Hollywood
Harrison Ford to star in ‘Blade Runner’ sequel
MUMBAI: Harrison Ford is up and ready to star in the sequel to Blade Runner. He will reprise his role as Rick Deckard in the upcoming movie Prisoners. The director Denis Villeneuve is in talks to helm the Alcon Entertainment film.
The film is scheduled to start principle photography in the summer of 2016. Hampton Fancher (who co-wrote the original) and Michael Green have written the screenplay, which is based on an idea from Fancher and Ridley Scott.
The story takes place several decades after the conclusion of the 1982 original, which centered on a man (Ford) working as a blade runner who was tasked with chasing down machines called replicants.
Alcon Entertainment acquired the rights to Blade Runner in 2011 with the intention of making both prequels and sequels to the iconic science-fiction thriller. Bud Yorkin will serve as a producer on the sequel along with Alcon co-founders Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson.
Thunderbird Films CEOs Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble will serve as executive producers.
Villeneuve most recently directed the crime thriller Sicario, staring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. He also directed Canada’s Oscar-nominated French-language film Incendies and Prisoners, staring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Ford will next be seen in Lionsgate’s The Age of Adaline and will reprise his role as Han Solo in Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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.
