AI-generated video is no longer anything new. But a 100-minute theatrical feature film that uses AI throughout the production process and has secured an official screening license shows how far AI filmmaking has come.
On Sunday, Bona Film Group announced that Sanxingdui: Future Past, China’s first hyper-realistic theatrical film to involve AI throughout the production process, is set to hit cinemas nationwide on October 23, 2026.
The move signals that AI filmmaking is moving beyond lightweight formats such as short videos and online mini-series and into long-form storytelling and the high-production standards of theatrical cinema.
But what makes the film particularly notable is not simply that AI made a movie. The bigger question is whether AI can become part of the production workflow of the film industry.
Making a movie with AI takes more than prompts
Sanxingdui: Future Past runs for 100 minutes and combines the ancient Shu civilization with a futuristic sci-fi setting. All of the film’s characters are original digital creations, with no digital replicas of real actors involved. This approach also avoids issues commonly associated with the use of digital likenesses, such as image-rights authorization.
AI is not acting as an automated director. According to the production team, AI is primarily used for tasks such as image generation and content production, while the creative concept, narrative direction and final artistic decisions remain in the hands of a professional team of more than 100 people at Bona’s AIGMS division, following a conventional film-production workflow.
This highlights one of the biggest challenges facing AI-generated video today: being able to generate a short clip does not mean being able to maintain consistency throughout a feature-length film.
A character may look different from one shot to the next, while facial expressions, movements, costumes and even background details can shift during generation. Such inconsistencies may be manageable in a few-second clip, but they become a much bigger problem in a 100-minute theatrical production.
For this problem, the team did not simply rely on batches of prompts. It manually calibrated details such as characters’ micro-expressions frame by frame to reduce the uncertainty of AI-generated content. The goal was ultimately to meet theatrical production standards, including 4K image quality, high dynamic range color and multi-channel surround sound.
Two years and 1.2 million images: the real challenge is engineering
The production team says the film took two years to make, using more than 1.2 million source images and going through over 100 full-film iterations.
During production, the Infinite Canvas system developed by Boka Film Cloud integrated scripts, storyboards, characters, sets, lighting and other audiovisual assets into a unified creative environment. The approach mirrors a broader trend in AI infrastructure: the challenge is no longer simply generating content, but making the entire production workflow work efficiently.
The same applies to AI filmmaking. Generating an impressive individual shot is becoming increasingly easy. The harder part is maintaining consistency in characters, environments, lighting and visual language across a 100-minute film.
That means the future of AI filmmaking may depend not only on model capabilities, but also on an entire workflow covering asset management, content collaboration, version control and human supervision.
Sanxingdui meets super AI — and AI becomes part of the story
The film’s plot revolves around mysteries left behind by the Sanxingdui civilization. According to the story, mysterious symbols found on Sanxingdui bronzeware conceal a binary code that could not have originated 3,000 years ago.
In the future, super AI spreads across the world, and humans increasingly hand over their decisions and judgment to algorithms, eventually triggering a systemic crisis.
Iconic Sanxingdui artifacts, including the Bronze Sacred Tree, Bronze Standing Figure and Bronze Masks with protruding eyes, will be brought to life in a futuristic sci-fi setting.
Interestingly, AI is not only a production tool in the film. It is also one of the central themes of the story itself. As humans become increasingly dependent on algorithms to make decisions, how can we preserve our own ability to judge and choose?
The film previously made appearances at the Cannes Film Festival and the Hong Kong International Film & TV Market, where it also released an international concept trailer.
AI filmmaking is going through a clear evolution — from several-second visual demos to short videos, advertising and online series, and now to theatrical feature films.
Being able to generate is only the first step. Being able to generate long-form content consistently and eventually integrate AI into an industrial-scale production workflow is the bigger challenge for AI filmmaking.
Whether Sanxingdui: Future Past can make that model work will only become clear after its theatrical release on October 23. But at the very least, the film is pushing AI filmmaking beyond the question of whether it can be done, toward a more fundamental one: can AI become part of the film industry itself?
