Movies
Kochadaiiyaan to release globally on 11 April
MUMBAI: Eros International Media Ltd (Eros International), a leading global company in the Indian film entertainment industry will release the eagerly awaited futuristic fantasy event of the year ‘KOCHADAIIYAAN – The Legend, a Mediaone Global Entertainment Limited production, directed by Soundarya Rajnikanth Ashwin, worldwide in cinemas on April 11, 2014.
Kochadaiiyaan features the unique visual mastery of Photorealistic Performance Capture technology for the very first time in the history of an Indian film. This technology has been previously seen in Hollywood masterpieces as Avatar, Tin Tin and Beowulf.
Kochadaiiyaan is an epic dramatization of good versus evil starring South Indian megastar Rajinikanth in a double role in a larger than life depiction. Also starring in the grand production is leading lady Deepika Padukone together with South India’s leading stars R. Sharath kumar, Nazar, Aadi, Shobana and Rukmini.
Providing the musical score is Oscar-winning composer A R Rahman, whose list of credits includes a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and two Academy Awards for his outstanding musical contribution for the multi-Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire.
Announcing the release of the film, Ms.Soundarya Rajnikanth Ashwin, the Director of the film said, “Following last year’s celebrations of India’s film making centenary we view the release of Kochadaiiyaan as part of the next steps of Indian cinema. For the first time a full length feature has been made using performance capture technology in India and I truly hope this creates a whole alternate film making avenue apart from live action films in our country”.
Mr. Sunil Lulla, Managing Director, Eros International Media Ltd added, “Eros is proud to present this magnum opus with Rajinikanth, which will take the Indian film industry to the next level. We are confident that this will be a landmark film in world cinema as a result of the ground breaking technology used. The film will be released in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Bengali and Punjabi in India and overseas in more than 6,000 screens. We will be releasing an English version internationally as well”.
In a major brand tie-up, Eros International and Mediaone have also tied up with Karbonn Mobile to launch 1 million Kochadaiiyaan branded mobile phones to celebrate the release of the film. The exclusive Karbonn ‘Kochadaiiyaan’ mobile phones will have screen savers and must-have images from the film along with the trailer and the signature tune of the film. These special Kochadaiiyaan mobile phones are intended to launch in February 2014, during the audio launch of the film.
Kochadaiiyaan was shot extensively at Pinewood Studios in the UK with a team of world-class technical experts including the London based Centroid Studios, a state of the art facility for Full Body Motion Capture, which has worked on various Hollywood productions including the recent Brad Pitt starrer World War Z as we// as Pirates of the Caribbean, lronman 2 and Harry Potter, and Counter Punch Studios from Los Angeles, who have been behind successes such as Beverly Hills Chihuahua. They worked in collaboration with Faceware Technologies, United Kingdom, who have worked on The Mummy 3 and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the Facial Capturing technology. A team of technical experts from South India and China have worked on this technology, with the best production facilities in London, for the overall completion of the project.
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.
