The First AI Movie Is Coming from Bollywood in 2025

By now, you’ve likely seen the short videos produced using AI video-generation tools, which make it possible to create photorealistic clips of several seconds from a simple text prompt. An Indian startup is now pushing the technology to its limits: It plans to release, by the end of 2025, a feature-length movie created almost entirely with generative AI tools.

Intelliflicks Studios, based in Chandigarh, is the brainchild of author Khushwant Singh and Gurdeep Pall, president of AI strategy at Qualtrics, in Seattle, and former corporate vice president of AI incubations at Microsoft. The studio is creating a screen adaption of Singh’s 2014 novel Maharaja in Denims, which tells the story of a young man in the present day who believes he is a reincarnation of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the 19th-century Sikh Empire.

Singh says studio bosses in Bollywood have twice purchased film rights for the book, but the complexity and cost of telling a story spanning several time periods meant the movie never got made. So when Pall, a childhood friend of Singh’s, told him about the rapidly improving capabilities of AI video generators, the pair decided to join forces and create what they say will be the first feature-length generative AI movie. “We are trying to take a pathbreaking step to show the capability of the technology,” says Singh.

What generative AI tools are they using?

The company is using a suite of commercial and open-source AI tools to make the movie, according to Pall, and is developing its own software to manage the novel workflows. It’s using image-generation models to produce character designs, scenes, and objects that are then fed into video-generation models. Other AI tools are used to create audio, lip-sync dialogue, and sharpen images. Pall says his team is also using conventional video production tools for simpler jobs like matching lighting and color between scenes.

The developers are primarily using pretrained models, and Pall says they have also fine-tuned some models on
India-specific data. But in some cases, fine-tuning isn’t enough. One scene involves a woman performing a dance traditional in northern India, called a Kathak dance, and Pall says that gathering enough data to train a model would be impractical. Instead, they plan to record a real Kathak performance and use AI to swap in the face of an AI-generated character.

Intelliflicks Studios released this trailer for the AI-generated feature film that it plans to release this year. Intelliflicks Studios

The biggest challenge the team has faced is consistency, according to Pall. Generative AI is inherently probabilistic, so a model’s response to a particular prompt will be different every time. This can make things tricky when a character must have the same appearance throughout a feature-length film.

This challenge became significantly more manageable in the last year, as many models can…