Hollywood
‘Hunger Games’ actress to direct Pitch Perfect 2
MUMBAI: Elizabeth Banks, the actor, who brought life to the Capitol-born chaperone in the Hunger Games film franchise, is all set to make her directorial debut with Pitch Perfect 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2012 instant hit – Pitch Perfect.
According to Variety, Elizabeth Banks has been targeted to head the project after directing a segment of last year’s sketch comedy – Movie 43. The actress worked as a co-producer on Pitch Perfect and starred as commentator Gail Abernathy-McKadden.
Banks will produce the sequel alongside Max Handelman (Surrogates) through their Brownstone Productions. Gold Circle Films’ Paul Brooks (The Wedding Date, Over Her Dead Body) and Jeff Levine will co-produce, while Scott Niemeyer (The Haunting in Conneticut, Life as We Know It) will be the executive producer. Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson are both expected to reprise their roles in the sequel.
Banks recently reprised her roles as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which has grossed over $850 million worldwide, and is one of the voice artists in The Lego Movie, which opens 7 February in India.
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.
