Buying Warner Bros. Gives Netflix What It's Always Needed: An Identity The $83 billion deal gives the streamer a century's worth of prestige television and movies, from Batman movies to . It also ends the streaming wars. In a deal to acquire Warner Bros. announced Friday, Netflix will be scooping up HBO's many titles, including Courtesy of HBO Close your eyes, think for a minute, and tell me: What is a Netflix Movie? OK, try again: What is a Netflix Show? Sure, it's easy to rattle off some killer titles--, --but Netflix has never really had a brand identity.

The Netflix and Warner Bros. deal might be great for shareholders, but not for anyone else Hollywood does not need more consolidation. Netflix's $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. is, in many ways, the last thing a weakened Hollywood needs right now. The industry is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, where theaters were forced to close and audiences became even more comfortable with streaming films at home . The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, which were driven by legitimate concerns around studio interest in generative AI, delayed production and promotion of many film and TV projects. And the rise of streaming content pushed many media companies towards taking on debt and unwise mergers (see: Warner Bros. Discovery), which led to higher subscription costs, layoffs and production belt-tightening.

"A Minecraft Movie," the big-screen adaptation of the popular video game "Minecraft," has been packing theaters with rowdy kids and teens since its release this month, spurring a social media phenomenon and sparking concern for America's youth. Videos on social media show young theatergoers huge reactions to one key scene, where one of the film's stars, Jack Black, yells out the phrase "Chicken Jockey!" as a small, Frankenstein-looking creature lands on top of a chicken in a boxing ring to face off with co-star Jason Momoa. The scene has prompted excited fans to scream, shout, throw popcorn around, jump up out of their seats, and in one instance in Provo, Utah, toss a live chicken in the air during a screening, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Springs Cinema & Taphouse in Sandy Springs, Georgia, told FOX 5 Atlanta that its staff has had to clean up popcorn, ICEEs, ketchup and shattered glass. The scene featuring the "Chicken Jockey" in "A Minecraft Movie" has spawned some chaotic movie theater behavior from young audiences. "The movie-going experience has changed a lot since I was younger," Josh Gunderson, director of marketing and events at Oviedo Mall in Florida, told FOX Business.

By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over 3bn ( 2.3bn) in revenue. What's more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game – tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies – had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.

Last year was a challenging one for the games sector, seeing games delayed, studios closed around the world and thousands of layoffs including at Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation . Warner Bros Games had big expectations for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League but the game was panned by fans and critics. Updates for the game ended in January after weak sales and poor reviews. And last month, the company announced the departure of David Haddad, the chief of the gaming unit, after 12 years. Wider trends in the industry have seen sales struggle as gamers spend less on new games, choosing instead to stick with long-running online games like Fortnite or yearly franchises such as Call of Duty and EA Sports FC.

Arriving at a house in the country, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) isn't sure she is welcome. The owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), is leery; his wife, Kat (Megan Suri), is unfriendly. It isn't Iris she dislikes, Kat later admits, it is "the idea" of her: she makes her feel redundant. Iris's boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is patient and encouraging, but even he finds her shyness and clinginess hard to bear. "Go to sleep, Iris," he says, and Iris's eyes roll up inside her head as…

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has never attempted to hide the science-fiction influences which inspire his companies. But now, Musk's enthusiasm for film has landed him in hot water as the maker of Blade Runner 2049 sues the billionaire tech boss over Tesla's Robotaxi images. During the'We, Robot' event on October 10, Musk showed a stylised image bearing a striking resemblance to one of Ryan Gosling's key scenes from the movie. However, Alcon Entertainment, the film's production company, says it had explicitly refused a request to use stills from the film during the launch of Tesla's self-driving Robotaxi. The company alleges that Tesla used an AI-powered image generator to create fake promotional imagery based on scenes from Blade Runner 2049.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has agreed a deal with Google Cloud to use the latter's Vertex AI to generate captions for programming across a variety of platforms. WBD claims that its Caption AI system can significantly reduce production time and costs while improving the accuracy of captions for US-based viewers. The tech will be used for unscripted programming at the outset, which could include news, sports and reality TV across the likes of Max, CNN and Discovery . WBD claims the system can reduce the time it takes to create captions by up to 80 percent and captioning costs by up to 50 percent. There will still be a level of human review for quality assurance, and the company claims this approach will help refine and train Caption AI's workflow to improve it over time.