Hollywood
AFM sues six Hollywood studios for reusing soundtracks in movies
MUMBAI: The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM) is suing six major studios for reusing film soundtrack clips in other films and television programs without appropriately compensating musicians.
The studios named in the lawsuit are: Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Brothers Entertainment.
“Our agreements obligate the studios to make additional payments to musicians when soundtracks are reused and AFM members are entitled to receive the benefit of that bargain. Our efforts to resolve these contract violations and missing payments have been unproductive, so we are looking to the courts for relief,” said AFM International president Ray Hair.
The studios have been pulled up for reusing previously recorded film soundtracks in violation of AFM’s collective bargaining agreement with the studios.
The lawsuit cites numerous examples of the studios reusing film scores without paying musicians including:
• Columbia using music from Karate Kid in an episode of the television series Happy Endings;
• Disney using music from Beauty and the Beast and The Muppet Movie in the television series The Neighbors;
• Fox using music from Titanic in the film This Means War;
• Paramount using music from Up in the Air in the film Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story;
• Universal using music from Bourne Identity in the television series The Office; and
• Warner Brothers using music from Battle for the Planet of the Apes in the film Argo.
The AFM is seeking award damages for all losses, including prejudgment interest.
In April this year, the AFM had also sued the studios for allegedly breaching the guild agreement by recording film scores outside the US and Canada.
Click here to read the complaint:
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.
