AI film flops, but the title still sounds like a tech conference
A Chinese AI movie earns less than a single popcorn at the box office.
The story
China's first AI-generated feature film, Sanxingdui: Future Past, flopped at the box office, earning only $180,000 despite a $1.5 million budget, with mixed audience reactions and skepticism about AI in full-length films.
Source: fortune.com
Our reading
The film’s budget was $1.5 million, but it only made $180,000. That’s like spending a month’s rent on a movie and getting a single popcorn ticket in return. The COO called it an ‘important experiment,’ which is the corporate equivalent of saying, ‘We tried, and it didn’t work.’
Chinese audiences seem to prefer AI for microdramas, the kind that fit in a TikTok video. Maybe they don’t want AI to take over the whole movie theater experience. Or maybe they just don’t want to pay for it. Either way, the film’s failure shows that even in a country that loves tech, not everything has to be a blockbuster.
The movie’s title is Sanxingdui: Future Past. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but at least it’s not called ‘AI: The Movie.’ That would have been too on-the-nose.
