While Hollywood remains locked in debate over whether artificial intelligence belongs on a film set at all, India has already moved past that question, emerging as one of the world’s most active testing grounds for AI-driven filmmaking, according to a recent Hollywood Reporter feature.
Unlike the US, India has no empowered industry unions pushing for caution around AI in entertainment, and, much like America, has yet to introduce dedicated legislation regulating AI use or protecting jobs in the space. That gap has left studios, startups and individual filmmakers free to experiment with the technology openly and, some would argue, without much restraint, weaving AI into nearly every stage of the production pipeline.
Dipankar Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO of Mumbai-based Studio Blo, estimates that around 80% of Indian films already rely heavily on AI at the pre-visualisation stage. His company has built its own AI platform, named Kubrick after the celebrated director, designed to help filmmakers who are not necessarily fluent in prompting AI tools navigate the technology more easily.
Studio Blo, founded in 2024 and now operating across Mumbai, Dubai, London and Los Angeles, is currently co-producing ‘Warlord’, an ambitious science-fiction series written and directed by veteran Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and created entirely using generative AI tools. The show follows an interdimensional warrior who cannot die because his lover, based in another dimension, pulls him to safety whenever he faces mortal danger. Kapur has said sequences that would once have taken months to produce using traditional VFX are now being completed in a fraction of that time, and he currently serves as Chairperson of Studio Blo’s Board of AI Ethics and Creative Stewardship. The studio’s broader body of work has included AI-generated advertising campaigns and celebrity-cloning projects, including a campaign featuring cricketer Hardik Pandya, alongside collaborations with filmmakers including Rajkumar Hirani, Atlee, Sudhir Mishra and Rohit Shetty.
Mukherjee has argued that AI should be understood not simply as a tool but as a new form of infrastructure that changes how stories are approached altogether, while maintaining that Studio Blo’s own philosophy remains human-first, with directors, cinematographers and designers still central to shaping each project. Even so, the pace and scale of AI adoption across India’s film industry, largely unshackled by the guardrails still being debated in Hollywood, is being closely watched as a possible preview of where the wider global film industry may be headed.
