Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino’s next: ‘The Hateful Eight’
MUMBAI: Right around the time of the Golden Globe, rumor has it that Quentin Tarantino will complete his new script, which will be a western; the working title of the film right now is The Hateful Eight. “I had so much fun doing Django, and I love westerns so much that after I taught myself how to make one, it’s like ‘OK! Let me make another one now that I know what I’m doing,’” Tarantino told Jay Leno in November when he appeared on The Tonight Show.
Tarantino has finished a draft, and is in the process of showing it to a handful of actors he wants for the picture. Nothing has been confirmed yet, however the title suggests Tarantino could be stepping up his game, playing off the title of John Sturges’ 1960 film The Magnificent Seven, which in turn was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai.
No one has been cast yet, but Tarantino has reached out to veteran casting director Victoria Thomas, who worked on Django, to work with him on casting for the flick, say several insiders. A part has been written for Christoph Waltz, who starred in Tarantino’s Django and Inglourious Basterds. As rumor has it, another part has been written for Hollywood veteran Bruce Dern who, at the age of 77 and after a career worth of distinguished mostly supporting performances, has emerged as a Best Actor frontrunner in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska.
Pilar Savone, who served as a producer on Django and was also an associate producer on Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Death Proof after being his assistant, is producing Hateful Eight.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
