Disney and the infinity war
A new premium format to rival IMAX, a Doomsday trailer nobody’s allowed to see, and ARRI changes hands for the first time in 109 years.
Hi everyone —
NAB has been exhausting exhilarating. :)
Eddie’s v3 launch has gone better than expected. Usage is up, revenue is up, customer happiness is up.
And it’s been back-to-back with demos at our booth.
This is our first year to get a booth at NAB. If we had 10 visitors a day that would have been a win. It’s been hundreds.
It’s been really cool to meet, face-to-face, existing customers and future ones. Your questions were thoughtful. Your interest is motivating. Plus we received lots of new ideas for our roadmap (thank you).
The vision of agents to help us in post production and liberate us to make more and better videos is resonating.
Here I am demo’ing AI agents in video editing:
NAB ends today and while I will miss it, I am looking forward to some sleep, the gym, and vegetables.
—Shamir
Also this week:
Saudi Arabia writes $12 billion cheque for Paramount’s Warner Bros. takeover, a 48-hour AI short won Best Animation by doing less instead of more, seven minutes of experimental film was scientifically proven to make you more creative than seven minutes of YouTube, Nicholas Hoult robs banks in a wolf mask for YouTube subscribers, USB-C can now power a cinema camera for $399.
Render Reel
ARRI has been acquired for the first time in 109 years: to Thomas Riedel, the Wuppertal entrepreneur behind Riedel Communications, the live-broadcast tech specialist that wires up Eurovision and major sports productions. The 1917-founded Munich camera and lighting house will remain in Munich and the first joint outing is this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Saudi Arabia writes $12 billion of Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover: with Qatar and Abu Dhabi adding $6 billion each. Nobody believes $24 billion arrives without strings, particularly when the package includes CNN, HBO, and Batman.
An understated 48-hour AI short won Best Animation at the inaugural Bionic Awards: Ausencia, made by 3D animators Guillermo Miranda and Javier De La Chica. The Adobe-sponsored event screened plenty of entries straining to prove AI can conjure anything. The winner did the opposite via showing a visible artistic hand.
Seven minutes of experimental film can cure brain rot and increase creativity: while seven minutes of viral YouTube did nothing at all. UCSB researchers ran nearly 500 subjects through either animated shorts from Short of the Week or home-video slop, then tested them on story writing and lateral thinking. The art-house group won, though participants reported enjoying the slop more.
Disney builds own IMAX because it lost the real one
On December 18, Avengers: Doomsday will open against Dune: Part Three. Villeneuve shot his film on IMAX 65mm cameras, which bought Warner Bros. a three-week IMAX exclusive on the year’s biggest screens.
Marvel, who wanted those screens too, got shut out.
Rather than shift the release date by a week, Disney announced its own IMAX: Infinity Vision.
The spec sheet calls for screens at least 50 feet wide, laser projection, and Dolby 7.1 surround. There are 75 certified auditoriums domestically and 300 more globally. It rolls out in September with an Endgame re-release and goes full throttle for Doomsday.
The problem is that Infinity Vision isn’t really a format so much as a logo. What makes IMAX IMAX isn’t just the size of the screen.
It’s the cameras that capture a taller 1.43:1 image, the custom theater acoustics, a brand consumers actually recognize, and directorial loyalty. Nolan shoots IMAX. Villeneuve shoots IMAX. Cameron shoots IMAX.
Infinity Vision is certification for screens that already exist, running projection tech that already exists, playing a Marvel movie shot on standard digital cameras like everything else.
There’s no new way of watching here.
History has been unkind to premium formats not called IMAX. Dolby Cinema has real technical merit and remains forgettable. AMC Prime, Cinemark XD, Regal RPX are all serviceable, but you’re not buying a ticket because of them.
A 50-foot screen minimum is also a low bar with flagship IMAX auditoriums clearing 70, sometimes 90.
What Disney does have is leverage. It can essentially mandate the branding on any exhibitor that wants its tentpoles, and it can pour marketing dollars behind a logo until audiences learn it.
That’s not nothing. But it’s a distribution play dressed up as a format.
And then there’s the trailer.
Marvel showed new Doomsday footage at CinemaCon which included Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom casually stopping Stormbreaker with one hand and is refusing to release it publicly.
DMCA takedowns are flying as bootleg rips leak, while fans plead for an official drop if only to drown out the AI fakes already flooding YouTube.
A strange new problem for a studio that still believes in scarcity marketing as the counterfeits now ship faster than the real thing.
Nicholas Hoult leads Youtube bank-robbing crew - alongside Anna Sawai, Pete Davidson and Zoë Kravitz in David Leitch’s next, unveiled at CinemaCon. The fictional crew has hit 15 banks and built 31 million subscribers, donating the take to charity (”OnlyFans is not a charity,” Davidson clarifies). A movie about criminals optimizing for the algorithm, pitched to exhibitors desperate to pull audiences away from one. Theatrical Sept. 4.
USB-C becomes legit way to power a cinema camera: MID49 showed the prototype at NAB. Its V-mount and Gold-mount unit talks to the camera, figures out the required voltage, and delivers 9V to a Canon C50, a Nikon ZR, or a Sony FX. An upcoming Canon firmware update will let a single USB-C cable handle power and run/stop. Around $399, shipping in June.
This week we’re watching:
The trailer for As Deep as the Grave, the film where Val Kilmer stars via AI, a year after his death.
The most striking shot is a closeup of a young Kilmer speaking to a child. The sourcing took hours of archival digging but the actual AI generation took just seven minutes. He has over an hour of screen time in the finished film and some detractors are calling it “terrifying”.
Filmmakers Coerte and John Voorhees swear you won’t be able to tell. More importantly, Kilmer’s children say it’s what he would have wanted.
Watch the trailer and decide for yourself.
Retail Therapy: The phone that does almost nothing
The Tin Can is a phone that only makes voice calls.
No apps, no texting, no games, no camera, and definitely no screen time negotiations at dinner.
Parents approve every contact, set quiet hours, and manage everything from a companion app. It runs on home Wi-Fi, which means it’s essentially a landline your kid can carry to their room aka the 2026 version of stretching the cord around the corner.
Available at tincan.com for $100.