Netflix is returning the inmates to the Lock Upp jail.

A second season of the ‘captive reality’ series, whose full title is Lock Upp: Sach Yaa Sazaa has been ordered following Season 1’s breakout summer, where it placed number one of Netflix’s TV shows list within two days of the premiere and remained in the top ten for seven straight weeks.

The response to the show was so strong that five weekly episodes were expanded to six to satisfy demand, Netflix has said. It eventually amassed 50 million hours viewed in a month.

The show sees Indian celebrities thrown together in a jail cell, where they compete in challenges. What broke through with audiences was some of the more divisive characters discussing their public perception and confronting narratives that have surrounded them.

Netflix said Season 2 “build on that world, bringing audiences back inside the jail for another chapter where personalities collide, dynamics shift, and every secret has the potential to change the game.”

Riteish Deshmukh and Farah Khan return as hosts, with Balaji Telefilms producing. Show creator Ekta Kapoor is producing alongside Shobha Kapoor and Manisha Sharma, with Malaya Pradhan the showrunner.

“Lock Upp: Sach Yaa Sazaa became appointment viewing overnight,” said Monika Shergill, VP of Content at Netflix India. “Viewers invested, debated, and kept coming back. It captured the zeitgeist — not just as entertainment, but also as a space where celebrities talked about topics they rarely do, owned their choices and confronted past trauma.

“Ekta’s bold homegrown idea and the scaled adaptation on Netflix led to entertainment maxxing. Season 2 will be about recreating the same Netflix effect with many new surprises for our audiences.”

Ekta Kapoor, Jjoint Managing Director at Balaji, added: “Lock Upp: Sach Ya Sazaa on Netflix went far beyond what we imagined. The conversations, the inmates, and their most memorable moments continued to live with audiences even after the finale. That’s what makes the return of Lock Upp so exciting.

“The next season will take audiences back into a world they know, but with an entirely new set of stories, personalities, and surprises. And Farah and Riteish will continue to helm the Lock Upp as the formidable jailer duo, bringing their own energy, unpredictability, and dynamic to the next chapter.”

Lock Upp originally launched on ALTBalaji and MX Player in 2022, but was rebooted for Netflix.

New representation is raining on Ryan Kwanten. The veteran actor and producer has inked with Rain for management representation.

Kwanten started acting young, with his first credits coming in the early 1990s. He worked steadily and caught an early break on the Australian television soap opera Home and Away. He segued to Summerland before catching another break on the role that he is perhaps best known for, playing Jason Stackhouse across seven seasons on HBO‘s hit True Blood, which ran for 81 episodes from 2008-14.

Kwanten’s other credits span genres and the big and small screens, including work opposite J.K. Simmons in Glorious, which he also executive produced, Nicolas Cage in Kill Chain and Anthony Hopkins in Kidnapping Mr. Heineken. He lent his voice to Zack Snyder’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole alongside Helen Mirren, Abbie Cornish, Joel Edgerton, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess and Geoffrey Rush.

His more recent credits include The Oath, which he starred in and produced alongside Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Them, Kindred, Head Count, The Portrait, Primitive War and the recently completed Seven Snipers with Tim Roth, Ioan Gruffudd and Radha Mitchell. He can next be seen in the post-apocalyptic werewolf thriller Dead Howling.

Kwanten continues to be repped by RGM Artists.

A trio of animated shorts set around the Christmas holiday and powered by artificial intelligence is in the works and poised to debut before the end of the year — for free.

The projects got unveiled at a panel discussion during the recent Toronto International Film Festival directly by the collaborators: Massive Studios co-founder Reza Sixo Safai, The Garfield Movie scribes Paul A. Kaplan and Mark Torgove, and veteran Hollywood producer Todd Garner. The three short films come from Massive Studios in partnership with content creation platform CapCut, and are being developed simultaneously using artificial intelligence tools like Video Studio and AI video generation model Seedance 2.5.

Safai, a co-founder at Massive Studios — a firm described as a “filmmaker-led” studio that develops film, TV, animation and branded entertainment using AI tools alongside traditional filmmaking ones — will direct the shorts from scripts by Kaplan and Torgove with Garner handling producing duties.

They provided a timeline, too: a trailer will debut Thanksgiving weekend in November, and the final films will be made available free of charge on Christmas Eve. There are some details yet to be announced like a streaming or distribution partner and some creative elements like titles, voice cast, creative collaborators and more.

That said, in statements provided to The Hollywood Reporter, the collaborators insist that the short films are creative-led animated projects that began as hand-drawn designs created by artists. The works will be combined with actor performances to establish the characters’ “proportions, expressions, costumes, textures and personalities before the technology is used to help bring them into motion.”

The team is also expected to include character artists, animators, editors, composers, sound designers, colorists and other creative collaborators. They also see their collaboration as a way to “demystify” new AI filmmaking tools, which can either be the focus of an enthusiastic or thorny conversation in town depending on which circle one is standing in.

Per the backstory, Garner came up with the original concept and brought it to Safai and the writers as a way to resuscitate the genre. “I grew up with Christmas specials, and I miss that tradition,” said Garner, the Broken Road Productions principal who has had a hand in 170 projects over the years including Runner, franchises like Mortal Kombat, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Vacation Friends, Zookeeper, Jack and Jill and more. “There is something wonderful about families discovering these stories together and then coming back to them every year. We wanted to make something new that could have that same feeling.”

Safai said the tools they are using should help them deliver something that feels “emotionally handmade” rather than artificial. He added, “For me, handcrafted doesn’t mean pretending technology wasn’t involved. It means you can still feel the human decisions in the work. The drawings, the performances, the writing, the imperfections, the choices. What matters to me is that you can still feel the people behind every frame.”

Both Safai and Garner noted how the process is allowing them to make something on a budget. “This is no different than any movie I’ve made. You come up with an idea, you find the right people, and you see how the audience responds. To me, it’s all about the artists, the story and the imagination behind it. The technology just gives us another way to get there,” said Garner.

Safai added: “The exciting thing isn’t simply that the tools can make production faster. It’s what becomes creatively and economically possible. We’re interested in using technology to make films possible that otherwise might never get made.”

Kaplan and Torgove previously worked on The Late Bloomer, Dr. Ken, Outsourced, George Lopez, Play Dates, Just Shoot Me! and Spin City.