Hollywood
Cineworld to buy European cinema chain
MUMBAI: England’s largest movie theater operator, Cineworld, has announced that it will be buying over 100 multiplexes across Eastern Europe and Israel for $828 million (?503 million).
The purchase will be done in a mix of cash and shares, from Cinema City International (CCI), listed on the Warsaw stock market in Poland.
The company will pay CCI $448 million (?272 million) in cash, and has launched a $181 million (?110 million) share rights issue to help fund the purchase. The proposed tie-up with Cinema City will give it leading positions in Poland, Israel, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia. The cash and shares deal is due to complete in March.
The merged group will have 201 outlets and 1,852 screens across Europe, with the addition of 966 from Cinema City making it the second largest operator in Europe behind Odeon UCI, which has more than 2,100 screens.
According to The Financial Times, Cineworld, which snapped up 21 Picturehouse sites last year, shares rose 5.87 per cent at 415p, continues a run that has pushed up the price almost 50 per cent in a year. CCI shares rose 7 per cent to 32.30 zlotys in Warsaw.
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.
