China's first fully AI movie fails to generate an audience

We suppose the good news for the film’s producers, Bona Film Group, is that the film was very modestly budgeted at $1.5 million. BFG claims the film took more than two years and more than 100 underpaid people to make. “We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit and the first to be tested by the audience,” BFG CEO Jiang Defu told the Chinese film industry outlet Yuli (per AFP). “I think that is not easy at all.” The 100-minute film featuring AI-generated characters, actors, and backgrounds is set thousands of years in the AI-dominated future, where algorithms run the world, and a global crisis breaks out. It appears the recently created Torment Nexus will continue making movies based on the book Don’t Create The Torment Nexus for the foreseeable future. 

Meanwhile, the powerfully janky and proudly amateurish Niu Lai, made by Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang, for $200, has since made $10 million at the box office, thanks to memes about how silly it looks. It exemplifies something AI boosters don’t understand about the arts: Actual people like watching weird stuff made by humans, no matter how unpolished it looks. In fact, sometimes that’s why they want to see it. Nevertheless, the Tilly Norwood-led Barbie knockoff, Misaligned, described as “very Tilly” by producers, is still in development.