How India Became the World's AI Film Lab
Bal Tanhaji AI
Courtesy
Picture the climactic ending of James Cameron’s Titanic: Kate Winslet as Rose, promising to “never let go” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack tragically succumbs to hypothermia in the icy Atlantic sea.
Now imagine, instead of slipping beneath the waves, Jack revives, hauls himself aboard the lifeboat, pushes back his floppy hair and embraces Rose — so that the duo may sail away to live happily ever after.
This alternate ending could surely be achieved, in relatively convincing fashion, using some combination of the best visual effects and artificial intelligence tools currently available. But what would the industry reaction be if the Walt Disney Company, rights holder of Titanic, were to alter the beloved classic in just this way and then re-release it in cinemas — over the vocal objections of DiCaprio and Cameron, no less?
A situation of just this kind played out in the Indian entertainment industry last year.
Romantic drama Raanjhanaa, produced by Eros International and directed by Aanand L. Rai, was one of India‘s sleeper hits of 2013. Made for about $3.5 million, it earned $11 million at the Indian box office and became something of a cult classic in the years that followed. The film features Tamil superstar Dhanush and Bollywood royalty Sonam Kapoor in a wrenching romantic tragedy set in Varanasi and New Delhi. Dhanush plays Kundan, a Hindu boy whose lifelong, unrequited love for Zoya (Kapoor), a Muslim woman with political ambitions and another man in her heart, drives him into a spiral of deception, self-destruction, and sacrifice that ends with his heartbreaking death by assassination in the film’s final moments.
Last August, Eros International released a new Tamil version of the movie with its final scenes altered with AI reconstructions so that the romantic lead survives. The new closing sequence — fully synthetic — ends with the opposite of the original’s tragic note, as Dhanush’s character wakes up and smiles in a hospital bed, having survived the assassination attempt.
The film’s director and star were vehement in their opposition to the re-release — “This alternate ending has stripped the film of its very soul, and the concerned parties went ahead with it despite my clear objection,” Dhanush wrote on social media, adding that AI alterations “threaten the integrity of storytelling and the legacy of cinema” — but their protests proved insuffient to stop the release.
Eros responded forcefully, contending that as the “sole financier, producer and rights holder of Raanjhanaa,” it is the “legal author of the film” under Indian copyright law, and thus free to do with the finished work whatever it pleases.
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“It was quite painful,” Rai, known for directing some of India’s biggest romantic dramas of the past decade, says of the experience. “I was hurt that the ending of my film was being changed and that someone was playing with the emotions in my work.”
The consensus within the industry was that Eros’ contention was probably legally sound, no matter how morally dubious its treatment of its creative collaborators might seem. The crux comes down to contacting and bargaining power, and most industry agreements in India are currently written in an all-encompassing fashion, lacking specifics, and allowing studios to exploit a work across all modes, mediums, formats and technologies, whether they exist today or are developed in the future.
“In many cases, an actor’s [or director’s] services are rendered on a work-for-hire basis, which means the studio becomes the first owner of the material created,” says Priyanka Khimani, a leading entertainment and music lawyer based in Mumbai. “A studio could argue that it is simply modifying a character that belongs to the film.
The only factor that seemed to give Eros pause was the public reaction from fans of the original Raanjhanaa, scores of whom slammed the AI remix on social media (a non-negligible number of others, however, went to see the re-release out of curiosity, with some even posting that they preferred the happy ending).
Pradeep Dwivedi, Group CEO of Eros Media World, says the studio never intended to “replace” the original film.
“What we explored was a clearly labelled AI-assisted alternate interpretation,” Dwivedi tells THR via email, describing the move simply as an attempt to see whether new technologies could allow audiences to revisit familiar stories in novel ways. But the company nonetheless appears to have become more cautious in the wake of the Raanjhanaa episode. The Eros CEO says the episode le