Bona's Sanxingdui, China's First All-AI Feature, Opens to 300K Yuan on a 10M Budget

TL;DR

Bona Film Group released Sanxingdui: Future Past in Chinese cinemas on Friday, October 23. It is the first fully AI-generated feature to get a theatrical permit from China's National Film Administration, and it opened badly. Ticketing platform Maoyan showed more than 10,000 screenings scheduled for the day. By Friday evening the film had taken close to 290,000 yuan (about $43,000), and a Chinese report the next day put the full first day at 318,000 yuan. Bona says the film cost more than 10 million yuan. Nearly 100 people spent over two years on it and generated more than 1.2 million base images. If you were hoping AI had made features cheap enough to profit on a niche audience, this is the first real number, and it says no.

What opened

Sanxingdui: Future Past is a 100-minute animated sci-fi film. In the story, humanity hands every decision to algorithms, a global crisis follows, and the clues to fixing it point to seven symbols from the Bronze Age Sanxingdui site in Sichuan. Every character, voice and backdrop is generated. Bona says the characters are original digital creations, not digital replicas of real actors.

The feature grew out of an AI short-drama series, Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse, whose first season came out in July 2024. IT Home reported that the series had drawn 160 million views across online platforms. In late April, Caixin reported that the National Film Administration had granted the feature a public-screening license, the "dragon seal" every film needs before it can play in Chinese cinemas.

How it was made

Bona describes it as a conventional film production with a generator in the middle. According to TechNode and IT Home, the team was organized like a conventional crew, 17 departments covering screenwriting, directing, art, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Bona's AIGMS team kept the concept, script, shot design and final aesthetic calls. The models handled generation and execution.

• Volume: more than 1.2 million base images and more than 100 full-film iterations over two years.
• Workflow: an "Infinite Canvas" system from Bona's Boka Film Cloud that holds scripts, storyboards, characters, sets and lighting in one environment.
• Finishing: micro-expressions calibrated by hand, frame by frame, with 4K, HDR and multichannel surround sound as targets.
• Models: IT Home's release-day report credits ShengShu's Vidu as chief technical support. Caixin's April report said the film used AI video tools from ByteDance, whose consumer product is Jimeng. Bona has not published a model list, so treat the stack as mixed.

Executive producer and Bona CEO Jiang Defu has been pushing back on the "one-click movie" idea. In Chinese interviews, collected by Sina, he said shots that look fine on a phone fall apart on a cinema screen, so separate review groups checked the film frame by frame. A million images to get 100 minutes is roughly the ratio of a photographer who shoots the whole wedding on burst mode and then has to cull it by hand.

The box office

The numbers moved all day and different outlets caught them at different times, so here they are with timestamps:

• Friday morning: presales of 80,000 yuan, with Maoyan forecasting total takings below 150,000 yuan (AFP via Taipei Times).
• Friday 17:20 Beijing time: over 125,000 yuan for the day, 142,000 yuan cumulative, per Maoyan Pro (IT Home).
• Friday evening: close to 290,000 yuan, with Maoyan's total forecast raised to about 390,000 yuan (AFP via Insider Paper).
• Saturday: Sina put the first day at 318,000 yuan, slightly ahead of the 311,000 yuan that the Beacon Pro (Dengta) platform had forecast before release. Beacon's pre-release forecast for the whole run was 2.169 million yuan (Sina).

Demand signals before release were thin. Sina reported fewer than 6,000 "want to see" marks on Maoyan and about 17,600 on Taopiaopiao. One Changsha cinema showed it once, to five people.

The ticket math

Tickets ran 20 to 90 yuan. Divide about 300,000 yuan by that range and opening day sold somewhere between roughly 3,300 and 15,000 tickets, across more than 10,000 scheduled screenings. That is between about one-third of a ticket and 1.5 tickets per screening. Grossing 10 million yuan would take between about 111,000 and 500,000 tickets, and the studio only receives part of the gross after cinemas take their share.

What audiences said

The novelty did not sell tickets. Iris Yang, who saw a free preview, told AFP she would not have paid for a ticket at that quality, but would if AI could match the cinema experience of Avatar. Independent AI director Zhang Jun told AFP that "the audience won't automatically pay for the tickets just because it's an AI-generated film." A Weibo user said it "could become legendary" if it were free on a streaming platform, but doubted people would pay for it at this stage.

Jiang framed the release as a test Bona chose to take. "We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit and the first to be tested by the audience," he told AFP, adding that it is not easy. Bona is not slowing down: IT Home reports that its next AI feature, Plan B: Operation Guanghan, started production in October for a planned first-half 2027 release.

Why this matters if you make things with AI

AFP reports that AI-generated short dramas on Douyin drew more than 200 billion views in September alone. The Sanxingdui feature itself came out of a 160-million-view short series. AI video already has a huge Chinese audience, and that audience watches free, vertical and in two-minute pieces. Asking them to buy a 100-minute ticket at the multiplex is a different product, sold at a different price.

The cost story is also less dramatic than the "AI makes movies cheap" pitch implies. Ten million yuan is cheap next to a live-action sci-fi film with the same scope, but it is not a garage budget. The production still needed a crew of nearly 100 working for two years, culling images and fixing frames by hand.

The next Western test is close. Gods Don't Give Gifts, the AI-generated feature from YouTuber Gossip Goblin that we covered last week, opens in the US on December 4 with an Oscar campaign behind it. Sanxingdui shows that a permit and a large screening count do not bring an audience on their own.

Key Takeaways

• Bona's Sanxingdui: Future Past, the first fully AI-generated feature licensed for Chinese cinemas, opened October 23 with more than 10,000 screenings scheduled on Maoyan.
• Opening day came in at roughly 290,000 to 318,000 yuan depending on the timestamp, against a budget Bona puts at more than 10 million yuan.
• Even Beacon's pre-release forecast for the whole run (2.169 million yuan) covers only about a fifth of the budget.
• The production used nearly 100 people for two years, 1.2 million-plus base images and 100-plus full-film iterations, with humans owning script, shots and final calls.
• AI short dramas pull more than 200 billion monthly views on Douyin, but this release suggests that audience does not follow AI to a paid cinema seat yet.
• Bona's second AI feature is already in production for the first half of 2027.

Sources: Taipei Times (AFP), Insider Paper (AFP), The Standard, IT Home (release day, Maoyan Pro data), IT Home (May 2026 permit report), Sina (box office and forecasts), Sina (Jiang Defu interviews), TechNode, Caixin Global