Hollywood
Movies Now & MN+ to simulcast ‘Gandhi’ on 30 January
MUMBAI: Times Network’s movie channels Movies Now and MN+ will simulcast – Gandhi – a biopic on the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 30 January, 2016 at 1 pm.
Directed and produced by Richard Attenborough and written by John Briley, the film features Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, Saeed Jaffrey playing the role of Sardar Patel, Alyque Padamsee as Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Roshan Seth as Jawaharlal Nehru. The 1982 biopic dramatises the life of Gandhi, the leader of India’s non-violent struggle for independence from the British, and also stars Amrish Puri as Khan, Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White, John Gielgud as Lord Irwin and Martin Sheen as Walker, among others.
Gandhi has bagged eight Oscars along with 10 Golden Globe awards, and several top creative and technical awards from some of the most reputed guilds and associations across the world.
The movie will also have a repeat telecast on Movies Now at 11 pm on the same day.
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.
