Hollywood
Sony Le Plex HD to premiere Philippe Petit’s ‘The Walk’
MUMBAI: “My dream is to be the most glorious wire walker in history,” so said Philippe Petit.
There may have been dozens step on the moon, but only one man has ever walked between the World Trade Center Towers, 1,350 feet above the ground. Bringing the engaging real-life depiction of the wire-walk between the Twin Towers, Sony Le Plex HD is all geared up to air the premiere of The Walk. The movie will broadcast on 20 November 2016 at 1 pm and 9 pm.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the movie chronicles the courage and belief of 24-year-old Petit played by Joseph Gorden-Levitt along with actor Ben Kingsley as the worthy mentor.
The plot revolves around a young French high-wire artist, whose heart is set on the Twin Towers in US, aspiring to walk the void between the two someday. His unnerving passion leads him to celebrated high wire artist Papa Rudy and beautiful musician Annie. Together, they resolve to accomplish the most illicit yet lyrical piece of performance in history.
A visual spectacle in every sense of the term, The Walk was applauded across the world for outstanding visual effects. With rigorous lessons from Petit himself, Gorden-Levitt emerged as an actor of athletic finesse with just eight days to portray the story of man who believes that art can make you fly.
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.
