Raanjhanaa’s AI re-release ignites debate over creative rights

When news broke that Raanjhanaa, the 2013 Hindi film defined by its bruising, unrequited love story, was being re-released in theatres on August 1, 2025 under its Tamil title Ambikapathy, featuring a reworked, AI-generated ending in which its protagonist Kundan survives, fans flooded social media with celebratory posts. “My Kundan is alive,” read one viral comment. But the joy was not universal. Director Aanand L. Rai condemned the revision as a betrayal. “The film was shaped by human hands,” he wrote in a statement. “Its soul cannot be altered without its death.” Actor Dhanush, who had built Kundan’s tragic arc with his own body and breath, said the change was made without consulting him, and that the revised version was “not the film I committed to 12 years ago”. What had once been a story of irreversible loss had been, without warning or consent, turned into something else.

Eros International Media, the film’s producer and rights holder, maintains it acted within its legal rights, calling the AI-altered Tamil version, Ambikapathy, a “legally compliant, transparently labelled, and artistically guided creative edition intended for Tamil-speaking audiences.” They emphasised that the original version remains unchanged and widely available. Under Indian copyright law, the producer is considered the author of the film, complicating claims from creative contributors regarding moral ownership unless contractual protections exist.

For some fans, however, this wasn’t just an AI revision—it was recompense. A decade of mourning undone in three minutes of screen time. A redemptive draft. The question now is not whether cinema can be changed after the fact. It’s whether we are ready for what that change allows: the reconfiguration of endings, the erasure of tragedy, the commodification of closure.

For most of film history, endings were sacred. You lived with them. You debated them. You grew old with them. Directors fought for the Final Cut, for integrity, for the right to leave a story broken if that’s how it arrived. But somewhere between streaming platforms and public polls, endings have become negotiable. Once a film left the cutting room, it entered the collective bloodstream. Now it remains malleable, subject to trend, sentiment, nostalgia.

This is not revisionism—it is reanimation. And it’s happening everywhere. Even as we debate the ethics of the Ranjhanaa rerelease, another classic has been quietly undergoing its own transformation in the US. In Las Vegas, The Wizard of Oz is scheduled to debut on August 28, 2025 at the Sphere—a colossal venue with a 160,000‑square‑foot, 16K‑resolution LED interior. Google Cloud, Warner Bros. Discovery, Magnopus, and Sphere Entertainment collaborated to create an immersive version using generative AI, enhancing over 90% of the film. The process involved upscaling resolution and out‑painting backgrounds to fill the massive screen, inserting characters into previously off‑frame shots, and expanding scenes for immersive continuity, all while trimming runtime to approximately 75 minutes. Critics have denounced this as cinematic vandalism—an affront to Victor Fleming’s original vision—while supporters argue that the AI-enhanced version opens the film to new audiences and upgrades it for immersive spectacle.

In Switzerland, Swiss filmmaker Peter Luisi created The Last Screenwriter (2024) using a screenplay written entirely by ChatGPT 4.0, with no human input other than trimming redundant dialogue and shortening scenes  . The story—a celebrated screenwriter named Jack who discovers that AI can match and even surpass his own creative skills—was intended as a provocation, a deliberate experiment to spark debate about the role of AI in cinema. The film’s scheduled premiere at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on June 23, 2024, was cancelled after audience backlash to its AI authorship. It was later released online for free with documentation of the process.

On message boards and streaming sites, alternate endings are now the dominant mode of engagement. Jack survives the Titanic. Daenerys finds redemption. Characters are patched back in, dialogue reimagined. It is all perfectly seamless. And deeply hollow. But these were experiments, unofficial deviations. Raanjhanaa is something else: a sanctioned alteration, released in theatres, pushed with full promotional weight, without the consent of the people who made it.

What died in this release was not Kundan. What died was the authority of authorship. A film exists not only on screen but in time. It carries with it the moment of its making—the decisions, the griefs, the arguments, the silences in the editing room. To tamper with that is not to modernise; it is to violate. In literature, we have fought these battles. Editors have been both saviours and saboteurs. But even there, the line between revision and desecration was watched. It required justification. A sense of tact. Cinema, it seems, is abandoning tact in favor of agility.

Legal protections have not kept pace. Directors in India often sign away control. Actors have little recourse once the image is captured. Studios hold the master keys, and the locks keep changing. What should a contract say now? The law is still ill-equipped to handle the implications of unauthorised reworking. What is at stake is not merely intellectual property. It is moral ownership. The right to say: this is the story I told. Let it be.

Already, writers and performers elsewhere have begun to demand language that protects against this kind of posthumous meddling. But enforcement is hazy. And in the absence of consensus, stories risk being treated like software—patchable, upgradeable, gamified.

AI Re-ReleaseAmbikapathyCreative RightsDhanushkundanRaanjhanaaTamil