While Hollywood has an attack of the vapor’s over the potential use of AI in the creative arts, including movies, those industrious Chinamen have just dived straight in with the first feature-length AI-generated feature, Sanxingdui: Future Past.
Who needs workers, eh? Which, now you say it out loud, doesn’t sound very Communist.
Well, good news everyone!
Because even in the second happiest totalitarian dictatorship on Earth, just behind Disneyland, where they give up their ability to buy a bus ticket without maintaining their social credit score, people don’t seem ready to give up on movies starring actual people.
Sanxingdui: Future Past had a wide release in China, and then bombed hard.
On a budget of about $1.5 million, it only made $198,000 on opening, according to The Hollywood Reporter).
AI-generated feature films have been released in limited circumstances elsewhere, but this was the first time anyone went for a huge blockbuster release. The movie was shown for 10,000 screenings opening weekend.
Many people have taken a bath on this.
They are putting a brave face on this, with Bona Film Group CEO Jiang Defu saying that it may have failed, but it was still an important release:
“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.”
Sanxingdui: Future Past is about a future when a superintelligent AI has spread across the globe, and humanity has handed control to algorithms, plunging the world into a crisis. Which seems a little brass-necked.
China is big on AI-generated microdramas, distributed via social media. It has started to be viewed as something of a contagion by the Chinese establishment, as most of the content is female generated content for female audiences featuring romance stories.
The concern is that it is having a negative effect on female brains across China.
Closer to home, Gods Don’t Give Gifts, the first AI-generated feature film from the West, hits U.S. theatres on December 4. This R-rated sci-fi anthology feature has a trailer you can watch here.
There is no news on a worldwide release of Sanxingdui: Future Past.
