“Mark my words. I say this to you today… We are not far away from a one-man-created blockbuster.”
Vikram Malhotra, founder and CEO of Abundantia Entertainment, the studio behind Breathe: Into the Shadows, Jalsa, and Sherni, and former chief operating officer at Viacom18 Motion Pictures, believes AI will upend entertainment.
“It’s now possible for one person alone to make a two-and-a-half-hour film, at the scale of Game of Thrones, in 10 days,” added Saumil Gandhi, founder of AI-native film studio Xanadu, pointing towards a “very near future” in which a 70-person film crew becomes a team of seven.
The bravado has a harder edge. The Hindi film industry has been in financial distress since Covid: nine of every 10 films released flop, by industry estimates; star fees can swallow a hit’s economics; and producers who cannot self-finance often turn to an unorganised lending market charging 18–60% a year.
The apparent recovery masks a problem. Cinema footfall barely grew in 2025, and Bollywood is turning to AI for more than cheaper, quicker filmmaking: it wants some control back over punishing economics.
That hope is reshaping how films get made. It is becoming increasingly viable to keep the core creative talent—the director, writer, editor—and outsource technical work to AI. The technology can touch the whole value chain, from a faint idea to the final release, generating shots from scratch or, mixed with live-action, producing hybrid cinema.
Malhotra agrees that the beauty of the art form lies in its “connect” with its audience, and that stories still need to be built around “core” human emotions and lived experiences. Yet he is bullish on extensive AI use.
Since October 2025, his studio has launched a dedicated AI-content division, aiON, and, in February 2026, partneredVarietyAI Film Studio Launched by India’s Abundantia Entertainment, InVideo with Invideo, an AI video-generation platform, to commit Rs 100 crore to an AI-driven film production studio.
Bollywood isn’t the first industry to have this reckoning. Three years ago, Hollywood’s writers and actors went on historic labour strikesThe GuardianHow Hollywood writers triumphed over AI – and why it matters, putting guardrails around AI use in creative work.