Hollywood
‘American Hustle’ director soon to venture into TV drama
MUMBAI: Having recently won the Golden Globe Award and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards for American Hustle, David O. Hustle, the prolific writer, producer and director is now venturing into television. According to Deadline, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) has given a straight-to-series 13-episode order to a drama project from the American Hustle writer/director and Erin Brockovich writer Susannah Grant. The two are executive producing with Sarah Timberman and Carl Beverly. The show, described as “an upstairs/downstairs soap centered on a private country club”, will be co-produced by CBS Studios and ABC Studios. This would be Timberman/Beverly’s fifth on-air series, joining Justified, Elementary, Unforgettable and Masters of Sex.
This marks the first TV series for Russell, with rare back-to-back Best Picture Oscar nominees — American Hustle this year and Silver Linings Playbook last year accompanied by best writing and directing nominations both times. Along with his Golden Globe and SAG wins, Russell is nominated for two Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Last year, his film, Silver Linings Playbook earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay; he also picked up a Best Director nomination in 2011 for The Fighter.
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.
