A Flop at the Chinese Box Office Shows AI Still Has a Tough Road Ahead in Theaters

"Sanxingdui: Future Past," a fully AI-generated feature, made just $181K in its opening weekend in Chinese theaters against a budget of $1.5 million.

One of the old adages of the film business was that people wouldn’t pay to watch an actor in theaters if they could see them for free on TV. Today, AI-generated content in China is ubiquitous, with a recent report suggesting that among the explosion of microdramas in China, nearly two-thirds of those videos are all generated by AI.

But it seems there’s a big difference between what audiences, even Chinese ones, will pay to buy a ticket for compared to what they will consume on their phones for free.

This past weekend, a fully, AI-generated feature film titled “Sanxingdui: Future Past” opened in Chinese theaters and grossed just RMB1.21 million, which is about $181,000, according to the film’s producer Bona Film Group. It’s the first AI feature to get the right to play on Chinese screens, and it makes it a big flop, as Bona in a recent blog post said the budget for the movie was 10 million yuan, which is about $1.5 million.

That’s about the budget of a small indie, and perhaps more than you would’ve guessed when so much of the narrative around AI is that it’s going to cut costs and that you can make “Avatar” for next to nothing. But Bona says the film was produced over the course of two years from a team of 70 to 80 people, and some of the creators bristled at the idea that the images were created with a single click. In fact, the blog post says “Future Past” was being tweaked and technically still “shooting” up until a week before the film hit theaters.

Clearly, though, that level of artistry wasn’t evident on screen. An attendee told the international outlet AFP that the AI still “falls short” of a human-made, live-action production. “In the future, just like films, maybe decades later, it would get to a level when people are all willing to pay to watch,” she told AFP. “But for the moment, I think there would be very few who would.”

Bona had reason to believe that the film could attract a reasonable audience in theaters. “Sanxingdui: Future Past” originated as an AI microdrama series itself that managed nearly 200 million views. In fact, production has already begun on Bona’s second AI-generated feature, “Unplanned Operation in the Cold Moon,” and that the company has received requests to screen the movie in other countries outside of China.

The challenge though of releasing a 100-minute feature compared to a microdrama that could be just a few minutes in length is that it has to go through a content review process before it can be screened in theaters, so that speed to bring something new and fresh to market wasn’t there for “Sanxingdui.”

All of this will be something that the upcoming film from YouTuber and AI creator Gossip Goblin will be watching closely. His fully AI feature, “Gods Don’t Give Gifts,” is opening in U.S. theaters this December and is even launching international sales at the American Film Market next month. It’s the first such movie to receive a rating from the MPA, and it’s even intending to submit for eligibility at the Oscars for Best Animated Feature. Gossip Goblin has a large audience that he cultivates across numerous psychedelic, sprawling AI shorts, many of which belong to a connected story universe, so he’s hoping to emulate the Markiplier and “Iron Lung” playbook to draw a dedicated fanbase to theaters via a self-releasing strategy.

But whether it’s in China or America, people go to the theaters expecting a certain level of cinematic quality above what they can get at home on their phones. We’ll see if the “Sanxingdui” experiment ends up translating to American audiences.