Hollywood
Cinepolis creates video to correlate the love between movies and popcorns
MUMBAI: On the occasion of National Popcorn Day on 19 January 2016, India’s first International cinema chain and the world’s fourth largest exhibitor, Cinépolis releases a heart-warming video celebrating the intrinsic link between movie-going and this universally loved snack. The video illustrates how watching a film in a theatre is absolutely incomplete without digging into a bag of delicious popcorn.
Conceptualized by Cinépolis Global Team, the film light-heartedly turns the spotlight on several people who walk into the cinema resisting the urge to buy the snack. These very movie-goers end up indulging whole-heartedly in their companion’s bag of popcorn when they are immersed in their films. The video sums up this trend by saying, 60% people buy popcorn at Cinépolis. 100% eat!
A tribute to the light, fluffy, flavoured favourite of cine-lovers, the video is backed by a study of popcorn consumption patterns in India which suggests that the money spent on this snack has almost doubled between 2012 and 2015 and currently stands at Rs 2,034 crore. The most loved flavours in the country are butter salted, caramel and cheese. The combination of a cold beverage and popcorn stands out as the most preferred snack inside cinema halls which comes as no surprise. After all, the identities of popcorn and movie watching are inherently tied together and Cinépolis has been fuelling this relationship with the superlative popcorn it serves at its cinema screens across the globe!
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.
