earth has to offer without any concession to motion capture suits or other CGI obstructions, which speaks to the truly revolutionary aspect of this production: Rather than edit the film around its special effects, Edwards reverse-engineered the special effects from a completed edit of his film... Instead of paying a fortune to recreate a flimsy simulacrum of our world on a computer, Edwards was able to shoot the vast majority of his movie on location at a fraction of the price, which lends "The Creator" a palpable sense of place that instantly grounds this story in an emotional truth that only its most derivative moments are able to undo... [D]etails poke holes in the porous border that runs between artifice and reality, and that has an unsurprisingly profound effect on a film so preoccupied with finding ghosts in the shell. Can a robot feel love? Do androids dream of electric sheep? At what point does programming blur into evolution...?

[T]he director has a classic eye for staging action, that he gives his movies room to breathe, and that he knows that the perfect "Kid A" needle-drop (the album, not the song) can do more for a story about the next iteration of "human" life than any of the tracks from Hans Zimmer's score... [T]here's some real cognitive dissonance to seeing a film that effectively asks us to root for a cuter version of ChatGPT. But Edwards and Weitz's script is fascinating for its take on a future in which people have programmed A.I. to maintain the compassion that our own species has lost somewhere along the way; a future in which technology might be a vessel for humanity rather than a replacement for it; a future in which computers might complement our movies rather than replace our cameras.

U2's inaugural performance at the opening of Las Vegas's Sphere included a generative AI video collage projected hundreds of feet into the air — showing hundreds of surreal renderings of Elvis Presley.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Time magazine: The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West's "Power" music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley's movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: "What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty...?"

While Brambilla's Elvises prance across the Sphere's screen — which is four times the size of IMAX — the band U2 will perform their song "Even Better Than The Real Thing," as part of their three-month residency at the Sphere celebrating their 1991 album Achtung Baby... Earlier this year, U2 commissioned several artists, including Brambilla and Jenny Holzer, to create visual works that would accompany their performances of specific songs. Given U2's love for the singer and the lavish setting of the Sphere, Brambilla thought a tribute to Elvis would be extremely fitting. He wanted to create a maximalist work that encapsulated both the ecstatic highs and grimy lows of not only Elvis, but the city of Las Vegas itself. "The piece is about excess, spectacle, the tipping point for the American Dream," Brambilla said in a phone interview.

Brambilla was only given three-and-a-half months to execute his vision, less than half the time that he normally spends on video collages. So he turned to AI tools for both efficiency and extravagance. "AI can exaggerate with no end; there's no limit to the density or production value," Brambilla says. And this seemed perfect for this project, because Elvis became a myth; a larger-than-life character..." Brambilla transplanted his MidJourney-created images into CG (computer graphics) software, where he could better manipulate them, and left some of the Stable Diffusion Elvis incarnations as they were. The result is a kaleidoscopic and overwhelming video collage filled with video clips both historical and AI-generated, that will soon stretch hundreds of feet above the audience at each of U2's concerts.

"I wanted to create the feeling that by the end of it," Brambilla says, "We're in a place that is so hyper-saturated and so dense with information that it's either exhilarating or terrifying, or both."
Brambilla created an exclusive video excerpting from the larger collage for TIME. The magazine reports that one of the exact prompts he entered was:

"Elvis Presley in attire inspired by the extravagance of ancient Egypt and fabled lost civilizations in a blissful state. Encircling him, a brigade of Las Vegas sorceresses, twisted and warped mid-chant, reflect the influence of Damien Hirst and Andrei Riabovitchev, creating an atmosphere of otherworldly realism, mirroring the decadence and illusion of consumption."

It's official: Netflix has shipped its last DVD. "For 25 years, we redefined how people watched films and series at home, and shared the excitement as they opened their mailboxes to our iconic red envelopes," says Netflix in a blog post. "It's the end of an era, but the DVD business built our foundation for the years to come -- giving members unprecedented choice and control, a wide variety of titles to choose from and the freedom to watch as much as they want."

Netflix announced the shut down of its DVD business in April. Here's an infographic the company shared in its post:

Two designers from New Zealand built a wildly popular social network for movie buffs. Now, they're cashing in (and sticking around for the sequel). The New York Times: The "Barbie" star Margot Robbie created an account. Ditto Rian Johnson, the "Knives Out" auteur. Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise's directing partner, has used his to heap praise on another action star (Sylvester Stallone). Letterboxd, the social network for recommending and reviewing movies, has become a kind of shibboleth for film nerds over the past decade. Roughly 10 million people now use the service to share their favorites: You like Studio Ghibli, too? What's your favorite Spike Lee joint?

The service has not undergone any revolutionary changes since it was founded in 2011. But Letterboxd is undergoing two big changes: a new owner and, eventually, user recommendations and review of TV shows. Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, Letterboxd's founders, announced on Friday that they were selling a majority stake in the service to Tiny, a public company in Victoria, British Columbia. The deal values Letterboxd at more than $50 million, said a person familiar with the sale, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential financial information.

Mr. Buchanan and Mr. von Randow, two entrepreneurs based in New Zealand, have reassurances for their users who may be afraid of what a sale could mean for their corner of the internet. First, neither co-founder is planning to leave any time soon, and both will remain shareholders. And the service itself isn't changing immediately. The proposal to incorporate TV is still in its infancy, and the founders said they did not expect that the addition would disrupt their existing products.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times' media reporter: In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending.

The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes. "It's sad when you get to the end, because it's been a big part of all of our lives for so long," Hank Breeggemann, the general manager of Netflix's DVD division, said in an interview. "But everything runs its cycle. We had a great 25-year run and changed the entertainment industry, the way people viewed movies at home."

When Netflix began mailing DVDs in 1998 — the first movie shipped was "Beetlejuice" — no one in Hollywood expected the company to eventually upend the entire entertainment industry... At its height, Netflix was the Postal Service's fifth-largest customer, operating 58 shipping facilities and 128 shuttle locations that allowed Netflix to serve 98.5 percent of its customer base with one-day delivery...

Netflix's DVD operations still serve around one million customers, many of them very loyal... To ease the backlash, Netflix is allowing its DVD customers to hold on to their final rentals.
"One hundred people at Netflix still work on the DVD side of the business, though most will soon be leaving the company."

Visual effects workers at Marvel Studios have unanimously voted to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, marking a historic milestone for the industry. Rolling Stone reports: Following the successful vote with the NLRB, Marvel's VFX union will now enter into collective bargaining negotiations with Marvel. A start date for those negotiations hasn't been announced yet. Underpinning the union drive were the poor working conditions visual effects professionals have endured on Marvel productions, including a lack of pay equity, grueling hours, understaffing, excessive requests for changes, and unfair turnaround times.

VFX crews have been a crucial part of film and TV productions since the introduction of visual effects in the first Star Wars films of the 1970s. But while many other backstage/behind-the-scenes crews and professions (such as production designers, editors, lighting, make-up, and props) have long been unionized under the IATSE umbrella, VFX workers largely remained non-union.

Rotten Tomatoes celebrated its 25th year of assigning scores to movies based on their aggregate review. Now Vulture writes that Rotten Tomatoes "can make or break" movies, "with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit". But unfortuately, the site "is also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked."

Vulture tells the story of a movie-publicity company contacting "obscure, often self-published critics" to say the film's teams "feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics" — while making undisclosed payments of $50 or more.) A critic asking if it's okay to pan the movie was informed that "super nice" critics move their bad reviews onto sites not included in Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Vulture says after bringing this to the site's attention, Rotten Tomatoes "delisted a number of the company's movies from its website and sent a warning to writers who reviewed them." But is there a larger problem? Filmmaker Paul Schrader even opines that "Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do...." A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they're more likely to boast that a film has been "Certified Fresh...."

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here's how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It's a film publicist's job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie's review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales... [I]n February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film's grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.

In studios' defense, Rotten Tomatoes' hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one's bat. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Cannes, the world's snootiest film festival, from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33 percent. "What they should've done," says Publicist No. 1, "was have simultaneous screenings in the States for critics who might've been more friendly." A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69 percent. "They had a low Rotten Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks before release, and that was deadly," says a third publicist.

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales.

On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.

A new report says that a PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews for over five years. From a report: Moviegoers, critics, and the average internet user have all used the aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes at one point or another. The website categorizes films and shows from "fresh" to "rotten," with rotten being those with lower ratings. Now it looks like the site's scores have been manipulated for more than five years. As noted by Vulture, it looks like a PR firm has manipulated movie scores on Rotten Tomatoes by paying the critics directly. This has been happening for years.

The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review. The payments, which aren't typically disclosed, are usually given to obscure critics who happen to be part of a pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. Though it's worth noting that the aggregation site's rules prohibit "Reviewing based on a financial incentive." Director Paul Schrader, also a critic, spoke out against Rotten Tomatoes which he says is part of a "broken" system. "The system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do." The site responded by delisting a variety of Bunker 15 films from their website. Furthermore, they issued a warning to any critics that reviewed them. The warning emphasizes that they do not tolerate manipulation on their platform.

Walt Disney Pictures' VFX team filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. As Motherboard notes, the filing "marks the second time in history that workers in the visual effects industry have announced their intent to organize -- the first being Marvel VFX workers, who did so three weeks prior." From the report: The Walt Disney Pictures workers, who are behind the visual effects in movies like the live-action Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean, plan to join the VFX Union, a new branch of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents much of the entertainment industry behind the scenes. Their filing comes after over 80 percent of the 18 in-house VFX crewmembers at Walt Disney Pictures in Los Angeles signed cards demonstrating their desire to unionize, according to a press release by the union.

"Today, courageous visual effects workers at Walt Disney Pictures overcame the fear and silence that have kept our community from having a voice on the job for decades," said Mark Patch, a IATSE VFX union organizer, in a statement. "With an overwhelming supermajority of these crews demanding an end to 'the way VFX has always been,' this is a clear sign that our campaign is not about one studio or corporation. It's about VFX workers across the industry using the tools at our disposal to uplift ourselves and forge a better path forward."

The number of titles on streaming services jumped 39% over the past two years to 2.35 million, according to a report released Monday by market researcher Nielsen. From a report: Add in traditional broadcast and cable channels and the number of individual viewing options climbed to 2.7 million. The figures reflect movies and shows available in the US, Canada, the UK, Mexico and Germany. Netflix and Disney+ are among 167 streaming providers, up from 118 two years ago. The average time it takes someone to find something to watch has risen to more than 10 minutes from a little over seven minutes in 2019, Nielsen said.

Last year movie theaters offered $3 movie tickets for "National Cinema Day," attracting a surge of more than 8.1 million movie-goers (compared to just 1.7 million the day after). So they're doing it again...

Today more than 3,000 movie theaters in the U.S. and Canada — with approximately 30,000 screens — are offering $4 tickets for every show (including IMAX and Dolby screenings) in a special one-day event. (The U.K. will also celebrate "National Cinema Day" — but in six days, on September 2nd.)

Variety notes that last year's event brought the highest one-day attendance for all of 2022, and "All of that foot traffic in theaters usually means there will be more popcorn and concession stand sales." So the National Association of Theatre Owners's nonprofit, the Cinema Foundation — decided to do it again this year just two days after the first event had ended. CNBC reports: While last year's event was held in part because of a need to lure audiences back to theaters after two years away following pandemic shutdowns, Bryan Braunlich, executive director of the non-profit Cinema Foundation, says that the hope for this year's Cinema Day is just for audiences to enjoy being at the movies... Nationwide chains including AMC and Regal will be participating. For a full list of theaters taking part in National Cinema Day, click here...

If this year's installment proves to once again be a success, Braunlich says the hope is to make National Cinema Day an annual event. "If this continues every year, which we hope it will, the long term goal is to eventize it," he says. "Make it less about the price and more like little Comic Cons in every city where you never know what celebrity is going to hop into your theater."
This year's event includes a limited re-release of some classic films, including the original Jurassic Park.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Teslarati: Tesla has won permit approval for its Diner and Drive-In Movie Supercharger in Los Angeles, according to documents seen by Teslarati from the LA Department of Building and Safety. Tesla has been teasing the possibility for several years of a drive-in movie theater and diner Supercharger site that would host 32 stalls, two screens to show famous movie clips, and a restaurant with rooftop seating. Initially, it was planned to be built on a series of lots in Santa Monica. However, the location was moved East to Hollywood and will now be placed on located at 7001 W. Santa Monica Boulevard. As the project has been moving through the normal regulatory processes, Tesla has been receiving some approvals and requests for corrections on many of its filed applications to begin construction at the Diner/Supercharger.

Amazon has filed a lawsuit against a group of online stores that sell pirated DVDs of key titles such as "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" and "The Peripheral." TorrentFreak reports: In a complaint filed at a California federal court, Amazon accuses seven websites of selling pirated discs. These sites, including dvdshelf.com.au, dvds.trade, and dvdwholesale.co.uk, are presumably operated by the same group, using a variety of companies. For the public at large, it may not be immediately obvious that these discs are pirated. However, since Amazon doesn't produce or sell DVDs for these Prime Video series, there is no doubt that they are created from illicit sources.

The piracy operation consists of at least seven websites and these all remain online today. According to Amazon, the sites ship to customers in the U.S. and abroad, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in mass copyright infringement. Before going to court, investigators conducted more than twenty test purchases of pirated DVDs. After these orders arrived, Amazon sent the discs to the Motion Picture Association which independently confirmed that they were all pirated.

The complaint lists Yangchun Zhang as a key suspect. This person presumably resides in China and obtained the 'DVD Shelf' trademark in Australia. In addition, Zhang is also listed as the registrant of several of the domain names involved. The complaint accuses Zhang and the others of both copyright and trademark infringement. Through the lawsuit (PDF), Amazon hopes to recoup damages, which can run in the millions of dollars. Another key priority is to shut the sites down and Amazon asks the court for an injunction to stop all infringing activity.

Hollywood studios have presented a new proposal to writers that includes the highest wage increase in 35 years, protections against the impact of artificial intelligence, and other provisions. CBS News reports: Writers have been picketing outside major studios for over 100 days, surpassing the 2007-2008 strike. One of the major sticking points between the two sides was their stark differences in wage increases and residuals. The proposal sent to the Writers Guild of America on Aug. 11 includes a 5% increase in the first year of the contract, then 4% the next year, and 3.5% in the third, totaling a compounded 13% increase. Before the WGA went on strike on May 2, the AMPTP offered writers 4%-3%- 2% in the respective years, or 9% over the duration of the contract. The recent offer does not match the WGA's demand of 6%-5%-5% in the respective years but does bring them from $9,888 a week to $11,371 a week for guarantees of up to 9 weeks.

They also moved to guarantee writers a minimum of 10 weeks of employment, a proposal they initially refused before the strike. AMPTP also increased the total domestic and foreign residuals for writers from $72,067 to $87,546 per episode over three years. Additionally, the union seemed to cave on the WGA's proposal to implement a viewership-based streaming residuals model. "For the first time, viewership data in the form of quarterly confidential reports is to be provided to the WGA that will include total SVOD view hours per title. This increased transparency will enable the WGA to develop proposals to restructure the current SVOD residual regime in the future," AMPTP wrote in the offer. Previously, the studios flat-out rejected the proposal and refused to make a counter, according to the WGA.

Studios also included a tenet regarding artificial intelligence protections in the proposed deal. "The Companies confirm that because [Generative Artificial Intelligence] is not a person, it is not a 'writer' or 'professional writer' as defined in this MBA and, therefore, written material produced by GAI will not be considered literary material under this or any prior MBA," the AMPTP wrote in the offer. The union continued: "The proposal provides important safeguards to prevent writers from being disadvantaged if any part of the script is based on GAI-produced material, so that the writer's compensation, credit and separated rights will not be affected by the use of GAIproduced material." Before the writers went on strike, the studios rejected the proposal and countered by "offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology," according to the WGA.