Will AI kill the Asian leisure business, or reinvent it?
Singapore celebrated its 61st birthday with two movies. One, Bersama Majulah, depicts the Southeast Asian nation beneath siege by zombies; the opposite, Trace Project, tells an inspiring story of a younger man who grows as much as turn out to be Singapore’s first astronaut on Mars.
The twist? Neither movie starred a human actor. Everything in each movies—aside from their scripts—had been totally generated by AI.
Generative AI in filmmaking is the primary actual proof of how the brand new know-how can disrupt a longtime business. It began with short-form content material: According to Chinese state media, over 95% of the greater than 120,000 Chinese microdramas launched within the first quarter of 2026 had been AI-generated, in contrast with almost zero only a yr in the past.
The know-how is now encroaching on extra established media: Last September, Hong Kong broadcaster TVB launched a 10-episode brief drama titled You, and Only You, the primary of its sort in Hong Kong to characteristic AI-generated characters. (The community is now utilizing its digital actors in advert campaigns.)
“AI is like oxygen—it’s in all places,” says Danming Xie, senior vice chairman and chief AI scientist of Chinese video-streaming platform iQiyi. “It’s more and more unimaginable to not use AI in video manufacturing. The dialog’s shifting extra towards how deeply creators use it.”
Users are flocking to Chinese video-generating fashions like these from Kling AI, launched by the streaming firm Kuaishou in 2024. The platform claims to have 100 million customers, and says 70% of its proceeds comes from abroad exchanges.
Other main gamers on this house embrace TikTok proprietor ByteDance and its Seedance 2.0 mannequin; e-commerce large Alibaba and its open-source mannequin HappyHorse; and U.S.-based startup Higgsfield AI.
Proponents of AI-generated movies argue that the know-how permits anybody to inform tales. Yet others fear a couple of lack of the business’s human core.
Film studios in Hengdian, a city nicknamed “China’s Hollywood,” now stand empty because the business turns to AI to generate brief—and more and more not-so-short—dramas.
“There’s been a whole lot of redundancies in China,” says Chris Shaw, who leads the Puttnam School of Film and Animation at Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts. “Lots of actors and studios have all of the sudden disappeared.”
And then there’s the most important check: Will audiences embrace a characteristic movie that was made by AI, even with human path?
The administrators behind Singapore’s latest AI-generated movies, unsurprisingly, see video-generating AI fashions as a internet good for the business.
Pax Chen, whose FizzDragon studio is answerable for the outer-space-themed Trace Project, thinks AI helps circumvent Hollywood’s variety downside. “People like to observe movies as a result of they see themselves in them. Asian folks, nonetheless, might not usually see themselves in Hollywood movies,” says Chen, {an electrical} engineer by coaching.
95%
SHARE OF THE 128,000 CHINESE MICRODRAMAS RELEASED IN Q1 2026 THAT WERE AI-MADE
70%
SHARE OF OVERSEAS REVENUE FOR KLING AI, A VIDEO-GENERATING STARTUP
<$3,000
COST OF FILMING A SHORT GEN AI DRAMA IN CHINASOURCES: CHINA NETCASTING SERVICES ASSOCIATION, KLING AI, CAIXIN
Joel Boh, founding father of movie studio Edenstone and producer of the four-minute-long zombie video, agrees that AI is permitting tales to be informed that, in any other case, would possibly by no means have been filmed. “Nowhere within the final 100 years had been filmmaking instruments so accessible,” Boh says. “I’d favor to work with imperfect however evolving know-how to inform a great story than to not do it in any respect.”
Boh’s brief movie value him 8,000 Singapore {dollars} ($6,315) to supply. Costs in China are even decrease: Some giant corporations in Hangzhou are utilizing AI to generate 100-minute dramas for beneath 20,000 yuan ($2,981), in response to Chinese media outlet Caixin Global.
“After AI emerged, movie manufacturing turned far more accessible,” notes Xie. And iQiyi is an emblem of how shortly AI is taking up the business. The Beijing-based firm was based in 2010 as a streaming platform just like Netflix, letting Chinese customers watch human-authored motion pictures and TV reveals from throughout the area. Yet in April, iQiyi introduced that it was pivoting to AI, turning its video app right into a social media platform internet hosting AI-generated content material. The founding father of iQiyi, Gong Yu, referred to as AI a “once-in-a-decade alternative.”
Another motive why video AI is taking off in Asia is the area’s comparably looser copyright laws.
“China doesn’t have the laws concerned to cease folks from making movies utilizing AI,” says Ian Dixon, an affiliate professor on the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “They’re additionally actually not going to have folks out protesting on the streets, just like the American screenwriters and actors do.”
The West, in contrast, has extra frameworks in place to guard artists. In 2023, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike, protesting adjustments within the business attributable to disruptive applied sciences like AI and streaming providers.
“The West is extra militantly reactive,” Shaw notes. “There’s much more vocalization of defending the rights of artists, and extra paranoia that such rights will go away.”
And as Chinese video fashions like ByteDance’s Seedance go international, they’re hitting boundaries as they enter exchanges that care extra about copyright regulation.
When Seedance 2.0 was launched in February, life like clips of actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt brawling on a rooftop flooded the web, sparking allegations of copyright infringement. The Chinese tech agency has since agreed to strengthen copyright safeguards on its video- and image-generation fashions as a part of an AI copyright truce with the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a commerce group representing main U.S. movie studios.
AI-generated movies are polarizing. Boh’s brief movie premiered to combined critiques on-line, even because it drew a file variety of guests to Edenstone’s web site. “We noticed near 70,000 lively customers in three days, and our servers couldn’t deal with it,” Boh notes. “It crashed and went offline thrice. That was a cheerful information level, I suppose.”
He admits that audiences would possibly nonetheless want time to get used to AI-made movies. “It’s like how we used to solely write [with] pen and paper, however the planet has moved on to utilizing Microsoft Word and Google Docs, as a result of we now require a sure degree of pace,” he says.
“It’s troublesome to steer conventional filmmakers and moviegoers,” Chen concedes. “Their mindset and manner of working are already many years within the making.” She’s now pivoting to creating AI-generated interactive movies, which permit viewers to take part within the storytelling course of by making selections that affect the plot.
And whereas customers appear to tolerate AI in short-form content material—maybe the video equal of junk meals—they’re nonetheless skeptical of feature-length AI movies.
“You nonetheless have to have very sturdy fundamentals to make a great film,” says Shaw, including {that a} well-made AI movie can solely be born from prompts primarily based on a robust understanding of filmmaking ideas and literacy. “Even if everybody has entry to the instruments within the kitchen, not everybody’s a world-class chef.”
Still, it’s not like Hollywood is especially artistic both. Just one completely authentic movie—Warner Bros. and Apple’s F1: The Movie—options within the prime 10 highest-grossing movies of 2025; the opposite 9 are sequels, or primarily based on current properties like Minecraft or the anime Demon Slayer.
“Studios are capable of change human-made content material with AI, as a result of cinema is already like an AI product,” Dixon says. “If you’re questioning what Hollywood’s going to do with AI, they’re going to make superhero movies.”
One Chinese launch reveals that audiences nonetheless admire a human-authored movie, even a really made one: In August, Chinese audiences had been befuddled by Niu Lai, a crudely animated movie a couple of cow, from a mother-and-son duo with no filmmaking expertise.
But that confusion grew into enormous crowds flocking to a film that viewers discovered refreshing amid a sea of AI-generated content material. Niu Lai ultimately grossed 60 million yuan ($9.1 million) on the Chinese field workplace—and beat superhero movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
