China's first AI-made film fails to win over theatres

‘Sanxingdui: Future Past’ has arrived in Chinese theatres with an unprecedented label: the country’s first feature film made entirely with artificial intelligence. The film, which cost approximately 1.5 million dollars, debuted with over 10,000 screenings distributed nationwide. Despite this widespread coverage, the title failed to win over audiences.

The figure is striking for the contrast between the resources deployed and the response obtained. A five-figure number of screenings indicates a significant distribution effort, typical of launches that an exhibitor or studio considers strategic. The declared investment, while not enormous by the standards of the international film industry, nonetheless places the project in a production tier above a simple technical experiment.

It remains unclear exactly what is meant by a film “made entirely” with artificial intelligence: whether this concerns the screenplay, the animation, the editing, or the production process as a whole is a detail the available source does not clarify. This is an ambiguity that accompanies much of the communication surrounding the first experiments in generative cinema, where the “AI” label is often used as a promotional argument even before serving as a precise technical description.

It should be noted that the news currently comes from a single source (TgCom24); no independent confirmation is currently available, either regarding the film’s production details or the box office figures that would precisely define its commercial failure.

The case nonetheless fits into a moment of strong attention, in China as elsewhere, toward the use of generative tools in audiovisual production: a field in which the industry is still testing cost and distribution models that lack established benchmarks. The box office result of ‘Sanxingdui: Future Past’, regardless of the exact figures, represents for now the first public test case for a Chinese film of this kind in a commercial theatrical circuit.