IQiyi, the largest streaming platform in China and a comparable reference to Netflix in that market, announced plans for artificial intelligence to generate most of its new movies and series within a five-year horizon. CEO Gong Yu shared this vision at the company's annual content event, accompanied by the launch of Nadou Pro, an audiovisual production tool that automates the entire process from scriptwriting to final rendering.
Nadou Pro integrates AI models from Alibaba and ByteDance for its domestic version, and Google Veo 3.1 for its international version. The immediate goal of the platform is to release, before the summer of 2026 ends, the first commercially successful movie entirely generated by AI, a goal that no studio or platform has achieved so far. The initial catalog includes 16 science fiction and anime films generated with these tools.
This move by IQiyi comes at a time when the global audiovisual industry is actively exploring the use of AI in production, with mixed results. Netflix has begun incorporating AI-generated final images into some of its series, with the first known example being the Argentine science fiction show "El Eternauta." Amazon MGM Studios launched an internal team dedicated to building AI tools for film and TV, currently in closed beta. YouTube introduced AI creation tools last September. Outside of traditional studios, director Darren Aronofsky released a series generated with AI about the American Revolutionary War, and a $70 million production called "Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi," directed by Doug Liman, competes for the title of the first high-budget movie generated with AI.
However, the question that no experiment has yet answered is whether users will pay for this type of content. The consumption of AI-generated video on platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels is massive, but that consumption occurs in a context of zero cost to the user, where clips last seconds and engagement is minimal. Translating that behavior to a paid streaming experience, where the user invests 90 minutes in front of a screen, is a leap that has yet to be commercially validated. A survey by NBC News last month found that approximately half of respondents have negative feelings toward AI, adding a cultural acceptance variable that metrics for short content consumption do not capture.
The economic factor also complicates the narrative. OpenAI shut down Sora, its video generation tool that sparked massive interest in this type of content, with the aim of reducing its financial commitments ahead of a possible IPO. With its shutdown, a $1 billion investment from Disney in OpenAI's video capabilities effectively became null and void.
According to next+ analysis, IQiyi's bet is the first real stress test for generative cinema at an industrial scale. So far, the discussion around AI in audiovisual production has occurred at two speeds: the technological enthusiasm of corporate announcements and the resistance of hundreds of industry professionals who see this technology as a direct threat to their jobs. What IQiyi is doing is turning that discussion into an experiment with measurable results: if its 16 AI-generated films have paying audiences, the model will be replicated. If they do not, the sector will have the first concrete data on the real limit of what consumers are willing to accept from AI in long-form entertainment. In any case, the outcome of this summer matters more than any projection about the future of cinema with artificial intelligence.