Sanxingdui: Future Past Opens on 10,000 Screens in China

China's first AI-generated theatrical feature opened nationwide on more than 10,000 screens, the first film made with AI to receive a public screening permit from the National Film Administration. Bona Film Group's 100-minute science fiction film starts from the mysterious symbols on the Sanxingdui bronzes, a binary code that could not be 3,000 years old, and links that ancient civilization to a future in which people hand their decisions to a superintelligent AI and a systemic crisis follows. The Bronze Sacred Tree and the bronze masks turn up in a science-fiction world, and every character is an original digital creation rather than a replica of a real actor.

The production ran more than two years and cost over 10 million yuan, about $1.5 million. Bona's AIGMS team of more than a hundred people generated more than 1.2 million source images and cut over 100 versions of the full film on Boka Film Cloud's "Infinite Canvas" system, with humans keeping the concept, story and final artistic choices ("AI is not acting as an automated director") and calibrating micro-expressions frame by frame. Producer Qu Jixiaojiang put the stakes plainly: "We hope to make the audience feel that these 100 minutes are worth it." Bona's stock hit its daily limit twice after the release date was announced, but the opening was soft, with ticket sales lagging, and online viewers asked why they should pay for images that seemed cheap to make. It arrived as China's AI short-drama boom was struggling to make money: the country's biggest AI bet yet on the big screen, and the first real test of whether audiences would pay for one there.