Cinema

Musk and China Handed Cinema to AI. Audiences Felt Nothing

Elon Musk's AI Odyssey drew ridicule and China's first all-AI feature sold almost no tickets. Great directors explain why: a machine has no life to put on screen.

Husam Sam Asi 30 October 2026, 19:34

A frame from Episode 1 of the AI-generated Odyssey made with Grok Imagine, Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, posted on X on 23 October 2026. Image: Grok Imagine / X

Artificial intelligence had two auditions as a film director last week, one in China’s cinemas and one on Elon Musk’s X. Audiences turned their backs on both.

In China, Bona Film Group released Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country’s first fully AI-generated feature, on 23 October, with more than 10,000 screenings scheduled on its first day. By Monday it had taken about $180,000 against a budget of $1.5 million. Its makers spent more than two years feeding the machine 1.2 million source images. The plot is a joke the film tells against itself: humanity hands its decisions to a super-intelligent AI and plunges into crisis. “We are the first to try it, the first to get a theatrical release permit, and the first to be tested by the audience,” said Bona’s Jiang Defu. The audience marked the test.

The same weekend, Musk’s Grok Imagine posted the first episode of its AI Odyssey, made with Wonder Studios. In July Musk had promised a full-length film “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer“, after a run of posts attacking Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, above all its casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. What arrived was seven minutes that viewers mocked for jarring cuts, plastic faces and ancient Greeks chatting in modern English. Even Grok, asked to judge its own work, ruled that it “does not meet a strict historical standard”. Nolan’s Odyssey, shot on IMAX film cameras, has taken nearly $1.8 billion worldwide.

A machine with no life

The machines will improve. Their problem lies deeper. AI already beats its human rivals at the craft of film-making. It frames, lights, renders and cuts faster than any crew, and that craft is the easy part. Cinema lives in a director’s vision, and a vision grows out of a life: the loves, losses, fears and obsessions a director carries into a story. A machine has no life to carry.

Where vision comes from

A director’s vision is built from hundreds of choices: the lens, the frame, the light, the colour, the music, the rhythm of the cut. Those choices carry the director’s history. Tim Burton grew up a lonely child in Burbank, dreaming of monsters, and his films keep returning to a lonely child cast out by society, from Edward Scissorhands to Frankenweenie. Guillermo del Toro keeps coming back to water, in Hellboy, Pacific Rim and The Shape of Water. He puts it down to a love of swimming, then to the baptism that marked him as a Catholic boy. Alfonso Cuarón built Roma from his own childhood in 1970s Mexico City.

The directors themselves are often the last to notice. Cuarón had never seen that Roma leads straight into the Mexico of Y Tu Mamá También, made 17 years earlier, until it was put to him. Burton says he never plans it: he responds to something emotionally. Danny Boyle says a film comes to reflect the personality of its director. The crew bring their skills, and the director’s job is to forge the final vision, which is his own.

Grok has no childhood, no faith, no fears and no personality to reflect. The vision behind Musk’s Odyssey belongs to a chatbot, a prompt and a promise posted on X.

Built to explain

AI is built for the opposite job. It is a machine for explanation: it summarises, clarifies and answers. Cinema works below the level of thought. It stirs feelings in the unconscious, which is why it captivates audiences of every background and education. Christopher Nolan, whose film Musk set out to beat, says pure cinema is a film that makes you “answer the questions you have by feeling them rather than thinking them“.

Musk’s promise gives the game away. He ordered a “historically accurate” Odyssey, as if Homer were a fact-check. The poem has survived nearly 3,000 years on the strength of one man’s longing to get home to his wife and son.

Cuarón explains the paradox at the heart of the art: the more specific a film is, the more universal it becomes. The particular greens of Mexico City in Roma move viewers who have never been there, because they translate them into colours from their own memories. A machine trained on everything is specific about nothing. Chinese audiences sensed it at once. “The public is highly skeptical about AI use in major feature films, despite their general acceptance of short-form films,” says Stanley Rosen, who studies Chinese film at the University of Southern California. The flop, he adds, “will compel others contemplating using AI for feature films to tread more carefully.”

Cinema is a vision

The lesson matters most in Hollywood, where cash-strapped studios are counting the savings AI promises and star directors have started using it. Steven Soderbergh defined cinema as “a specificity of vision“, something that “isn’t made by a committee”. An algorithm trained on everything is the biggest committee ever assembled.

Burton’s monsters came from a lonely boyhood in Burbank, del Toro’s water from a baptismal font, Cuarón’s Roma from his family home. Sanxingdui came from 1.2 million images. Audiences may never explain the difference. They feel it, and they vote with their tickets.