Raanjhanaa's AI retelling: Can a machine rewrite the soul of a story?

Indian Express

07-08-2025

In 2025, on a sultry summer night in Tamil Nadu, the cinema lights dimmed on a film audiences thought they knew by heart — Raanjhanaa, now recast as Ambikapathy, sporting a new, AI-assisted ending. Gone was Kundan's feverish, fatal sacrifice; in its place, a flutter of eyelids, friends' teary smiles, and the shimmer of a bittersweet second chance. If Bollywood is India's great emotional theatre, this dramatic rewrite was a high-wire act: bold, divisive, and utterly 21st-century.
But as applause and outrage traded places, one question echoed through the aisles: Can a machine rewrite the soul of a story?
The controversy has raised questions about artistic integrity and creative ownership. By erasing Kundan's tragic death — the emotional core of the 2013 classic — and replacing it with a happier, AI-generated finale, the re-release challenges the sanctity of the director's original vision.
Filmmaker Aanand L Rai and actor Dhanush have publicly condemned the move, warning it dilutes the film's soul and sets a dangerous precedent for the industry. Eros, the production company behind the film, has maintained that it holds complete rights to the film and is within its legal bounds to alter it.
Beyond storytelling, this incident exposes legal and ethical dilemmas about who controls a story in the AI era — and what is lost when creativity bows to technology.
According to a recent blog on SpicyIP, one of India's most credible legal publications in the field of intellectual property, the real question that arises from the controversy is whether the director or actors in this case, who are contributors (and may not even qualify as a authors), can legally stop the copyright holder from altering the work in a way that changes its meaning. 'Under Indian copyright law, the answer is likely no. Moral rights offer no help here. Economic rights might, but only if the director is recognised as a co-author with control over derivative works. He is not,' it said.
Ameet Datta, one of India's leading IP litigators, said that under India's Copyright Act, the term 'author' for cinematographic films, is typically the producer. Directors and actors are not counted as authors.
Datta said that India needed an overhaul in its copyright law, and called for a personality rights law. 'We need it not because you want to benefit actors or directors, but because of the ease with which AI can be misused for image rights. Every individual needs to have a right over how their image is being used,' he said.
This is where trademark law can have an intersection with the right to privacy. According to a 2019 paper published by the National Law School of India, Bengaluru, in the landmark 2017 right to privacy judgement by the Supreme Court, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul had brought publicity rights under the ambit of right to privacy. In his judgement, he wrote that 'every individual should have a right to be able to exercise control over his/her own life and image as portrayed to the world and to control commercial use of his/her identity. This also means that an individual may be permitted to prevent others from using his image, name and other aspects of his/ her personal life and identity for commercial purposes without his/her consent.'
However, Justice Kaul's opinion, though concurring, was not part of the leading judgement, and as a result, his observation remains non-binding and only persuasive in nature, the paper noted.
Here, Denmark has already set an example. The country is proposing a legislation that aims to protect its citizens from deepfakes by giving them copyright over their own likeness. If the law were to pass, it would mean that anyone could seek a removal of their digitally altered photos or videos, if it was created without their consent.
There are also potential overlaps with labour laws. Datta said that if the creators of the film got together to reshoot an alternate ending for the film, it would involve some form of compensation for everyone involved, not just the director or actors, but the film's entire crew, including those behind the camera, set designers, and even spot people, given that films are collaborative pieces of creativity.
However, with AI being used to create an alternate ending, there is no compensation whatsoever for the people whose images are being used, Datta said.
An illustrative example of this is the decisive victory that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) secured against their bosses in 2023, following one of the longest labour strikes in the country's history. One of the key aspects of the negotiations there was the use of AI, amid concerns by writers and actors that use of the technology could pit them against robots in a battle for human creativity. As part of the agreement the union secured from production houses, while the use of AI was not outlawed, it set up guardrails around its use to ensure that its control stays in the hands of the workers.
Those in India's creative industry do not enjoy such collective bargaining power, as their counterparts do in the United States.
Soumyarendra Barik is Special Correspondent with The Indian Express and reports on the intersection of technology, policy and society. With over five years of newsroom experience, he has reported on issues of gig workers' rights, privacy, India's prevalent digital divide and a range of other policy interventions that impact big tech companies. He once also tailed a food delivery worker for over 12 hours to quantify the amount of money they make, and the pain they go through while doing so. In his free time, he likes to nerd about watches, Formula 1 and football. ... Read More