No actors, no crew, no ticket sales: ‘So obviously AI’ film flops at China’s box office

China has ushered artificial intelligence into its cinemas, but the country’s first fully AI-generated feature film has flopped at the box office.

Made with no human actors or camera crew, Sanxingdui: Future Past brought in just around 1.8 million yuan (US$270,000) after three weeks in theatres, according to Chinese box office data tracker Beacon Pro. The figure was well below the film’s reported budget of tens of millions of yuan.

The 100-minute sci-fi film is set in a world decades in the future where rogue algorithms and AI are pushing humanity towards catastrophe. To fight back, society must decipher a warning left inside bronze artefacts from the ancient Shu kingdom, from which the film takes its name.

China, home to a booming AI-driven microdrama industry now estimated to be worth billions of yuan, is no stranger to AI-generated entertainment. Official data showed that 430,000 microdramas were launched between January and August alone, with AI-generated content accounting for more than 90 per cent.

Still, many took to social media to complain about the stiff facial expressions in Sanxingdui, visual inconsistencies between scenes, a disjointed plot, and the fact that it was “so obviously AI-generated”.

Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that the pervasiveness of AI content itself, especially on social media feeds, could be exactly what hurt the film.

“Perhaps audiences equate AI-generated videos with vertical shorts and cheap disposable entertainment they consume on their cellphones while waiting in line, sitting in the back of a taxi, or going to the bathroom,” Berry said.

“But when they spend money to see a movie in a theatre, they want something different, something real.”

That desire could explain the film’s poor performance, especially in comparison to Niu Lai, a low-budget, low-tech Chinese animated film produced by a mother-and-son duo over five years that gained widespread popularity over the summer.

Despite its amateur visuals and awkwardly deadpan dialogue, Niu Lai resonated with audiences as an unmistakably human piece of work. It went viral on social media after a quiet opening, and brought in over 51 million yuan in its first three weeks.

People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece newspaper, ran a commentary criticising Sanxingdui on Tuesday, saying its reception “reflects not only the quality of a single film but also the more widespread challenges and problems inherent in AI-driven creative work”.

The reckoning for the Chinese film scene comes during a broader downturn, where slower economic growth and competition from digital entertainment have weighed on ticket sales.

National box office takings in the first 10 months of the year reached only 31.6 billion yuan, down nearly 30 per cent from the same period in 2025, according to Beacon Pro.

For Sanxingdui, the producers first generated a large batch of visuals before crafting a story around the clips, resulting in a fragmented narrative, according to the People’s Daily commentary.

“When technological wonders become commonplace, the true limit of AI films points to the parts that AI cannot handle – scripts, acting, emotions and judgment,” the commentary said, adding that the flop did not mean the end of AI filmmaking.

Berry, however, said preferences might be shifting within China.

“All trends have ebbs and flows, ups and downs,” Berry said. “We are starting to see some people turn away from AI-dominated content in favour of art, stories and visuals that have a human touch.”