Hollywood
Lionsgate roars with 24 Emmy nominations
MUMBAI: Lionsgate’s series Orange Is The New Black, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie and Manhattan, and its limited series Houdini earned a total of 24 Emmy nominations.
These include an eighth consecutive Outstanding Drama Series nomination for four-time Emmy winner Mad Men (AMC); a Drama Series nomination for Orange Is The New Black (Netflix); and four lead acting nominations including Mad Men’s Jon Hamm (his eighth consecutive drama nod) and Elisabeth Moss (her fifth nomination in this category), Nurse Jackie’s Edie Falco (an Emmy winner and six-time nominee for this role), and Adrien Brody, who landed his first Emmy nomination for Houdini.
Mad Men’s 11 nominations also include nods for Christina Hendricks as Supporting Actress (her sixth nomination), two Writing nominations, as well as nods for Production Design, Casting, Editing, Hairstyling and Makeup.
Orange Is The New Black scored a total of four nominations, including nods for Uzo Aduba as Supporting Actress, Pablo Schreiber as Guest Actor, and Casting, along with its Drama Series nomination.
In addition to Edie Falco’s nomination for Nurse Jackie and Adrien Brody’s nomination for Houdini, Lionsgate picked up six additional Houdini nods in the Directing, Cinematography, Picture Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Makeup categories, as well as a Main Title Design nomination for Manhattan.
“We’re extremely proud of our incredible roster of nominated shows and we thank the TV Academy for this tremendous recognition. These nominations underscore our commitment to producing highly entertaining and original programs that resonate deeply with viewers and inspire broader cultural conversation,” said Lionsgate Television Group chairman Kevin Beggs.
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.
