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New Delhi, India – What if Michael had died instead of Sonny in The Godfather? Or if Rose had shared the debris plank, and Jack hadn’t been left to freeze in the Atlantic in Titanic*?
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Eros International, one of India’s largest production houses, with more than 4,000 films in its catalogue, has decided to explore this sort of what-if scenario. It has re-released one of its major hits, Raanjhanaa, a 2013 romantic drama, in cinemas – but has used artificial intelligence (AI) to change its tragic end, in which the male lead dies.
In the AI-altered version, Kundan (played by popular actor Dhanush), a Hindu man who has a doomed romance with a Muslim woman, lives. But the film’s director, Aanand L Rai, is furious.
“The idea that our work can be taken and modified by a machine, then dressed up as innovation, is deeply disrespectful,” Rai said, adding that the entire film crew had been kept in the dark about the re-release.
“What makes it worse is the complete ease and casualness with which it’s been done,” said Rai. “It is a reckless takeover that strips the work of its intent, its context, and its soul.”
This is the first time a film studio has re-released a movie with AI alterations, anywhere in the world, and it has also caused an uproar among critics, filmmakers and film lovers.
Here is what we know so far about why this move has been so controversial, and what the legal and ethical issues are.
How has the film been altered?
Eros International, a prominent film studio, has re-released a Tamil-dubbed version of the film, Raanjhanaa, titled Ambikapathy, with an alternate, AI-generated ending.
This altered version, which significantly deviates from the original film’s climax, screened at cinemas in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, on August 1.
At the end of the original movie, the lead male character, Kundan, lies dead, covered in bruises from his injuries, in a hospital with his lover sitting by his side, crying. In the AI-altered ending, however, Kundan does not die. Instead, he opens his eyes and starts to stand up.
How have people reacted to the re-release?
The release of the AI-altered version prompted immediate objections from the film’s original creators. Dhanush, a Tamil actor, issued a statement noting that “this alternate ending stripped the film of its soul” and that the re-release had “completely disturbed” him.
With its changed ending, Ranjhaanna is “not the film I committed to 12 years ago”, he said. The actor added that the use of AI to alter films “is a deeply concerning precedent for both art and artists [that] threatens the integrity of storytelling and the legacy of cinema”.
Rai, the director, shared a detailed note on Instagram condemning the move. “Let me say this as clearly as I can: I do not support or endorse the AI-altered version … It is unauthorised. And whatever it claims to be, it is not the film we intended, or made.”
“This was never just a film to us. It was shaped by human hands, human flaws, and human feeling,” Rai added. “To cloak a film’s emotional legacy in a synthetic cape without consent is not a creative act. It’s an abject betrayal of everything we built.”
Richard Allen, professor of film and media art at City University of Hong Kong, said it seems inevitable that AI-altering will become a mainstream method of filmmaking in global film industries.
“If producers think they can make more money out of old content by using AI, they will do so,” Allen told Al Jazeera.
Is AI-altering legal?
Rai has said that he is investigating legal options to challenge the re-release of this movie.
Eros International insists that its actions are perfectly legal, however, and has refused to retract the re-release.
“This re-release is not a replacement – it is a creative reinterpretation, clearly labelled and transparently positioned,” said Pradeep Dwivedi, chief executive of Eros International Media.
Dwivedi noted that under Indian copyright law, the producer of a film (in this case, Eros International) is deemed its author and primary rights-holder, meaning that the production house is the first owner of copyright for the film.
He said the film studio is “the exclusive producer and copyright holder, holds full legal and moral rights” under Indian laws. He described the alternate ending to the movie as “a new emotional lens to today’s audiences”.
The studio, which has released more than 4,000 movies globally, will “embrace generative AI as the next frontier in responsible storytelling”, Dwivedi said, adding that Eros International is “uniquely positioned to bridge cinematic legacy with future-ready formats”.
What about the ethics of this?
Mayank Shekhar, an Indian film critic, said the real issue with AI-altering is one of ethics: doing it without the expressed consent of the creators – writer, director and actors – involved.
“What’s left then is simply the legalese of who owns the copyright, or who paid for the product, and is hence the sole producer, and therefore the owner of the work,” Shekhar said. “Technically, I suppose, or so it seems, what Eros has done isn’t illegal – it’s certainly unethical.”
In his statement, Eros International’s Dwivedi said that every era of cinema has faced the clash between “Luddites and Progressives”. He added: “When sound replaced silence, when colour replaced black-and-white, when digital challenged celluloid, and now, when AI meets narrative.”
Dwivedi insisted that reimagining the movie’s ending was not “artificial storytelling,” but “augmented storytelling, a wave of the future”.
Has AI been used to alter films before?
AI has not been used to alter the storyline of an existing movie by its own producers or crew for re-release before this.
However, it has been used for post-production purposes in movies – such as voice dubbing or computer-generated imagery (CGI) enhancements. Its use was a flashpoint in Hollywood during the labour protests of 2023, which resulted in new guidelines for the use of the technology.
In an interview, The Brutalist’s Oscar-nominated editor, David Jancso, said that the production had used a Ukrainian software company, Respeecher, to make the lead actors, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, sound more “authentic” when they spoke Hungarian in the film.
Similarly, filmmaker David Fincher supervised a 4K restoration of his celebrated crime-thriller, “Se7en” for its 30th anniversary this year, using AI to correct technical flaws in focus and colour.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, said last month that the company had used generative AI to produce visual effects for the first time on screen in its original series, El Eternauta, or The Eternaut. Netflix has also been exploring the use of trailers personalised for subscribers’ user profiles.
Reuters reported that Netflix had also tested AI to synchronise actors’ lip movements with dubbed dialogue to “improve the viewing experience”, quoting company sources.
Will AI alterations become the norm in cinema?
Allen said the alteration to Raanjhanaa felt different from the way AI has been used to enhance movies in the past. “There are so many things that AI doctoring might do to a movie,” he said.
However, he added: “We won’t necessarily lose sight of the definitive version, unless newly released versions are mislabelled as restorations or original versions of the movies themselves, which goes back to the ethical frameworks.”
Shekhar said: “The larger issue is simply of regulation. AI is too new for laws to catch up yet.
“The fact is, a work of art ought to be protected from predators. And respected for its own worth, whether or not somebody likes the ending of a film!”
An alternative ending to a film also needs to be plausible.
In 2022, Titanic director James Cameron said he commissioned a forensic analysis, involving a hypothermia expert, that proved there would have been no way for both Jack and Rose to survive on that infamous floating door. Jack “had to die”, Cameron said then.
And AI can’t change that science.
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