China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country’s first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film’s reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Why did China’s AI-made movie struggle so badly?
The 100-minute sci-fi film imagines a future where AI systems run the world before a global crisis erupts. Its characters, voices, and backgrounds were generated using AI, but the project still required substantial human effort. Producers say nearly 100 people worked on it for more than two years.
Bona Film Group CEO Jiang Defu said that the team was the first to attempt this approach, secure a theatrical release permit, and put it in front of real audiences, adding that the experience was far from simple. Even with AI handling the voices and visuals, the human effort behind it clearly wasn’t enough to draw a crowd.
A scrappy human-made film tells a different story
A different Chinese animated film, Niu Lai, offers an interesting contrast. The low budget animated film was made by a mother and son for roughly $200. It barely made money in its first ten days, but clips of its clunky, amateurish animation and unusual performances made it an online sensation. It has since earned nearly $10 million, dwarfing what the AI movie Sanxingdui managed.
What should Hollywood take away from this?
The takeaway isn’t that people hate AI films and the two movies are not directly comparable, since Niu Lai’s success came partly from mockery and memes. Still, it shows that polished AI effort doesn’t guarantee ticket sales the way a scrappy, relatable story can because it still has the human touch.
Hollywood’s AI experiments may need more than impressive visuals to succeed. They still need compelling stories and characters that give audiences a reason to care. Technology can help make a movie, but it cannot guarantee that anyone will want to watch it.
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