Hollywood
Hugh Grant returns to romcom with ‘The Rewrite’
MUMBAI: After a gap of five years, Hugh Grant is making a return to romantic comedies with The Rewrite.
Written and directed by Marc Lawrence, the movie also stars Marisa Tomei, Allison Janney, JK Simmons and Chris Elliott.
In the new comedy, the British actor plays a screenwriter whose Hollywood career peaked in late 80s. Now divorced and broke, he reluctantly accepts a teaching job at an American university.
Marisa Tomei co-stars as one of his students (Holly), who isn’t impressed by the level of commitment that the professor is putting forth. Holly is a single mother who’s taking classes to earn her degree. Meanwhile, Keith gets himself caught in a web of lies involving Matt Damon and Ryan Gosling.
This is Lawrence’s fourth collaboration with Grant after Did You Hear about the Morgans?, Music and Lyrics, and Two Weeks Notice.
The Rewrite is Grant’s first romcom since 2009’s Did You Hear About the Morgans? In the meantime, Grant voiced The Pirate Captain in Aardman’s high-seas stop-motion adventure The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, and also appeared in the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in a variety of roles including a nuclear power plant boss, an elderly care home escapee, and a vicious futuristic cannibal tribesman.
The movie is slated to hit theaters on 8 October in the UK, but no US release date has been announced yet.
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.
