Hollywood
‘Pulp Fiction’ anniversary at Cannes, ‘Django’ television series planned
MUMBAI: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the cult classic, maverick director Quentin Tarantino along with the stars of Pulp Fiction, John Travolta and Uma Thurman, treated the masses to a public screening of the cult classic on the beach at Cannes. Standing on a makeshift stage in front of a giant screen, Tarantino welcomed his two actors, who, one by one, walked down a sandy aisle before flanking their Pulp Fiction director.
Pulp Fiction was the winner of the 1994 Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) from a jury presided over by Clint Eastwood; Pulp Fiction had its official world premiere at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on 19 May that year. However, although the film had been kept tightly under wraps and was screened for no one in the United States before its Cannes debut, a number of critics did get a secret sneak peek at it the night before.
Prior to the screening, the cast and crew of Pulp Fiction were spot walking on the official red carpet at the Palais De Cannes and then attended a party hosted by Miramax Pictures.
The Oscar-winning director told the audience at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday that he’s looking at a four-hour miniseries version of his acclaimed 2012 pre-Civil War Western Django Unchained.
“I have about 90 minutes’ worth of material with Django [that] hasn’t been seen,” said Tarantino to USA Today. “My idea, frankly, is to cut together a four-hour version of Django Unchained… But I wouldn’t show it like a four-hour movie. I would cut it up into hour chapters. Like a four-part miniseries. And show it on cable television. Show it like an hour at a time, each chapter.”
“We’d use all the material I have and it wouldn’t be an endurance test,” he added. “It would be a miniseries. And people love those.”
Django earned a total of five Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. It grabbed the golden statuette for Original Screenplay and Supporting Actor Christopher Waltz.
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.
