AI cinema’s first real test: Sanxingdui: Future Past faces the box office

China’s first AI-generated feature film is now in cinemas. After more than two years in development and an international presentation in Cannes, Bona Film Group’s film now faces its toughest judge: the audience. Its opening has been modest.

Last Friday, La Croisette reported on the release of Sanxingdui: Future Past, China’s first fully AI-generated feature to reach commercial cinemas. A few days later, the question the whole industry was asking is starting to find an answer: will audiences go to the cinema to see a film made with AI?

A modest opening

According to the box-office trade press, the film has had a modest opening, with lukewarm advance bookings. The Chinese industry had already been watching closely to see whether the project could recoup an investment of more than 10 million yuan — around $1.5 million. One of its producers, Qu Jixiaojiang, put it humbly before release: his hope was that audiences would feel those 100 minutes were worth it.

The international ambition remains intact: the film also opened in Malaysia, and talks are under way for releases in Russia and France.

What lies behind the screen

The scale of the project is worth remembering. AIGMS, Bona’s AI division, brought together more than one hundred people for over two years across 17 disciplines: screenwriting, directing, production, art direction, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. They generated more than 1.2 million source images and over one hundred complete versions of the film, and calibrated the characters’ micro-expressions by hand, frame by frame.

Every character is an original digital creation, with no replicas of real actors, and creative direction and final artistic decisions remained in human hands. The story links the ancient Shu civilisation and its enigmatic bronzes, more than 3,000 years old, with a future in which an artificial superintelligence spreads across the planet.

Image: detail of the Sanxingdui Bronze Sacred Tree, one of the treasures that inspire the film. Photo: Gary Todd / Wikimedia Commons (CC0).