Welcome to a new-look movie set, where the quiet buzz of the coding floor has replaced the noise of cameras, clapperboards and shouted instructions.
Collective Artist Network, a top talent agency for Bollywood A-listers, has long influenced the careers of real-life superstars. Now, this is digital engineering. At its Bengaluru campus, filmmakers use artificial intelligence tools to create content based on Hindu mythology, a popular genre in India.
There is a scene in a film based on the religious text “Ramayana” in which Lord Hanuman is shown flying carrying a mountain. A show based on a different ancient epic, the “Mahabharata”, depicts Princess Gandhari, who blindfolds herself to marry a blind king.
India makes the most films of any country, and stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan have cult-like followers. But many industry players say changing audience habits, including the rise of streaming, are squeezing production budgets. According to consulting firm Ormax Media, the number of moviegoers is expected to decline from 1.03 billion in 2019 to 832 million in 2025. While box-office sales reached a record $1.4 billion last year, revenue has declined since the pandemic and is dependent on a handful of hits and expensive tickets.
Studios in India are responding by deploying AI on a scale unprecedented elsewhere: creating full-blown AI-generated films; Using AI dubbing to release movies in multiple languages; and re-cutting the endings of older titles to drive additional sales. In the process, they are reshaping the economics of filmmaking, compressing production timelines, and pitting AI-powered efficiency against a recurring problem: audiences often review AI content harshly, even if it sells.
“AI is reducing production costs for traditional filmmaking in genres like mythology and fantasy to one-fifth,” said Rahul Regulapati, head of the collective’s AI studio, known as Gallery5. And production time? “Down to a quarter,” he said.
The approach differs from Hollywood, where union contracts and fear of job displacement have hindered studios’ use of technology. In India, at least one major production house is reviewing its entire library for AI re-releases, and Google, Microsoft and Nvidia have made early bets by partnering with local filmmakers.
But Reuters is detailing for the first time the extent to which India’s film industry is reorganizing itself around AI and economics. Reuters visited two AI studios and tested filmmaking equipment, —attended film festivals and interviewed 25 people for this story, including directors, studio heads, industry executives and startup personalities. American and British studios have experimented with AI filmmaking – The first full-length AI animated feature is being produced in 2024 and an AI-powered immersive version of “The Wizard of Oz” last year.
But India’s filmmakers have ambitions on a different level, said Dominic Lees, a film and AI researcher at Britain’s University of Reading. “If they can demonstrate, AI will revolutionize filmmaking in India,” he said. The pivot to AI broadly reflects India’s acceptance of technology.
Last year, Reuters detailed India’s claim that the shift towards AI would create ample opportunities to address short-term disruption. According to analysis by consulting firm EY, AI can increase revenues of Indian media and entertainment companies by 10% and reduce costs by 15% in the medium term.
Vikram Malhotra, founder of Abundantia Entertainment, told Reuters that the Bollywood production house, which recently announced an investment in an $11 million AI studio, is building its AI capability from the ground up and expects AI-generated or assisted content to account for a third of its revenue within three years.
Last year, India’s Eros Media World re-released its 2013 hit, “Raanjhanaa” with an AI-altered twist. It replaced a tragic ending, in which the hero died, with a happy ending where he opens his eyes to the surprise of his lover, who smiles through the tears.
There was a reaction to the rewrite. Lead actor Dhanush, who goes by one name professionally, said on
Nevertheless, the re-release of “Raanjhanaa” attracted audiences. India’s largest cinema chain, PVR Inox, told Reuters that 35% of available tickets for the Tamil-language version of the film were sold during its release month, August. This was 12 percentage points higher than the average for 2025.
Now, Eros is moving forward: Its group CEO Pradeep Dwivedi told Reuters the studio is reviewing its 3,000-title catalog “to identify candidates for AI-assisted adaptation.” The group’s Indian unit, Eros International, last year warned of “competition from digital platforms” as its consolidated annual revenue from operations fell 44%.
“It’s both a revenue opportunity and a creative renewal strategy,” Dwivedi said of the AI rewrite plan. In Hollywood, such changes would face obstacles. Under an agreement with the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, studios cannot digitally alter or create digital replicas of an actor’s performance without the artist’s consent. The Directors Guild of America contract prohibits studios from using AI for creative decisions without consulting the director and prohibits AI from employing its members.
In contrast, Indian studios are pushing for aggressive experiments using AI, including in Hindu mythology – big business in a country with millions of devout followers. The collective is planning eight AI-generated titles focused on deities like Hanuman, Krishna, Durga and Kali.
JioStar, a media joint venture between billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Walt Disney, is airing an AI-generated adaptation of the ancient Hindu epic “Mahabharata” — the first episodic series to emerge from the collective’s cinematic AI lab.
The AI rendition of the story of a dynastic war between princes has been viewed at least 26.5 million times on JioStar’s streaming platform since its release in October, the company told Reuters. An earlier TV adaptation attracted 200 million viewers between 1988 and 1990. However, the show has faced a lackluster reception with the audience. “Mahabharata” has a rating of 1.4 out of 10 on IMDb, with some reviewers criticizing lip-sync issues and others saying that some sequences felt low-quality or lacking authenticity due to unnatural styling.
Alok Jain, a senior executive at JioStar, told Reuters that the response “has been a mix of praise and healthy debate, which is natural for any ambitious creative leap.” He said JioStar is exploring creating original stories in AI format.
Some industry people lament the rise of AI in film production. American writer and producer Jonathan Taplin, who has worked with Hollywood studios, said that using AI to create entire feature films “is an insult to the entire history of cinema.”
He said, “It will fill your theaters and screens with formulaic sloppiness.”
Dubbing may offer an easier path to acceptance of AI in film.
India’s 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects divide the country into micro-markets, making dubbing essential for any film to become a national blockbuster. Audiences have long been concerned about mismatched lip movements – a problem that AI has begun to address.
During a Reuters tour of NeuralGarage, an AI startup in Bengaluru that provides dubbing for top studios such as Yash Raj Films, co-founder Subhabrata Debnath displayed a clip of an AI-generated character speaking in English. He then put on a German audio track, and within minutes the character was speaking fluent German, lips and jaws moving in unison.
Debnath said the technique preserves “the person’s performance, identity and speaking style” while altering the face enough to make the dubbing look natural.
NeuralGarage’s AI technology was used last year to dub Yash Raj’s Hindi film “War 2” into South India’s Telugu language. The production house did not respond to Reuters questions.
Global tech giants also want a piece of the action. Google partnered with Bollywood director Shakun Batra in August to create a five-part cinematic series using its Veo 3 video-generation and Flow AI tools to experiment with AI-powered filmmaking. Mira Lane, Google’s vice president of technology and society, told Reuters that AI could also allow independent artists to create complex sequences that “may otherwise be out of reach due to budget or logistical constraints.”
The Collective is working with Microsoft, which told Reuters it is providing AI computing power to help “shape the next wave of global storytelling” through such collaborations.
To circumvent the limitations of standard text prompts, The Collective uses a hybrid of physical recording and digital animation. Actors wear motion-capture suits equipped with sensors to record body movements as 3D data, while smartphones capture facial expressions. This data is fed into the AI pipeline, allowing fine-grained control over AI-generated characters.
The waves are reaching beyond the studio. Globally, festivals dedicated to screening AI-generated shorts have proliferated in cities including Los Angeles, Cannes and Barcelona. India’s first event took place in November at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, where young storytellers walked the red carpet accompanied by a dancing robot.
And in February, Nvidia shared the stage with aspiring AI filmmakers at the second edition of India’s AI Film Festival in New Delhi. Nvidia global vice president Pradeep Gupta told the audience that the company is working to reduce computing costs so that anyone can “build something significant without investing a lot of money” in production.
Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap told Reuters he is concerned about the rise of AI in filmmaking in India and the lack of guardrails around its use. But he reluctantly accepted the economic case for studios deploying the technology.
“In India, cinema is not about art. It is completely business, so studios are going to use it to make mythological films,” Kashyap said about AI. “Our audience is crazy about it.”
