China Debuts Its First Fully AI-Generated Film

China’s first full AI-generated feature-length film, a historical fantasy called Sanxingdui: Future Past, opened in theaters on Friday.

Judging by weak advance ticket sales, audiences were not terribly eager to see the landmark $1.5 million movie.

WATCH:

Sanxingdui: Future Past (also translated as Sanxingdui: Future Memory) is based on a legendary real-world archaeological dig in China’s Sichuan province that began in 1986. The Sanxingdui dig unearthed hundreds of artifacts that were over 3,000 years old from a deep pit in mountainous terrain. The most distinctive of these treasures was a group of bronze masks and sculptures with strangely distorted features, such as oddly shaped eyes and enormous ears, that were unlike any other find from that era.

The dig also included some huge and elaborate bronze sculptures that were more complex that other works from ancient Sichuan, and the dig site itself was later revealed to be a crumbled city, larger than almost any other from Bronze Age China.

The other curious detail of the Sanxingdui dig was that many of the artifacts appeared to have been deliberately damaged or burned before they were buried, and the inhabitants of the area disappeared without a trace soon after burying their relics, leaving modern scholars to contemplate the mystery of a previously unknown civilization – significantly more advanced than any other discovered in the area – that vanished from history.

The details of Sanxingdui seem baffling and ominous, although some historians have proposed a straightforward explanation: the city was a destination for religious pilgrims, the burned and broken artifacts were sacrifices, and the city faded from memory when the pilgrimages ended around 1,000 B.C.

Sanxingdui had a good run, possibly lasting for centuries, but the focus for religious activity appears to have shifted to an area near the modern city of Chengdu, where simpler versions of similar artifacts have been discovered.

The new AI-generated movie presents a more fanciful theory involving sci-fi technology and time travel. The film’s nature as an A.I. creation harmonizes with its plot, which involves scientists of the future turning to the lost civilization of Sanxingdui for guidance as computers and algorithms dominate the world. The “bronze sacred tree” depicted in the film’s trailer is one of the more impressive statues recovered from the real-world archaeological dig.

The movie is about 100 minutes long, with a production budget of 10 million yuan, or about $1.5 million. There are no human actors in the film, and none of its characters were directly modeled on living people – everything in it was conjured by computers. A team of a hundred creators worked on the film for two years, generating over 1.2 million images with ByteDance’s Jimeng AI.

The movie was approved by China’s censorship bureau, the National Film Administration (NFA), in April. Approval was considered a landmark event, because the NFA had never authorized a completely AI-generated movie before, and did not even have a category for such films on its paperwork.

Sanxingdui: Future Past inspired the same sort of debates about the intersection of art and artificial intelligence in China as the Western world has been having, with some worried about AI productions undercutting conventional moviemaking, or flooding theaters with slop. Producer Qu Jixiaojiang told China’s state-run Global Times she hopes the quality of the movie will speak for itself.

“We hope to make the audience feel that these 100 minutes are worth it,” she said.

Qu was philosophical about the risks of audiences rejecting her AI-generated film, hoping that whatever the box office might say, her team would be remembered as trailblazers.

“Those who move early are not necessarily the luckiest. They may be the ones who have to bear the most pressure,” she said.

Production company CEO Jiang Defu argued against the notion that using AI to create a movie is cheating or cutting corners, pointing out that Sanxingdui was produced by a team as large and structured as any other in the Chinese movie industry, and they reviewed every frame of the output for quality and consistency.

Qu added that some of the scenes created earliest in the production were revised or recreated later, as AI technology advanced rapidly over the past two years. She said the entire movie has been “substantially reworked” at least five times.

“A.I. has leveled the playing field in terms of tools, but it has widened the gap between creators. Even as production methods change, audiences still expect a story worth watching,” she said.

The early verdict from audiences in China was not encouraging. Revenue from advance ticket sales was only about $9,700, and total box office for opening weekend was projected to be less than $15 million.

“We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit, and the first to be tested by the audience. I think that is not easy at all,” Jiang said when the early results came in.

Some of the negative reviews were less concerned with the nature of the film as an AI creation than the overall experience of watching it, saying it felt a little too stiff and unconvincing.

“If A.I. generation can match the theatrical experience of Avatar, I think I would be willing to pay for it,” nonplussed viewer Iris Yang told Agence France-Presse (AFP), referring to American director James Cameron’s 2009 landmark CGI-heavy science fiction film.

“In terms of quality, compared with human production, it still falls short,” a viewer named Lilian Gong told the Straits Times after a lightly attended early screening.

“In the future, just like films, maybe decades later, it would get to a level when people are all willing to pay to watch — but for the moment, I think there would be very few who would,” she said.

A post on Chinese microblogging website Weibo made the point that online services like Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) already offer a sea of AI-generated content to users at no charge, so selling tickets to an AI movie is difficult.

“If it’s free to watch on streaming platforms, it could become legendary. But paying to watch? People are not going to accept it at this stage,” the Weibo user said.

The Sanxingdui production team said it hoped for an international release, possibly to eventually include Western theaters. In the meantime, American audiences have two similar AI-generated projects coming their way: Gods Don’t Give Gifts, an animated sci-fi anthology film set for release on December 4, and Misaligned, which is still in early development but is supposed to feature the first AI-generated celebrity “actor,” Tilly Norwood.