China's First Fully AI-Generated Film Flops at 1.7m Yuan

China's first fully AI-generated feature film has earned just 1.7m yuan (£191,000) at the box office, despite a production budget its producer puts at "tens of millions". The film is Sanxingdui: Future Past. The Guardian watched it in a virtually empty Beijing cinema and delivered a measured verdict: no worse than plenty of human-made action flicks. Well, maybe a bit worse.

The plot, for want of a better word, concerns a future society that has outsourced every decision to algorithms, triggering global catastrophe. The only hope is a hidden code locked inside the Sanxingdui bronze sculptures of the ancient kingdom of Shu. This sends astronauts racing through ancient Egypt and archaeologists diving through space-time vortices.

Who wrote this thing?

An AI did. The production company used an in-house scriptwriting tool called Bowen, and the evidence is on screen. Sample dialogue: "That is the superbrain superintelligence that costs $10m dollars a month to subscribe to." Also: "Avoid that thing!" — spoken as a plane crashes in an incident foretold by the evil algorithm. The Guardian's reviewer and the sole other audience member agreed the film exceeded their very low expectations. That is not quite a rave.

All of the film's visuals and some of its sound effects were AI-generated; humans handled the editing. The characters split between uncannily life-like and squarely uncanny valley (the eerie discomfort caused by almost-human figures). The Chinese characters looked more realistic than the white ones. Everyone struggled with running, which they do a lot, defaulting to the smooth gait of video-game characters. The lead astronaut, Wu Xingyan, looks creepily like Tilly Norwood, the controversial "AI actor" attached to the upcoming Hollywood feature Misaligned.

Why do investors still care?

Because money, mostly. The film flopped because "the movie isn't entertaining", said Yu Yaqin, an independent film critic in Beijing. Still, she said, AI films will keep being made in China in the short term "because investors place a high value on AI".

A Beijing screenplay-development professional said the majority of projects pitched to her in recent months have been AI films. "Chinese investors believe this is the future," she said — not least because AI production can be far cheaper. "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 conceded the film was "riddled with flaws and imperfections" but argued it may "yet go down in cinematic history as the starting point of what came next".

Is anyone actually watching AI content?

Yes, on phones. Tens of thousands of AI-generated microdramas — one- to three-minute episodes made for mobile viewing — are uploaded to Chinese streaming platforms every month. The industry did not exist a few years ago and is now worth an estimated $3bn.

That scale may explain the cinema flop. Few viewers will pay 50 yuan (£5.60) for a ticket when similar content streams free on a phone. "AI-generated microdramas are selling a way to kill time, while films in cinemas are selling an experience worth spending time on," one film blogger wrote. Yu put it more hopefully: "Perhaps audiences are still more willing to spend money on films that offer a more unique experience." The next AI feature's box office will test whether that hope survives contact with a ticket counter.