Picture the climactic ending of James Cameron’sTitanic: Kate Winslet as Rose, promising to “never let go” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack tragically succumbs to hypothermia in the icy Atlantic sea.Now imagine, instead of slipping beneath the waves, Jack revives, hauls himself aboard the lifeboat, pushes back his floppy hair and embraces Rose — so that the duo may sail away to live happily ever after.
“It was quite painful,” Rai, known for directing some of India’s biggest romantic dramas of the past decade, says of the experience. “I was hurt that the ending of my film was being changed and that someone was playing with the emotions in my work.”
The consensus within the industry was that Eros’ contention was probably legally sound, no matter how morally dubious its treatment of its creative collaborators might seem. The crux comes down to contacting and bargaining power, and most industry agreements in India are currently written in an all-encompassing fashion, lacking specifics, and allowing studios to exploit a work across all modes, mediums, formats and technologies, whether they exist today or are developed in the future.“In many cases, an actor’s [or director’s] services are rendered on a work-for-hire basis, which means the studio becomes the first owner of the material created,” says Priyanka Khimani, a leading entertainment and music lawyer based in Mumbai. “A studio could argue that it is simply modifying a character that belongs to the film.
The only factor that seemed to give Eros pause was the public reaction from fans of the originalRaanjhanaa, scores of whom slammed the AI remix on social media (a non-negligible number of others, however, went to see the re-release out of curiosity, with some even posting that they preferred the happy ending).
Pradeep Dwivedi, Group CEO of Eros Media World, says the studio never intended to “replace” the original film.
“What we explored was a clearly labelled AI-assisted alternate interpretation,” Dwivedi tellsTHRvia email, describing the move simply as an attempt to see whether new technologies could allow audiences to revisit familiar stories in novel ways. But the company nonetheless appears to have become more cautious in the wake of the Raanjhanaa episode. The Eros CEO says the episode left him to reflect on how films are “not just intellectual property” but also “emotional memories” for audiences and creators.
Indian entertainment insiders, however, say theRaanjhanaacontroversy is most notable not for the brazenness of Eros’ actions, but for the fact that there was any controversy at all. With a few notable exceptions among established autuers, India’s filmmaking community has been open and vocal in its full-throated embrace of AI. Nearly every stage of filmmaking in the country — from writing and pre-visualization to post-production and fully AI-generated features — is now being reshaped by artificial intelligence as an indispensable collaborator.
The contrast could hardly be starker with Hollywood, where the creative community’s relationship with Silicon Valley has curdled over the past decade — a cumulative bitterness born of the smartphone’s corrosive impact on U.S. political discourse, streaming’s erosion of the theatrical model and back-end profit participation, and the relentless consolidation of an entertainment industry that once sustained a much broader middle class of working artists. Having watched big tech disrupt nearly every revenue stream that once sustained their livelihoods, Hollywood’s creative guilds were not about to be sold another tale of technological liberation. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 were fought, in significant part, to establish contractual guardrails around AI — and the guilds continue to push for greater enhancements to those protections.
But while Hollywood remains roiled in debate over whether AI belongs on a film set at all, India has already moved on. The country has no empowered industry unions to push for caution — and much like the U.S., national legislation introducing regulation around AI use and employment protection has been non-existent. Instead, studios, startups, and individuals have been experimenting openly, ambitiously, and, some would argue, recklessly. As a result, the technology is being woven into the production pipeline at every level, with most practitioners unapologetically bullish about its potential.
Dipankar Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO of Mumbai-based Studio Blo, recently announced a sci-fi series, titledWarlord, to be directed by acclaimed Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, but created entirely using AI tools. Mukherjee estimates that around 80 percent of Indian films are already using AI extensively in pre-visualization. His company has built its own platform, Kubrick — named after the legendary director — designed to help filmmakers who may not be fluent in prompting tools. Directors upload a shot breakdown, answer a series of questions about characters and locations, and the system generates a storyboard that can be refined from there. The technology is also compressing timelines dramatically. “For a feature-length film made entirely with AI, our production timelines are typically between six and 12 months,” Mukherjee said. “To put that into perspective, a traditional animated feature might take two to three years.”
Source: Drudge Report
