Setting aside the countless concerns you could raise over AI-generated movies, are they actually good enough to draw a crowd at the box office?
The performance of China’s first fully AI-generated theatrical film suggests not.
The film, “Sanxingdui: Future Past,” is getting slaughtered at the domestic box office, raking in just $181,00 after being released on October 23, according to Cartoon Brew. Adding salt to the wound was that this was treated as a proper wide release, with over 10,000 screens scheduled to show it on opening day.
With a return of less than $20 per screen so far, it’s extremely unlikely that the film’s production company, Bona Film Group, will make back its reported budget of $1.5 million. Nearly 100 people worked on the movie for over two years, the company claims, though the “actors” — their voices as well as visuals — are AI-generated.
BFG CEO Jiang Defu acknowledged the challenge of finding an audience for an AI movie after the movie’s measly ticket presales.
“We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit and the first to be tested by the audience,” he told Chinese film industry outlet Yuli, as quoted by Agence France-Presse. “I think that is not easy at all.”
It’s hard not to see Sanxingdui’s failure in light of the unexpected success of another Chinese animated film, “Niu Lai.”
Made by a mother and son for just $200, its clunky animation and amateur performances are just about the opposite of the uncannily-polished visuals that AI models can generate with little effort. But it was precisely “Niu Lai”‘s myriad flaws, and the sincerity of the effort behind it, that endeared audiences, and it became a meme as well as actual box office micro-phenomenon, making nearly $10 million. Proportionate to its original budget, it’s one of the most profitable films ever made.
In the US, fully AI movies have also struggled to find screens, with many moviegoers looking down on these churned-out creations as slop. That said, there are a hyped up projects on the horizon that are slated to hit theaters soon — if marketing hype is to be believed — though the odds of them finding an audience, let alone making money, aren’t necessarily in their favor.
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