The crux comes down to contracting and bargaining power, and most industry agreements in India are currently written in an all-encompassing fashion, lacking specifics, and allowing studios to exploit a work across all modes, mediums, formats and technologies, whether they exist today or are developed in the future.

“In many cases, an actor’s [or director’s] services are rendered on a work-for-hire basis, which means the studio becomes the first owner of the material created,” says Priyanka Khimani, a leading entertainment and music lawyer based in Mumbai. “A studio could argue that it is simply modifying a character that belongs to the film.”

Romantic drama Raanjhanaa, produced by Eros International and directed by Aanand L. Rai, was one of India‘s sleeper hits of 2013. Made for about $3.5 million, it earned $11 million at the Indian box office and became something of a cult classic in the years that followed. The film features Tamil superstar Dhanush and Bollywood royalty Sonam Kapoor in a wrenching romantic tragedy set in Varanasi and New Delhi. Dhanush plays Kundan, a Hindu boy whose lifelong, unrequited love for Zoya (Kapoor), a Muslim woman with political ambitions and another man in her heart, drives him into a spiral of deception, self-destruction, and sacrifice that ends with his heartbreaking death by assassination in the film’s final moments.

Last August, Eros International released a new Tamil version of the movie with its final scenes altered with AI reconstructions so that the romantic lead survives. The new closing sequence — fully synthetic — ends with the opposite of the original’s tragic note, as Dhanush’s character wakes up and smiles in a hospital bed, having survived the assassination attempt.

The film’s director and star were vehement in their opposition to the re-release — “This alternate ending has stripped the film of its very soul, and the concerned parties went ahead with it despite my clear objection,” Dhanush wrote on social media, adding that AI alterations “threaten the integrity of storytelling and the legacy of cinema” — but their protests proved insufficient to stop the release. Eros responded forcefully, contending that as the “sole financier, producer and rights holder of Raanjhanaa,” it is the “legal author of the film” under Indian copyright law, and thus free to do with the finished work whatever it pleases.

India’s dubbing industry — a vast ecosystem of roughly 20,000 freelance voice artists servicing a film market that spans more than ten major languages and dozens of regional star systems — is confronting an existential threat. The corporate logic is merciless: if AI-generated dubbing is truly indistinguishable from the human original, and can deliver a Hindi blockbuster in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and half a dozen other languages simultaneously, at a fraction of the traditional cost, the business case for employing large pools of human voice talent is over.

This scenario is no longer hypothetical. Veteran voice artist Ghazal Khanna, who has dubbed titles for Netflix in India, such as the hit Korean mystery series The Frog, estimates that around 70 to 80 percent of brand voices for major Indian TV and video commercials have already been replaced by AI. A similar progression is underway in narrative film and TV dubbing. Yash Raj Films’ action sequel War 2, released in late 2025, became a landmark demonstration of AI use in the sector: filmed in Hindi, the movie was released across multiple languages using NeuralGarage’s “VisualDub” tool, which subtly adjusts actors’ lips and facial expressions so that Hrithik Roshan’s Hindi dialogue appears to be spoken naturally in Telugu. Even co-star Jr. NTR — himself a Telugu-language star who delivered his lines in Hindi on set — had his own voice and perfectly synced face restored in the Telugu version. The Amarinder Singh Sodhi, general secretary of India’s Association of Voice Artists, has sounded the alarm. “If AI takes over, we are finished,” he has said.