Hollywood
Scarlett Johansson coming soon on small screen
MUMBAI: Scarlett Johansson is all set to star in a new period drama for her first major TV role. According to media reports, The Lucy actress will play the lead in a limited series adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winner Edith Wharton’s classic 1913 novel The Custom of the Country.
She has starred briefly in TV before, with stop-motion animated series Robot Chicken in 2005.
The 29-year-old actress will be seen as a midwestern girl, Undine Spragg, who makes it her goal to reach the heights of New York high society by any means necessary in the early part of the 20th century in the series.
According to the media reports, Johansson will also be the executive producer of the eight-episode period story.
Besides Johansson, there is another big name attached to the project as Oscar-winning British playwright-screenwriter Christopher Hampton is on board to write the screenplay of the limited series.
Johansson will next be seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron, before starring in spin-off movie Black Widow and Disney’s live-action CGI remake of The Jungle Book.
Meanwhile, Johansson has been busy juggling work and motherhood after the star gave birth to her first baby with fiancé Romain Dauriac on 4 Sept.
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.
