*Varini Vij and Sudha Ganesh

(Source: JustDial)

This piece examines the Ambikapathy controversy, where the Tamil re-release of Raanjhanaa featured an AI-generated alternate ending without the consent of its director Aanand L. Rai or lead actor Dhanush. The incident highlights critical gaps in India’s copyright framework, where directors are excluded from authorship under the Copyright Act, 1957, leaving them powerless against unilateral alterations by producers. Unlike jurisdictions such as the UK, EU, and Australia, India fails to recognise directors’ creative authority, undermining their moral rights. The piece also explores how AI manipulations distort actors’ performances, exposing limitations in Section 38B, which narrowly protects only against reputational harm. Drawing parallels with Hollywood’s SAG-AFTRA consent-based framework, the paper argues for urgent statutory reform in India to safeguard directors’ authorship and actors’ personality rights against AI exploitation. Without such protections, Indian cinema risks reducing human artistry to editable templates, prioritising commercial interests over creative integrity.

Introduction

What if Romeo and Juliet did not die at the end? Imagine a hypothetical scenario wherein Shakespeare’s publisher decides that the ending is too bleak and commissions a new, rewritten, happier version of the play. This version shows that Juliet wakes up just in time, Romeo pockets the poison as they elope to Verona and live happily ever after, all without the consent of Shakespeare. While this hypothetical seems laughably blasphemous in the context of iconic literary works, it is no longer a far-fetched concern in modern cinema, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”).

Ambikapathy Controversy

The Tamil version of the 2013 film Raanjhanaa (titled Ambikapathy) re-released in theatres on August 1, 2025, featuring a “new AI-enhanced ending.” In the original, the protagonist, Kundan is shot  at a political rally, leaving his friends to watch helplessly as he dies in a hospital bed.. Screenings of the re-release across Tamil Nadu reveal a different “happier” ending, where actors’ tear-streaked faces have become eerie smiles as an AI-powered Kundan is resurrected. This artificially induced transformation rewrites the narrative, fundamentally changing the emotional impact of the film’s original cut.

Crucially, this change was executed without the involvement and consent of Aanand L Rai (the director) as well as Dhanush (the lead actor), and they have since distanced themselves from the new cut. Eros International, the production company, defended the move, arguing that the updated ending is merely an addition and not a replacement, akin to anniversary editions and director’s cuts, which are widely accepted industry norms. It views this as a creative reimagining rather than a replacement. However, this comparison is inherently fallacious, as these reinterpretations are typically consensual, involving previous creative decisions that were left unincorporated. With AI alterations, the technology hijacks the role of the original creative team, formulating an entirely new narrative without their consent.

The move by Eros, thus brings to light several questions about the unchecked use of such technologies in filmmaking. This piece explores how the Ambikapathy incident reflects deeper structural problems in India’s copyright regime. It delves into how directors are withheld from exercising control over their creative products, as well as how actors lose their autonomy over their creative expression due to the lack of legal safeguards to regulate AI’s impact on cinema. As storytelling becomes increasingly susceptible to technological intervention, it’s time the law caught up.

Directors’ Rights: A Critical Gap in Indian Copyright Law

In Indian law, a director is not recognised as the author of a film. A joint reading of Section 17 and Section 2(d)(v) of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 (“ICA”) reveals that the copyright of a cinematograph initially rests with the producer. The producer is thus the sole and first owner of the film. Without recognition as an author, a director cannot exercise any rights under Section 57 of the ICA, which vests moral rights in an author, allowing them to object to any distortion, mutilation, or modifications to their works. This brings to light a critical fault line in Indian copyright law, where the directors, such as Rai, despite being the creative brain behind the cinematographic work, is left with neither ownership nor enforceable rights over how their art is presented in the public space. This gap shifts power entirely to producers, enabling unilateral alterations to repackage existing works without the creative input of the director. While other jurisdictions, such as the UK and the EU, recognise directors as authors, Indian filmmakers still remain invisible in the eyes of the law.

There was an effort to recognise directors’ rights, by way of the Copyright Amendment Bill, 2010, by proposing the inclusion of directors as joint authors. The Bill, however, was rejected on two grounds. Firstly, directors bear no legal liability and do not take on financial risks like producers; secondly, it would be unjust to determine a single individual as the “principal director”, as many “directors” are involved throughout the different aspects of the film. While it is true that the financial risk lies with the producer primarily, the Bill did not propose to strip the producer of his rights, but rather to place the director on an equal footing and recognise their creative contribution. Furthermore, failure of the ICA and further amendments to define the term “principal director” cannot be cited as a reason to exclude them from being recognised as authors. In the film industry, it is widely acknowledged that roles such as the action director, music director, or other supporting creative leads are not considered the major director. The label ‘director’ often denotes a singular individual responsible for the overarching creative vision of the picture, and it is this primary director who should be granted authorship rights.

To develop a framework that protects a director’s rights in India, European copyright laws can offer instructive models, which have evolved through decades of judicial interpretation and created an artist-centric approach to authorship. France recognises the director as a co-author of a cinematograph work. Article 14 of the Law of March 11, 1957, on Literary and Artistic Property, Comoros states that “the natural person or persons who carry out the intellectual creation of a cinematographic work have the status of author of a cinematographic work.” It explicitly names the director (réalisateur) as among eight co-authors of cinematographic works, alongside screenwriters, composers, and dialogue authors. The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 recognises the director as a joint author of the film, along with the producer. Even a fellow common law nation, Australia, albeit in a limited manner, gives recognition to the contribution of the principal director in the form of moral rights.

For a country like India, which is home to one of the world’s largest and most prolific film industries, the absence of such protections is striking. With thousands of films produced annually and increasingly distributed globally, failure to legally recognise directors as co-authors, or even granting them moral rights, undermines their creative agency and leaves their works vulnerable to changes caused by emerging technologies like AI. India urgently needs to adopt provisions to protect its directors. One of the ways this can be done is by amending Section 2(d)(v) of the ICA to define the author of a cinematograph film as “the producer and the principal director. Granting a director the status of a co-author, along with the producer, will be a step further in protecting a director’s artistic integrity. Such a recognition would not diminish the producer’s economic contribution but would equalize it with the director’s intellectual and artistic contribution. Vesting directors with co-authorship rights would also grant them moral rights under Section 57 of the ICA, allowing them to object to AI-generated distortions of their works.

Actors’ Moral Rights and AI Manipulation

While Rai has been extremely vocal about the changes in the movie, he is not the only creative stakeholder impacted. The film’s lead actor, Dhanush, released a statement on X (formerly Twitter) on 3rd August, 2025, condemning the AI-generated climax. He also stated that “this is not the movie I committed to 12 years ago, ” proving that neither Dhanush nor his co-stars were consulted before changes were made to the ending.

The new AI-generated climax of Ambikapathy drastically reimagines the ending, inevitably distorting the actor’s original performances, expressions, body language, and nuanced acting choices. It creates a version of them that they never consented to, but will still be attributed to them. This should ideally amount to a violation of the moral rights of actors; however, a close reading of Section 38B reveals that the moral rights of a performer are currently framed in narrow terms. A performer has the right to restrain or claim damages for any distortion of their performance only if it is prejudicial to their reputation. While these rights are still more than what a director has, this requirement of reputational harm does not protect the creative integrity of an actor’s performance. Producers can easily exploit this loophole by reworking key sequences or altering the ending of a film under the guise that the changes do not affect the actor’s reputation. This allows them to profoundly alter the actor’s artistic expression without ever obtaining their consent, leaving the actor’s creative personality vulnerable and exposed, in an era where AI can convincingly generate altered performances that the actor never delivered.

Eros has reportedly planned similar AI-based alterationsfor other films in its catalogue. This means that they can rewrite performances of multiple actors across various projects. The AI alteration may not damage an actor’s reputation in the conventional sense, but it can fundamentally alter and misrepresent an actor and their acting choices, without their consent.  While integrating emerging technologies in film is inevitable, it must be done ethically, ensuring that an actor’s creative integrity is not violated.

Developments in Hollywood serve as an example of how issues related to AI use in the film industry could be dealt with. In 2023, the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (“SAG-AFTRA”) went on strike to address concerns regarding the existential threats posed by AI, particularly the unauthorised replication and alteration of their voice, image, and likeness. The strike ended in forming a robust agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that promised to protect the creative integrity of performers by establishing a consent-based framework for the utilisation of any AI in altering the works of a performer. Under the agreement, producers must obtain explicit and project-specific consent before creating a digital replica of a performer or altering an existing recorded performance through AI. Moreover, detailed disclosures must be made regarding the nature and scope of the intended AI use, and performers need to be entitled to fair compensation if the AI-generated content replaces their performance.  

Presently, there is no comparable safeguard for actors’ protection against AI-driven distortions in India. In the absence of active actor and producer associations capable of negotiating enforceable protections, the responsibility falls on the legislature to enact a statutory regulation. Introducing a similar consent-based statutory framework will expand the ambit of actors’ moral rights beyond reputational harm, allowing them to take creative control of their performance and how it is presented in the age of AI.

In India, the judiciary in Arijit Singh vs. Codible Ventures LLP  has recognised that singers possess protectable personality rights against AI cloning. The court further emphasised that commercial exploitation of a celebrity’s persona without consent is impermissible. Actors face a similar issue with the advent of AI-generated alterations, allowing producers to modify performances at their whim without any consent or compensation. This leaves the actors vulnerable to commercial exploitation and violates their personality rights. Since both singers and actors are considered performers under Section 2(qq) of the ICA, this personality rights protection should ideally extend to actors as well, allowing them to protect themselves from unilateral digital alterations.

If the clear legal vacuum in Indian copyright law is not addressed immediately by adopting a framework akin to the SAG-AFTRA rules, along with a statutory recognition of the violation of an actor’s personality rights, producers could endlessly repackage performances, creating AI versions of actors as marketing gimmicks. Allowing such practices to go unchecked without statutory provisions sets a dangerous precedent, commodifying human artistry and reducing performers to mere editable templates.

Conclusion

As Rai and Dhanush have set out to pursue legal remedies against Eros, the reality is that India’s current copyright framework offers them very little recourse. Currently, Indian law privileges producers’ commercial power over the creative integrity of directors and actors. This case, thus,  is a stark reminder that without statutory recognition of directors’ authorship and explicit protections for actors against AI manipulation, creative professionals stand in a highly precarious position, exposed to exploitative practices. If lawmakers fail to act, one can only imagine a future where Ramesh Sippy and Amitabh Bachchan wake up to find Sholay re-released with an AI-generated version of Jai resurrected, teasing a “spiritual sequel” to the cult classic, as the altered version rakes in ₹100 crores at the box office.

*Varini Vij is a third-year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. She has a keen interest in intellectual property law, technology law, and media law.

*Sudha Ganesh is a third-year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Her interests lie in media law and intellectual property law.