The Celestia Pictures founder brings an entrepreneur’s lens to an industry being reshaped by OTT, AI and a fragmenting audience.
For Ankkit Poddar, Owner and Producer of Celestia Pictures, the most consequential shift in cinema is not the one audiences can see on screen. It is the shrinking window of attention a film now has to earn. “The biggest change in the film business is not that we have more screens; it is that we have fewer uninterrupted minutes of the audience’s attention,” he says. That single reframing, he argues, changes how content should be conceived from the first page.
The old model was linear: develop a film, produce it, release it theatrically, then monetise through satellite and ancillary rights. Today, entertainment runs across a far broader ecosystem, and the audience has fragmented with it. A film no longer competes only with the other titles releasing that weekend. It competes with streaming shows, short-form video, gaming and content from around the world. An Indian viewer, Poddar notes, can move from a Hindi theatrical film to a Korean series to a 60-second reel and then to a regional OTT title, often on the same device and the same day.
That reality has redrawn the producer’s job. “A producer today cannot think only creatively,” he says. Audience behaviour, distribution, marketing, technology, intellectual property and financial discipline now sit inside the same decision. For Poddar, who came into entertainment from an entrepreneurial and business background, that intersection is the appeal. When he reads a script, he is asking whether the story is compelling, but also who will watch it, why they will choose it over hundreds of alternatives, and what a sustainable business around it looks like.
Decisions, he believes, are becoming increasingly audience-driven. Rather than developing a film first and solving distribution and marketing later, the industry is learning to ask the harder question early: “Who exactly are we making this for?” A large budget or a large campaign, he cautions, does not answer that question on its own.
Distribution and marketing have moved furthest. Theatrical release remains important, particularly for films that create a communal experience, but it is now one window among many alongside OTT, digital platforms and international audiences. Marketing, meanwhile, has shifted from buying visibility to creating conversation. “Earlier, marketing was largely about telling audiences that your film exists. Today, the audience can become part of the distribution mechanism for your marketing,” he says, pointing to how a single scene circulating online can now do the work a conventional advertisement once did.
On AI, Poddar is deliberate. He sees it as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement for human creativity, useful across research, pre-visualisation, scheduling, localisation, audience analysis and marketing. “I don’t want AI to tell us what story to tell. I want technology to help us explore how well we can tell the story we have chosen,” he says. He is equally clear about restraint: “The producers who benefit most from AI will not necessarily be those who use the most AI. They will be the ones who know where to use it and, equally importantly, where not to.” Questions of copyright, consent and performers’ likenesses, he adds, have to be treated as central, not peripheral.
Those principles shape how he is building Celestia Pictures. The company is consciously script-oriented rather than cast-oriented, reversing an industry habit of starting with “who can we cast?” It is also exploring an AI-enabled approach across the creative lifecycle, and treating strong stories as intellectual property that can travel across films, series, formats, languages and markets. “I don’t want Celestia Pictures to become a company that uses AI to make films. I want it to become a company that makes great films and intelligently uses AI wherever it can make the storytelling stronger, faster or more ambitious,” he says. The guiding line, he adds, remains the company’s own: Where Great Stories Find Their Light.
Looking ahead, Poddar expects the next phase of entertainment to be defined by the convergence of storytelling, technology, data and intellectual property, and by a sharpening paradox: the easier content becomes to produce, the harder it becomes to make people care about it. That, for him, is where the opportunity sits. “AI may change the economics of filmmaking. Technology may change distribution. Data may change marketing. But none of them can eliminate the need for a story worth telling.“
