Hollywood
AXN presents back to back seasons of Orphan Black
MUMBAI: It’s time to put on our thinking caps and get mind rushed as one of the most entertaining and popular sci-fi drama Orphan Black is back, right from the beginning. Orphan Black, a highly innovative and imaginative sci-fi TV show returns on AXN starting Season 1 every weeknights at 11 PM.
The series focuses on Sarah Manning, a street smart orphan and a con artist who gets pulled in a compelling conspiracy after witnessing the suicide of a girl who looks just like her. Sarah assumes that girl’s identity, expecting to solve all her problems by cleaning out the dead woman’s savings. Sarah is instead driven into a kaleidoscopic mystery as she realizes – she and the dead woman are clones. Critic’s Choice Television Award winner and Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actress Tatiana Maslany essays the role of the protagonist.
Tatiana Maslany became a household name not just for her character of Sarah Manning but also for having done the impossible – playing all the different clones that feature across various seasons which is no mean feat to achieve.
Sarah also discovers that she has many ‘sister’ clones spread throughout North America and Europe, and that someone is plotting to kill them and her. The show thus also traces through the lives of the multiple clones – Alison, Helena, Cosima, Racheal and many others. All of whom were planted in unsuspecting birth parents and nurtured in completely different circumstances. Two institutions – the Dyad Group (a biotech corporation) and the Proletheans (a secret religious group) takes the story forward as they threat the existence of the clone club.
Every twist and turn leads to a new enemy, a new ally, a new clone and always a new question. Audience’s astounding response to the show’s unique plot and the tremendous performance by Tatiana Maslany have made the show a huge success and Indian audiences are all set to witness back to back seasons of Orphan Black, weeknights at 11 pm exclusively on AXN.
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.
