One signal

Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as China’s first fully AI-generated film, reportedly earned about $181,000 after opening on more than 10,000 screens. Digital Trends says the film had a reported $1.5 million budget, making that opening a sobering result for a project built around AI-generated visuals and voices.

The film still involved substantial human work: its producers say nearly 100 people spent more than two years on it. Digital Trends contrasts it with Niu Lai, a roughly $200 animated film that went on to earn nearly $10 million, though the article notes that online mockery and memes helped drive its popularity. They are not like-for-like box-office rivals, then. The useful takeaway is not that audiences have delivered a grand verdict on AI cinema. It is that AI production tools, even at scale, do not guarantee a story people want to pay to watch.

Discuss: What should matter more to a film’s success: how it was made, or whether audiences care about the story?

Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.