AI Firm Behind India’s ‘Mahabharat’ Series Turns to Indonesian Myth in Cross-Border IP Pact (EXCLUSIVE)

The AI technology behind Star Plus and JioHotstar series “Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh” is headed to Indonesia. There, its developer Galleri5 and fellow Collective company Collective Studios’ Historyverse plan to create film and series properties drawn from the country’s myths and history.

Historyverse, which handles original IP and studio work for Collective Artists Network, is partnering with Galleri5 and Singhasari Special Economic Zone on the venture. Projects will cover mythology, fantasy, history and animation. Indonesian creatives and cultural specialists will work alongside Historyverse’s IP development team, using production tools Galleri5 built in India.

The first project being discussed is “Echoes of Nusantara,” a working title for an original mythology-adventure. Historyverse will run creative development, production and IP packaging, and will collaborate with local talent to get projects ready for possible financing, production and distribution outside Indonesia.

“The next global entertainment franchises will not all come from Hollywood,” said Vijay Subramaniam, founder and group CEO of Collective Artists Network. “Every market has stories that deserve to travel further, and Indonesia has an extraordinary wealth of them. Our ambition with Collective Studios’ Historyverse is to work with Indonesian creators to develop these stories into films, series and larger entertainment properties for the world. Galleri5 gives us a new way to approach the scale of filmmaking, while the creative vision and the stories themselves remain at the center.”

Galleri5’s main product, G5 AI Studio, brings more than 200 AI models together with purpose-built tools for storyboarding, designing characters and worlds, animation, VFX and film-quality video. More than 10,000 ads and videos have been made on the platform. JioStar and Collective Media Network launched “Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh,” and Galleri5 built and ran the AI filmmaking technology behind the show. The company is now developing workflows for Historyverse’s theatrical slate, which includes “Chiranjeevi Hanuman – The Eternal” and “Krishna.” Those productions give Galleri5 a base for refining its technology against real-world creative and production demands.

“The next generation of global cinema will be built on a very different technology foundation,” said Rahul Regulapati, founder and CEO of Galleri5 and a partner at Collective Artists Network. “At Galleri5, we’re building that foundation with G5 AI Studio, bringing frontier AI models and filmmaking workflows into one platform. We’ve already demonstrated what this technology can do through films and television in India. Now, together with Indonesia’s extraordinary creative talent and Collective’s studio capabilities, we have an opportunity to take locally rooted stories to audiences around the world.”

For Indonesian creators, the partnership is a chance to match stories led by local talent, and their own original IP, with tools meant to scale up production.

Airlangga Hartarto, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for economic affairs and chairman of the National Council for Special Economic Zones, said the country had no plans to sit on the sidelines of AI development or simply act as a consumer of the technology. “We intend to help shape it. Special Economic Zones allow us to turn that ambition into real productivity, skilled jobs for our young people and new sources of growth on the path to 8 percent,” he said.

Singhasari will introduce the venture to Indonesian creators, studios, investors, distributors and creative-economy institutions, and help set up local partnerships and routes to market.

KRAT David Santoso KR, CEO of Lokanima and Singhasari Special Economic Zone, said the Kingdom of Singhasari had flourished eight centuries ago on the land the zone now occupies. It was a hub for engineering, the arts, scholarship and government, and its culture was enriched by hundreds of years of contact with India. “Today, with our partners from India, we are bringing that history back to life, this time by mastering the AI transformation. Our aim is to build new competitiveness for Indonesia in the new-technology and digital-content subsectors, with Indonesian talent and IP at its heart,” he said.

India’s ambassador to Indonesia, Sandeep Chakravorty, said the Ramayana and the Mahabharata had been part of Indonesian temple culture, wayang (traditional puppet theater) and the popular imagination for over a millennium. “Today, India and Indonesia are writing the next chapter of that shared story with artificial intelligence,” he said.