In a nutshell: A Minecraft Movie, the live-action-with-CGI adaptation of the best-selling video game of all time, is released this Friday. The pretty underwhelming trailers led to plenty of people calling this the next Borderlands, but according to early reviews and first impressions, it's actually… okay.
Even more impressive? The final renders used Blender's semi-realtime Eevee engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds.
In context: October 2024 marked the 40th anniversary of director James Cameron's science fiction classic, The Terminator – a film that popularised society's fear of machines that can't be reasoned with, and that "absolutely will not stop … until you are dead", as one character memorably puts it.