Artificial intelligence is transforming the world’s biggest film industry
Artificial intelligence has arrived in Bollywood, and it is changing the game in ways few expected. What once seemed like a distant sci-fi scenario is now reality inside studios in Bengaluru, where the quiet tapping of keyboards has replaced the chaotic noise of cameras, clapperboards, and directors shouting instructions to massive crews.
While Hollywood still debates the limits of using the technology due to union contracts and concerns about job displacement, Indian cinema went in the opposite direction: it picked up the pace and put AI at the center of its filmmaking pipeline. And the numbers are impressive. Costs dropping to one-fifth of what they used to be, production timelines shrinking to a quarter, and studios reviewing entire catalogs to find opportunities for re-releases powered by generative technology.
This is not science fiction — it is happening right now. 🎬 But not everything is pure excitement. Behind the eye-popping viewership numbers and the billion-dollar bets from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia on the Indian market, there is a growing debate around quality, authenticity, and the role of human creativity in this new model. What the world’s largest film industry by production volume is building with this technology could redefine not just how movies are made, but how stories are told for billions of people.
Silent sets and digital characters in Bengaluru
Collective Artists Network, one of Bollywood’s biggest talent agencies representing top-tier stars, has always worked on building careers for real-life celebrities. Now, that same company is creating digital stars. At its Bengaluru office, filmmakers use artificial intelligence tools to create content based on Hindu mythology — a genre that generates billions in India, a country with millions of devoted followers of these stories.
One of the most ambitious projects is a film based on the religious text Ramayana, which includes a scene of the god Hanuman flying while carrying a mountain. Another project, a series based on the ancient epic Mahabharat, features the princess Gandhari, who blindfolded herself upon marrying a blind king. These projects would have been absurdly expensive using traditional special effects. With AI, costs plummeted.
Rahul Regulapati, who leads the AI studio at Collective known as Galleri5, explained that AI is reducing production costs to one-fifth of what they used to be in traditional production for genres like mythology and fantasy. And production time? It dropped to a quarter of what it was before. Those numbers are significant when you consider that Collective is already planning eight AI-generated titles focused on Hindu deities like Hanuman, Krishna, Durga, and Kali.
To get around the limitations of standard text prompts, the studio uses a hybrid model that combines physical filming with digital animation. Actors wear motion capture suits fitted with sensors to record body movements as 3D data, while smartphones capture facial expressions. That data feeds into the AI pipeline, allowing more refined control over digitally generated characters.
How AI is entering the film production chain
Indian cinema produces more than 1,500 films a year, spread across Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, and several other regional industries that speak different languages and reach entirely distinct audiences. That massive volume of film production has always required heavy infrastructure, huge crews, and budgets that varied widely depending on the language and target region.
But audience habits are shifting. The number of moviegoers dropped from 1.03 billion in 2019 to 832 million in 2025, according to the consulting firm Ormax Media. Although box office sales hit a record $1.4 billion last year, revenue has been unstable since the pandemic and reliant on a handful of major hits and pricier tickets. The rise of streaming is putting significant pressure on production budgets.
What artificial intelligence is doing right now is compressing the production process in a way that, five years ago, would have been considered impossible. Script generation tools, automated editing, soundtrack composition, and even digital set creation are being adopted by studios of every size, from the most independent to the most deep-pocketed. The combination of specialized software with professionals trained to operate these tools has created a hybrid model that is redefining what it means to produce audiovisual content at scale.
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Vikram Malhotra, founder of Abundantia Entertainment — a Bollywood production house that recently announced an $11 million investment in an AI studio — is building his AI capabilities from scratch. He expects AI-generated or AI-assisted content to represent one-third of the company’s revenue within three years. That is a bold bet that shows just how committed the industry is to this direction.
New endings for old dramas
One of the most controversial applications of AI in Indian cinema involves rewriting classic films. Last year, Eros Media World re-released the 2013 hit Raanjhanaa with an AI-generated twist. The original tragic ending, where the protagonist dies, was replaced with a happier conclusion where he opens his eyes to the surprise of his beloved, who smiles through tears.
The reaction was intense. Actor Dhanush, the film’s lead, publicly stated that the AI remake had ripped the soul out of the film and set a deeply concerning precedent for both art and artists. Even so, the re-release attracted audiences. PVR Inox, India’s largest cinema chain, reported that 35% of available tickets for the Tamil-language version were sold during its launch month in August. That was 12 percentage points above the 2025 average.
Now Eros is going further. Pradeep Dwivedi, the group’s CEO, revealed that the studio is reviewing its catalog of 3,000 titles to identify candidates for AI-assisted adaptation. The group’s Indian unit, Eros International, warned last year about competition from digital platforms, as its consolidated annual revenue from operations dropped 44%.
For Dwivedi, this is as much a revenue opportunity as it is a creative renewal strategy. This move to revisit entire catalogs with algorithms that identify which titles have re-release potential through technological enhancements turns forgotten films into commercially viable products once again.
AI dubbing: the passport to new markets
If there is one application of artificial intelligence getting special attention in Indian cinema, it is automated dubbing. India has more than 22 official languages and hundreds of regional dialects, which historically made distributing films across states an expensive and time-consuming process. Dubbing a feature film with human actors into five or six different languages meant hiring casts, renting recording studios, coordinating schedules, and spending weeks in post-production. With AI-powered voice synthesis tools, that same process can be completed in a fraction of the time and cost.
During a visit to NeuralGarage, an AI startup in Bengaluru that provides dubbing services for major studios like Yash Raj Films, co-founder Subhabrata Debnath demonstrated a clip of an AI-generated character speaking English. He then overlaid a German audio track, and within minutes the character was speaking fluent German with lips and jaw fully synchronized. According to Debnath, the technology preserves the performance, identity, and speech style of the person, altering the face just enough for the dubbing to look natural.
NeuralGarage’s technology was used last year to dub the Hindi film War 2, from Yash Raj, into the Telugu language of southern India. The impact of AI dubbing goes far beyond India’s internal borders. Global streaming platforms have already identified that Indian films and series have a loyal audience in markets like Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Middle Eastern countries. The problem was always the language barrier. With AI making dubbing cheaper and faster, the international release window can happen almost simultaneously with the original launch, without the logistical bottleneck that previously delayed the global distribution of regional content. 🌍
Of course, this advancement also raises legitimate questions about authenticity. Fans and critics have debated whether algorithm-generated dubbing can capture the cultural and emotional nuances that make Indian cinema so unique. The intonation, the rhythm of speech, the dramatic pauses that are part of Bollywood’s cinematic language — these are subtle elements that an AI can technically replicate, but that still depend on fine-tuning by human professionals to sound natural. The current consensus among industry experts is that AI works best as an accelerator of the process, not as a complete replacement for the human talent behind narration.
The money behind the transformation
It is no coincidence that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia are putting significant resources into India’s entertainment market. India has a rare combination of factors that makes it extremely attractive for anyone looking to test and scale artificial intelligence solutions applied to audiovisual content: a massive creative industry, a base of highly skilled developers and engineers, a consumer market of more than one billion people, and an institutional willingness to adopt new technologies faster than other countries.
Google partnered with Bollywood director Shakun Batra in August to produce a five-part cinematic series using its Veo 3 video generation and Flow AI tools to experiment with AI-driven filmmaking. Mira Lane, Google’s vice president of technology and society, highlighted that AI can enable independent artists to create complex sequences that would otherwise be out of reach due to budget or logistical constraints.
Microsoft also got in on the action, providing AI computing power to Collective Artists Network with the goal of helping shape the next wave of global storytelling. Nvidia, in turn, shared the stage with aspiring AI filmmakers at the second edition of India’s AI film festival in New Delhi in February. Pradeep Gupta, Nvidia’s global vice president, told the audience that the company is working to bring computing costs down so that anyone can create something substantial without pouring a lot of money into production.
According to analysis from consulting firm EY, AI could increase revenue for Indian media and entertainment companies by 10% and reduce costs by 15% in the medium term. This cycle has implications that go well beyond India. What is being built there could become an exportable model for other emerging film industries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America — regions that also have robust creative output but have historically faced production cost limitations when trying to compete globally. 🔄
The digital Mahabharat and audience reaction
One of the most revealing examples of AI’s current state in Indian cinema is the series Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh. Produced by Collective’s AI studio and distributed by JioStar — a media joint venture between billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Walt Disney — the series is the first episodic production to come out of the studio’s AI filmmaking lab.
The viewership numbers are significant. The adaptation of the epic about a dynastic war between princes has logged at least 26.5 million views since its October launch on JioStar’s streaming platform. For context, a previous television adaptation of the same story attracted 200 million viewers between 1988 and 1990, at a time when television was practically the only home entertainment available.
However, the critical reception was very different from the viewership numbers. The series holds a rating of 1.4 out of 10 on IMDb, with critics pointing to lip-sync issues, sequences that look low-quality, and a lack of authenticity due to a stylization that feels artificial. Alok Jain, a senior executive at JioStar, characterized the response as a mix of appreciation and healthy debate — something natural for any ambitious creative leap. He said JioStar is exploring the creation of original stories in AI format.
The gap between viewership and critical reception reveals a pattern that could define the future of AI in entertainment: audiences watch, but they do not always approve. This is a dilemma that studios around the world will have to face as the technology becomes more present in content production.
Hollywood versus Bollywood: opposite approaches
The difference in stance between Hollywood and Bollywood when it comes to AI is striking. In the United States, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has established clear rules: studios cannot digitally alter an actor’s performance or create a digital replica without the artist’s informed consent. The Directors Guild of America contract prohibits studios from using AI for creative decisions without consulting the director and prevents AI from doing the work of its members.
In India, those regulatory barriers practically do not exist. Studios are running aggressive experiments with the technology without the same contractual restrictions that limit their American counterparts. That does not mean, however, that there are no critical voices. Anurag Kashyap, a respected Bollywood director, said he is concerned about the growth of AI in Indian filmmaking and the lack of safeguards around its use. But he reluctantly admitted that the economic argument for studios adopting the technology is hard to dispute.
In Kashyap’s view, cinema in India is not about art — it is purely business — and that is why studios will use AI to make mythological content, because audiences are hungry for that type of production. On the other side of the debate, Jonathan Taplin, an American writer and producer who has worked with major Hollywood studios, was more blunt, calling the use of AI to create entire feature films an affront to the entire history of cinema and warning that the practice will fill theaters and screens with formulaic, low-quality content.
Dominic Lees, a cinema and AI researcher at the University of Reading in Britain, offered a different perspective. According to him, the ambitions of Indian filmmakers are on another level. If they can deliver what they are promising, the shift in AI-driven filmmaking will move to India.
AI film festivals and the new creative ecosystem
The ripple effects of this transformation are spreading well beyond the studios. Globally, festivals dedicated to showcasing AI-generated short films have popped up in cities like Los Angeles, Cannes, and Barcelona. India’s first AI film festival took place in November at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, where young storytellers walked the red carpet alongside a dancing robot.
In February, Nvidia shared the stage with aspiring AI filmmakers at the second edition of the AI film festival in New Delhi. These events are building a community of creators who see the technology not as a threat, but as a tool for democratizing audiovisual production. For independent filmmakers who previously lacked the resources to produce content with sophisticated visual effects, AI is opening doors that were completely shut.
Human creativity has not left the building
In the middle of all this technological excitement, it is important not to lose sight of what the professionals in Indian cinema themselves are saying. Directors, screenwriters, and actors who have already worked on projects with artificial intelligence support describe the experience in much more nuanced terms than the headlines suggest. In practice, AI works as a highly efficient collaborator for repetitive and technical tasks, freeing creators to focus on the decisions that truly define a project’s identity — things like character development, theme selection, and building the emotional core of a narrative.
What is really at stake in this debate is not whether artificial intelligence will replace filmmakers, but how the industry will establish healthy boundaries for the use of the technology without stifling creative experimentation. Indian actors’ and screenwriters’ unions have already started discussing collective agreements that include specific clauses about AI use, following the path that Hollywood professionals opened after the 2023 strikes. The difference is that, in the Indian context, negotiations seem to be happening in a more collaborative and less confrontational way — perhaps because the industry as a whole recognizes that the technology is driving market growth, not just replacing jobs.
India’s move toward AI reflects a broader attitude the country has toward technology. India is betting that embracing artificial intelligence will create enough opportunities to offset the short-term disruptions. This philosophy runs through not just entertainment, but sectors like customer service, manufacturing, and financial services.
At the end of the day, what Indian cinema is showing the world is that adopting artificial intelligence in film production does not have to be a traumatic or polarizing process. It can actually be an opportunity to expand the reach of stories that would otherwise never reach certain audiences, to lower barriers to entry for independent creators, and to reinvent an industrial model that, despite being productive, has always carried enormous structural inefficiencies. The path is still being built, but the first steps already show that technology and human creativity can walk together without one having to eliminate the other. 🎥
