China’s first AI-generated film is a flop. Some still see it as the future of cinema

Chinese investors placing high value on AI despite unpopularity of Sanxingdui: Future Past

China’s first fully AI-generated movie has flopped, earning just 1.7m yuan (£191,000) at the box office despite costing “tens of millions” to make, according to its producer.

But is it any good? The Guardian watched Sanxingdui: Future Past in a virtually empty cinema in Beijing, and found it no worse than plenty of human-centred mindless action flicks.

Sanxingdui tells a confusing tale of a future society in which every decision has been outsourced to algorithms and AI, leading to a global catastrophe. The only way to avert the impending doom is to unlock the hidden code that is hidden in the Sanxingdui, bronze sculptures linked to the ancient kingdom of Shu. Cue astronauts racing through ancient Egypt and archeologists diving through space-time vortices.

Use of the production company’s in-house AI scriptwriting tool, called Bowen, was evident in lines such as, “That is the superbrain superintelligence that costs $10m dollars a month to subscribe to”, and, “Avoid that thing!” when a plane was about to crash in an incident foretold by the evil algorithm. But the sole other audience member and I agreed that it exceeded our very low expectations.

All of the film’s visuals and some of its sound effects were created using AI, while it was edited by humans.

Many of the characters were uncanny – uncannily life-like for the most part, and uncanny valley for the remainder. The Chinese characters seemed much more realistic than the white people. All of them struggled with running (which they do a lot). They uniformly fell into that steady, smooth gait of video-game characters. One of the main characters, an astronaut called Wu Xingyan, looks creepily like Tilly Norwood, the controversial “AI actor” who is “starring” in an upcoming Hollywood feature film called Misaligned.

But despite Sanxindui’s unpopularity, people who work in the film industry believe that it’s just the beginning of AI cinema in China.

Sanxingdui flopped because “the movie isn’t entertaining”, said Yu Yaqin, an independent film critic in Beijing. At least in the short term, “AI films will continue to be produced in China because investors place a high value on AI,” she said.

One person who works in screenplay development in Beijing said that the majority of projects she has been approached by in the past few months have been for AI films. “Chinese investors believe this is the future,” she said, not least because AI films have the potential to be much cheaper than traditional productions.

“What used to take 100 people to do, now can be done by five people, and the rest won’t have any jobs,” she said.

One state media commentary said that although Sanxingdui was “riddled with flaws and imperfections,” it may “yet go down in cinematic history as the starting point of what came next”.

Chinese audiences are no stranger to AI-generated content. Tens of thousands of AI-generated microdramas, one- to three-minute-long dramas that are designed to be watched on mobile phones, are uploaded to streaming platforms each month. The industry, which didn’t exist a few years ago, is now worth an estimated $3bn. That is still much smaller than the traditional film industry, but a sign of the direction of travel.

Sanxingdui’s poor performance may also be because people don’t want to pay 50 yuan (£5.60) for a cinema ticket when they can watch similar content on their phone for free.

“AI-generated microdramas are selling a way to kill time, while films in cinemas are selling an experience worth spending time on,” wrote one film blogger.

“Perhaps audiences are still more willing to spend money on films that offer a more unique experience,” said Yu, hopefully.