Hollywood
‘Hangover’ director Todd Phillips begins shooting for ‘Arms & the Dudes’
MUMBAI: Principal photography is underway on Warner Bros. Pictures’ Arms & the Dudes, starring Oscar nominee Jonah Hill and Miles Teller.
The Hangover trilogy director and Oscar nominee Todd Phillips is directing the film.
Based on a true story, Arms & the Dudes follows two friends in their early 20s (Hill and Teller) living in Miami during the Iraq War who exploit a little-known government initiative that allows small businesses to bid on U.S. Military contracts. Starting small, they begin raking in big money and are living the high life. But the pair gets in over their heads when they land a $300 million deal to arm the Afghan Military – a deal that puts them in business with some very shady people, not the least of which turns out to be the U.S. Government.
Phillips directs from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jason Smilovic, and Stephen C. Chin, based on the Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson. Phillips and Bradley Cooper, under the banner of their 22nd & Green Productions, and Mark Gordon, under the banner of The Mark Gordon Company, are producing the film. The executive producers are David Siegel and Bryan Zuriff.
Filming began on location in Romania, and shooting is also being accomplished in Las Vegas, Southern California, Miami, and in Morocco.
Arms & the Dudes reunites Phillips with several of his collaborators from The Hangover trilogy, including director of photography Lawrence Sher, production designer Bill Brzeski and editor Jeff Groth. Joining the team is costume designer Michael Kaplan.
The film will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment company.
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.
