Hollywood is betting on AI movies — China already tried one and sold a single ticket per screen
The industry debating whether AI features are the future just got its first theatrical data point, and it comes with a decimal.
The experiment has a name: Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed by Bona Film Group as China's first fully AI-generated theatrical feature. It opened in Chinese cinemas on October 23 with more than 10,000 screenings scheduled for day one, per Cartoon Brew, and grossed about RMB 1.21 million — roughly $181,000 — through Monday.
The r/boxoffice thread tracking the numbers translated that into the metric that stings:
"It's not just bad. Opening weekend was 1 admission per screen, and it quickly dropped to 0.1 admission per screen afterwards. Pretty much a few people decided to check out how bad it was and then everyone agreed it didn't have the meme potential Niu Lai did."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
The Niu Lai test, failed
The Niu Lai reference is the brutal part of that comment. That shoestring animated film opened in August to about RMB 7,700 in ten days, then became a RMB 64 million hit once clips of its crude animation went viral — mockery, memes, and curiosity did what marketing couldn't. Sanxingdui got the first stage of that treatment, the people checking how bad it was, and never got the second.
And this wasn't a lazy cash-in. Bona says the film cost over RMB 10 million (about $1.5 million) and took nearly 100 people more than two years — real money and real labor, which makes the result a cleaner verdict on the product itself.
Nearly 100 people spent over two years on China's first AI feature. Its audience settled at a tenth of a ticket per screen.
The part Hollywood should read twice
The bet this tests isn't China's alone. Lionsgate signed its AI partnership with Runway back in 2024, OpenAI has been backing the AI-animated feature Critterz toward theaters, and Elon Musk has promised a full-length AI Odyssey by New Year's. All of it assumes a paying theatrical audience exists at the end of the pipeline.
Don't miss: Elon Musk promised an AI Odyssey to beat Christopher Nolan's — Grok delivered 7 minutes
One commenter located the flaw in that assumption:
"The kind of people who crave AI content won't pay for cinema tickets."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
That's the finding, if this one data point holds: AI content's natural audience already gets it free, at home, in infinite supply. Cartoon Brew is careful to note that one film settles nothing. But the first real-world test of "AI feature plus movie theater plus ticket price" just returned a number, and the number has a zero before the decimal point.
Previously we wrote: Stallone fought a studio to play Rocky. Now he's telling young actors to surrender to AI