Hollywood
Rentrak to launch box office tracking service in India
MUMBAI: Rentrak recently announced the launch of its India box-office tracking service, aiming to bring independently verified box-office data in the country. The announcement was made at the ongoing Mumbai Film Festival.
Talking to the Hollywood Reporter, Rentrak’s vice present for Europe, the Middle-East and Africa, Arturo Guillen said, “This can be a win-win situation for all parties involved — producers, distributors and exhibitors.”
Even with almost 11,000 screens in the country, the box-office data is still largely based on figures reported by distributors and producers rather than being directly sourced from cinema locations. The company will collect and analyze data from cinemas directly, according to media reports.
According to industry estimates, India clocks around 3.5 billion admissions per year with total revenues touching $1.5 billion. With the demand for Indian films getting huge overseas as well, Rentrak is already tracking Bollywood titles in 44 countries while the company’s India client base will include local arms of Hollywood studios that have become active in local productions such as Disney, Fox Star Studios and Viacom18, in addition to Indian banners, the report added.
“As we have seen in other markets, cinemas benefit from our data as it helps them track footfalls, which is helpful for in-cinema advertising and programming decisions,” said Rentrak India MD Rajkumar Akella, in an interview to The Hollywood Reporter.
“A leading Indian producer once told me that data is the basis to define reality,” added Guillen, referring to how data can also help in tracking consumer tastes.
This is Rentrak’s second attempt at entering India after its now-defunct 2007 pact with Mumbai-based Bigtree Entertainment, which provides entertainment ticketing applications and solutions.
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.
