Fifty years after Annakili, an AI-made Ilaiyaraaja tribute from the biopic team

May 14, 2026 was fifty years to the day since Annakili landed in theatres in 1976 and Ilaiyaraaja walked through the door of Indian film music. The team producing his biopic, Connect Media and Mercury Movies, has now marked the half-century with a cinematic tribute video, made in partnership with WPP Production and built around AI as both a production tool and a stated approach. It runs as a black-and-gold, orchestra-led piece, with Ilaiyaraaja conducting at the centre of it.

The official 50-year tribute to Ilaiyaraaja, from Connect Media, Mercury Movies and WPP Production.

The numbers behind the milestone are the kind that do not really fit a tribute video. Across the fifty years since Annakili, Ilaiyaraaja has scored more than 1,500 films across nine languages and more than 9,000 songs, a body of work that effectively defined what Tamil film music sounded like through the late seventies and eighties, and went on to shape Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada cinema across the same period. Calling that “a legacy that transcends generations” is the usual press-release shortcut for it; calling it the longest single-composer thread in Indian cinema is closer to the fact.

The bigger context for the video is the biopic itself. Connect Media and Mercury Movies are the same producers attached to the Ilaiyaraaja life-story film, with Dhanush in the lead, a project that has been in the works for a while and has not yet announced final cast credits or a release window. This tribute drop functions, in part, as the biopic team’s first public-facing work on the subject, a way to plant a flag on the 50th-anniversary moment ahead of the longer film arriving. “Ilaiyaraaja sir’s music is not just background music; it is the emotional memory of generations,” said Varun Mathur, the founder of Connect Media, in the release accompanying the launch.

The AI dimension is the part the producers have chosen to talk about openly rather than tuck away. Sriram Bhakthisaran, the managing director of the Mercury Group, framed the technology as both opportunity and responsibility, a way to honour a legacy by bringing the cost of new work around it down without, he said, sidelining the creative artists involved. Karthik Nagarajan of WPP Production added that the AI in this tribute is not used for visual flourish; it is being used to honour the music that has been the soundtrack of so many lives.

This video is the team’s curtain-raiser. The biopic itself, still in production, is the longer work to come.