Artificial Intelligence is reshaping Bollywood, from AI-generated actors and scripts to resurrected stars, forcing the industry to rethink creativity, ownership, and the future of storytelling.
In March 2025, when Vivek Anchalia dropped the trailer for Naisha, he called it Bollywood’s first feature length film with fully AI-powered visuals. What began as AI music videos evolved into a 90-minute theatrical feature with romantic leads—Naisha Bose and Zain Kapoor—and created entirely by AI. Like all romantic Bollywood films, their love story spans idyllic locales in India, France, and Switzerland.
But it’s not roses all the way. “AI actors falter where real ones often shine,” Anchalia was quoted as saying. “For instance, they can look flawless but their eyes don’t reflect pain.” No surprise then that Naisha, slated for a May 2025 release, has yet to hit the screens. As Anchalia adds, the technol- ogy shifted drastically in March, April, and May. “Whatever we had done earlier was not good enough even in our eyes.”
Meanwhile, Maharaja in Denims, based on Khushwant Singh’s novel, is also racing to become India’s first fully AI-generated feature. Even tech giant Google has partnered with directors like Shakun Batra for an innovative, AI-driven storytelling campaign. But how did AI emerge as the rising star of Bollywood? The truth is that shifting audience habits are squeezing Bollywood. According to consulting firm Ormax Media, the total number of theater admissions dropped from 1.03 billion in 2019 to 832 million in 2025, while streaming competition intensified. Studios are responding with AI. Abundantia Entertainment is building a $11 million AI studio and expects AI-generated or assisted content to account for one-third of its revenue within three years. Eros Media World is reviewing its 3,000-title catalog “to identify candidates for AI-assisted adaptation” after revenue fell by 44%.
Special effects to storytelling
AI is no longer just a post-production tool for de-aging or dubbing. It’s writing scenes, generating actors, composing scores, and forcing a 100-year-old industry to confront questions of authorship, consent, and truth. The economics are blunt. AI can slash production costs to one-fifth and timelines to a quarter for mythology and fantasy genres. Collective Artists’ Network has announced Chiranjeevi Hanuman – The Eternal. Eros has launched a creator app, Eros Universe, which was trained on its 30-year library. It lets users make AI content.
In 2025, Eros went so far as to resurrect a dead hero through an AI-tweaked climax! The studio re-released the Tamil version of the 2013 hit Raanjhanaa, this time with a happy ending: The protagonist Kundan, played by Tamil superstar Dhanush, opens his eyes lying on a hospital bed, instead of dying from his injuries like in the original film. The move, which left the actor and director Aanand L Rai fuming, has sparked a huge debate over creative control and ethical implications. A deeply disturbed Dhanush said that the AI remake had “stripped the film of its very soul” and set a “deeply concerning precedent for both art and artistes.” Director Aanand L. Rai was blunter. Terming it as a dystopian experiment, he said AI is “not there to change the past.” What’s worse, it was done without their consent. Filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, reacting to AI-generated films, posted: “So it begins… Who needs writers and directors when it’s ‘Made in AI’?”
On his part, as reported in the media, Eros Group CEO Pradeep Dwivedi calls AI rewrites “both a revenue opportunity and a creative renewal strategy.” He asserts that it was a creative and alternate reimagining of the ending, not a replacement—and since they are the sole producer, financier, and exclusive copyright holder under Indian law, they hold the rights to adapt, reimagine, and release alternate edits of their content.
Who owns an AI performance?
Unlike Hollywood, Bollywood has no union rules blocking digital alteration of performances. SAG-AFTRA bars studios from changing an actor’s perfor mance without consent; the DGA prevents AI from doing directors’ work. India has no equivalent. That’s why, one industry executive said, Bollywood is “pushing into aggressive experiments.” Lawyer Priyanka Khimani, in Hindustan Times, notes there’s no “framework specific to AI,” but the Copyright Act gives “sufficient protection” for authors to enforce rights. Still, “the absence of a codified legal framework governing AI’s usage in creative domains does create somewhat of a vacuum.”
Most Bollywood contracts as of now predate AI and talk nothing of digital replicas. Globally acclaimed cinematographer-director Santosh Sivan is busy promoting the historical Raja Shivaji, his latest project as cinematographer, but he managed to take a break to tell Khabar that “AI will slowly but surely be embraced by Indian cinema. It’s still in its infancy, but change is bound to happen. See how fast film disappeared and got replaced by digital.” Sivan is perhaps the best person to talk about AI taking over Bollywood. He had in 2022 made a film, Jack N’ Jill, which explores a unique human-AI experiment where a young scientist tests his AI program on a vulnerable woman.
Filmmaker Shekhar Kapoor Cinematographer and director Santosh Sivan Writer and director Rita Das goes a step further, hailing AI as a democratic technology, which he says will help new and independent filmmakers to make high quality films without huge budgets. Rita Das, an upcoming Bollywood writer and director, echoed Shekhar’s views when she spoke to Khabar: “AI has come as a boon to new filmmakers like me as it helps us to focus on storytelling while making production more efficient and affordable. I am collaborating with talented directors like Raghav and Krish for a project which I have written, and thanks to AI, it is being executed within a controlled budget.”
Bollywood has always sold dreams. The question for 2027 is whether those dreams will still be human. The Economic Times has predicted that the proportion of Indian filmmakers using AI, currently at 15-20%, could rise to as high as 50% within the next three years. “AI for speed, humans for soul,” as Sony’s Pankaj Kumar Mishra has pointed out. The industry’s next blockbuster may depend on keeping that ratio right.
Gitanjali Chak, who lives in Bengaluru, is a longtime host of the Bollywood Buzz column in Khabar.