First domestic AI theatrical film released, opening-day box office just over 300,000 yuan

The premise is quite interesting—the mysterious carved symbols on Sanxingdui bronzes actually conceal an ancient binary code.

Put plainly, it's just taking the Sanxingdui IP, which comes with its own sense of mystery, and wrapping it in a sci-fi shell.

Audiences widely complain that the characters' expressions are stiff and their movements unnatural, and that watching for a while produces an indescribable sense of incongruity.

Some also joke: maybe the only people buying tickets are film-review bloggers.

So the box office, naturally, isn't great—first-day takings were just over 300,000 yuan, and Lighthouse predicts a total of 2.169 million yuan.

Many assume the budget must have been especially low, but it may be higher than people imagine; the producer says it's in the tens of millions.

With a production cost in the tens of millions, by normal box-office revenue-sharing calculations the break-even line is around 25 million yuan.

Given the current box-office trajectory, losing money is basically a foregone conclusion—after all, not everyone has the good fortune of "Niu Lai."

The filmmakers are feeling aggrieved too, and Bona's administrative president Jiang Defu has come out to plead their case.

He says don't believe the talk of one-click generation: the team numbered nearly a hundred people, who followed the film-industry workflow to retouch frame by frame for more than two years, discarded 1.2 million base images, and scrapped and redid the entire film over a hundred times.

To court theaters, the distribution price was pressed down to 20 yuan and the revenue split conceded to 40-60, whereas normal domestic films are 43-57—effectively handing theaters three extra points.

Despite taking such a humble stance, the box office still won't budge.

Because at the end of February this year, "Reunion Order" had already been released—an animated film based on the giant pandas Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, billed as China's first full-process AIGC animation.

But that one skewed toward younger audiences, drew less attention, and didn't spark such a big industry discussion.

Bona set up "Boka Cloud Studio"; Sanxingdui is only the first trial, with "Off-Plan: Guanghan Operation" and "Chinese Strange Tales: Luosha Sea Market" lined up behind it.

In this area, Mango TV has consistently been ahead. At the end of August this year it launched "Post-Journey to the West," the first AI long-form drama in Chinese television history to air on satellite TV.

Its premiere ratings ranked first among provincial satellite channels in its time slot, its online reach approached 3 billion views, the main feature drew 150 million plays on Mango TV, and Mango Super Media's stock hit the daily limit up two days in a row.

You should know that this show cost only 900,000 yuan per episode, less than a tenth of a live-action drama in the same slot.

iQIYI launched the "Prairie Fire Plan," aiming to release more than forty AI films this year, and built a dedicated production platform called Nadou Pro covering the entire process from screenwriting to editing.

ByteDance also launched "Jimeng Studio" at the end of August, dedicated to incubating AI feature films of ninety minutes or more; S-level projects get their full production costs covered, along with distribution and film-festival resources—clearly it intends to spend money to make this path work.

Don't think only China is racing on this; overseas players aren't idle either.

There's also an AI sci-fi blockbuster called "Raphael," set for release on November 25, built around a future-war worldview.

In North America, "Gods Don't Give Gifts" is set for release on December 4, and it has explicitly said it will submit for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Put plainly, this isn't one company's gamble—the entire global film and television industry is feeling its way across the river.

This year the entertainment world has seen a baby boom; with no shows to shoot anyway, people have time on their hands, and netizens have joked that the domestic entertainment industry has entered a "Great Pregnancy Era."

Fox Sister still remembers that back in March this year, "AI actors for roles below second male lead" trended on social media, drawing a storm of criticism.

Even a short-drama actress who had appeared in a hit worth over a hundred million couldn't land a single role for three months, and some male actors simply started setting up street stalls.

Industry insiders predict that in the next five to ten years, at least thirty to fifty percent of professional positions in the film and television industry will disappear. It's not a temporary lack of work—it's structural disappearance.

In fact, what's disappearing isn't just the acting profession, but the entire ecosystem that supports these positions.

It's just that we're still at a very early stage, much like when silent films first appeared a hundred years ago: crude technology, immature storytelling, and audiences still adapting.

That much hasn't changed in the past hundred years, and in another hundred years, it most likely won't change either.