China's First Full-Length AI-Produced Theatrical Film Sets October 2026 Release

Bona Film Group has announced that Sanxingdui: Future Past, a 100-minute hyper-realistic feature film produced using AI throughout its workflow, will hit Chinese cinemas on October 23, 2026. The film blends the ancient Shu civilization with a sci-fi setting and features entirely original digital characters — no digital likenesses of real actors were used. It marks a significant step beyond AI's previous role in short-form and online content, entering the demanding consistency and quality standards of theatrical cinema.

The production, led by Bona's AIGMS division with a team of over 100 professionals, took two years and drew on more than 1.2 million source images across more than 100 full-film iterations. Rather than relying purely on prompting, the team manually calibrated micro-expressions frame by frame to maintain character and visual consistency across the full runtime. A proprietary system called Infinite Canvas integrated scripts, storyboards, characters, sets, and lighting into a unified environment — underscoring that the core challenge of AI filmmaking has shifted from generating impressive individual shots to sustaining coherence across an entire feature-length production.