Hollywood
‘The Jungle Book’ to premiere on three Star channels on 27 November
MUMBAI: Star Movies has been home to the biggest blockbusters that have enthralled audiences over the years. Star Movies and Star Movies Select HD are all set to bring the beloved childhood classic – Disney’s The Jungle Book to audiences in India.
Some stories leave a lasting impression on our minds while some fade away. Jungle Book is the former; a story that has kept us spellbound with every adaptation, be it TV or film. Academy Award winning director Jon Favreau brings to life Disney’s The Jungle Book as a benchmark of how CGI films have developed over the years. Disney’s The Jungle Book will premiere on Star Movies, Star Movies HD and Star Movies Select HD on 27 November (Sunday,) at 1pm and 9pm.
The film’s cast includes three Oscar winners: Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong’o and Christopher Walken; and an Oscar nominee: Bill Murray. Featuring Neel Sethi as Mowgli with voices from Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Scarlet Johansson, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o and many more, the film rings true to Rudyard Kipling’s timeless tale. All the characters in the movie played an instrumental role in helping Mowgli make the jungle his home. Whether it was Raksha who took care of him as her own; Bagheera who protected him from the sinister Shere Khan or the free spirited Baloo- they formed a family like no other. Disney’s The Jungle Book is about values as much as it is about the grandeur of film-making.
With a worldwide gross of over US$ 963.7 million, the film is the year’s highest grossing Hollywood film in India and second biggest grossing film of 2016 (Hindi and English including).
Visually stunning, Jon Favreau’s re-telling of a classic pays tribute to the original adventure of one of your most beloved childhood stories.
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.
