Hollywood
Hugh Grant gives details on his new rom-com at SIFF
MUMBAI: British actor Hugh Grant addressed the Shanghai International Film Festival press contingent on 15 June about his latest movie The Rewrite. Grant plays the role of a screenwriter in the Marc Lawrence-directed movie which will be screened at this year’s festival.
The Rewrite is the story of a screenwriter named Keith Michaels who at one time was very successful and won a Golden Globe. His career is in a terrible place after 15 years and he ends up teaching in a university in New York.
There he meets Holly, a single mom with two jobs, trying to earn her bachelor’s degree. She helps to change his attitude towards teaching. “It’s not exactly a romantic comedy,” Grant said at the contingent. “There is romance, and it certainly is a comedy, but I would say its closer to About A Boy. It’s really about a man who seems completely lost and who discovers a new life.”
Grant has starred in three other films directed by Lawrence, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Music & Lyrics and Two Weeks Notice. Grant is popular with movie fans in China for his roles in romantic comedies like Love Actually, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and more.
Grant won a Golden Globe Award for his role in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
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.
