People Will Watch AI Videos for Free. Will They Pay for an AI Movie?

Two weekends into its run, Sanxingdui: Future Past has become the cautionary tale nobody at Bona Film Group wanted to write. Bona billed it as China’s first fully AI-generated theatrical feature. Through its eleventh day, the film had earned about $253,000, adding only around $71,000 in its second week. Cartoon Brew estimates the second-weekend drop at 60 percent or more. Even the most optimistic Chinese trackers now predict it won’t recover a third of its reported $1.5 million budget.

The anecdotal picture looks worse than the spreadsheet. When an Agence France-Presse reporter attended a screening, four people sat in the theater. For a film that opened with more than 10,000 screenings, that qualifies as a private viewing. One of the few paying customers told AFP the film fell short of human-made work. Maybe it would be worth the ticket price someday, the viewer said, just not yet.

AI video has already become a regular part of our entertainment diet, whether we notice it or not. People watch it and pass it along by the billions. Sanxingdui offers the first real test of a question the whole industry keeps circling. Will those same people pay to see an AI movie on the big screen? Two weekends in, the answer looks like a resounding no.

What Bona Promised

On paper, Bona had built a reasonable bet. The film grew out of an AI microdrama series that drew nearly 200 million views online. The studio unveiled footage at Cannes in May, then won a public-screening license from China’s film regulator. According to Bona, nearly 100 people spent more than two years on the 100-minute feature. The team generated more than 1.2 million base images and ran more than 100 rounds of revisions. In turn, exhibitors responded with nearly 11,000 screenings on opening day. That’s an enormous footprint for a film with no stars and no franchise behind it.

The story carries its own irony. Sanxingdui imagines a future in which humanity has handed its decisions to a super-intelligent AI. As a result, the world plunges into crisis. The solution lies in symbols carved into Bronze Age artifacts from the real Sanxingdui site in Sichuan. A film warning against AI, made almost entirely with AI, must have sounded like a marketing dream. Audiences apparently didn’t share it.

Bona’s leadership has taken the result with a shrug. Chief operating officer Jiang Defu acknowledged the lukewarm reception but called the film an important experiment. He told a Chinese film outlet that Bona was first to try it and first to face audiences. That’s a fair point, though most studios prefer to run their experiments before the release date.

What We Actually Know About How It Was Made

Here’s where reporting on this film gets tricky, because the coverage contradicts itself on basic points. Chinese state media described humans controlling the script and creative direction, with AI mainly handling the images. AFP, however, quoted Bona saying the actors, their voices and the backdrops were all AI-generated. In addition, earlier coverage described AI synthesizing the characters’ expressions from human performances. Meanwhile, IndieWire reported that the team was still tweaking the film until a week before release.

The outlets can’t even agree on the opening gross. Cartoon Brew and the ticketing platform Maoyan put it at about $181,000. AFP’s estimate, cited by The Hollywood Reporter, landed closer to $198,000. When the reporting disagrees on who voiced the characters, I won’t pretend to know how this movie was made. I can’t tell you how much of the story came from writers and how much came from a machine.

Bona itself added one more wrinkle. The studio says AI trimmed some production costs without reducing the human labor and time involved. That complicates the popular idea that AI makes filmmaking effortless. Audiences did hear, loud and clear, the label “fully AI-generated.” My read is that most decided that label wasn’t worth the ticket price.

A Snapshot, Not a Verdict

Around Los Angeles right now, you don’t have to look hard to find someone upset about generative AI. I hear it at screenings and over lunch with people I’ve worked alongside for decades. What strikes me is how often the anger lands on the wrong target. For example, many people draw no line between a film generated from prompts and the AI tools post-production has used for years. Those tools track a shot or clean up a plate so an artist can skip the frame-by-frame grind. Lumping the two together makes an honest conversation much harder to have.

At the same time, I’m still wrapping my head around all of this. I suspect most people in this town are too. The technology changes by the week, sometimes by the hour. Any confident prediction written today risks looking quaint by spring. So consider this piece less a verdict than a snapshot of where things stand in late 2026.

Where I Stand

Still, I’ll be upfront about my own leanings, even as my opinions take shape. I love real, organic artwork made by real artists, and that will always be true. I’ve seen AI produce images that are beautiful and sometimes astonishing. Every one of them was generated, though. None of it came from a human mind or from a place shaped by lived experience. For me, that difference matters more than anything on the screen. I draw by hand before I ever touch a tablet, and my instinct is that if you can draw, you should go draw.

“I love real, organic artwork made by real artists, and that will always be true.”

In my view, generating a film doesn’t make someone a filmmaker. A person who prompts and assembles AI imagery works more like an editor or an art director. That role still takes taste and judgment, but it’s a different job. Besides, these systems learn by absorbing enormous amounts of existing work, much of it from artists who never agreed to contribute. To my mind, that means a generated film borrows from other people’s creativity rather than producing something original. Plenty of people disagree with that view. The question now sits at the center of lawsuits that artists and studios have filed against AI companies. Either way, it explains why so many people in this town react to the technology the way they do.

Handmade Isn’t a Guarantee Either

The same day Sanxingdui opened in China, Laika released Wildwood in American theaters. Director Travis Knight’s adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel spent roughly 15 years in development. At 131 minutes, it’s the longest stop-motion feature ever made. Every frame exists because someone moved a puppet a fraction of an inch and took a picture. I saw it at the Academy before its release, and it reminded me what the human mind can build with bare hands and imagination. When filmmakers work that way, the art comes straight out of their own heads. The experience on screen feels organic in a way generated imagery doesn’t.

Unfortunately, craft alone doesn’t fill seats. Wildwood earned glowing reviews and opened third in North America with about $12.3 million. That’s a respectable start, but Forbes estimates the budget at $60 million to $100 million. At the end of the day, a film succeeds by connecting with an audience and telling a story people want to see. I suspect that once more moviegoers give Wildwood a chance, many will walk out pleasantly surprised.

China’s Accidental Hit

China offered its own counterpoint this summer. Niu Lai is a crude animated feature made by filmmaker Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang. The pair wrote and animated the film themselves over five years, even voicing the characters. It opened with no trailer and a single poster, and it earned about $1,150 in its first ten days. Then clips of its awkward animation went viral on Chinese social media.

Audiences came to laugh and to cheer the underdog family behind it. By late October, the film had reportedly earned around $9.6 million. Neither film proves that handmade work wins at the box office. Both suggest that audiences buy into stories, including the story of who made the movie and why.

Free Views Aren’t Paid Tickets

The most telling detail in the Sanxingdui saga may be where it started. The microdrama series that spawned the film pulled in nearly 200 million views. Chinese media report even bigger numbers for the format as a whole. AI-generated short dramas on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, drew more than 200 billion views in September alone. Bona had every reason to believe that audience would follow the story into theaters, but it didn’t.

The difference comes down to how we meet each kind of entertainment. In a feed, a video appears without our asking for it. We watch for a few seconds, maybe laugh, and keep scrolling. The whole transaction costs nothing more than time we were already spending. A theater asks far more of us. We commit to a specific film and hand over money along with two hours of our evening. Once the commitment grows, our expectations grow with it, and novelty on its own can’t clear that bar.

“For a film that opened with more than 10,000 screenings, four people in the theater qualifies as a private viewing.”

Lowering the cost of making a movie doesn’t raise its value to the people watching it. As platforms fill with polished material, attention becomes the scarcest resource in the business. Movies now compete with streaming, video games, podcasts, and a bottomless supply of free content in every pocket. For independent animators, that shift cuts both ways. The tools have never been more accessible, yet standing out may be harder now than ever.

Where That Leaves Us

Successful AI-assisted and AI-generated films will almost certainly arrive. Likewise, plenty of handmade films will keep disappearing without a trace. Sanxingdui won’t settle that debate. What it does give us, two weekends in, is a hard data point. In short, audiences who happily watch AI video for free would not pay for this AI feature.

Ask me again in six months, and the landscape may look completely different. That’s exactly why this moment is worth documenting. For my part, I’ll keep loving the things people make with their own hands and imaginations. And if two weekends at the Chinese box office tell us anything, plenty of moviegoers feel the same way.