From Busan to Los Angeles, AI Filmmaking Is Having Its Theatrical Moment

Something happened at this month's Asian Contents and Film Market in Busan that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago. Four working filmmakers stood on a stage and showed audiences how they are making real films, including features, with a generative video model called Kling AI. The session, New Cinematic Possibilities: Reimagining Filmmaking with Kling AI, was co-hosted by Kling AI and the market, marking the company's second year in InnoAsia, a program connecting technology companies with the content industry.

Kling 4.0 has started early access beta testing, and the filmmakers on stage treated it as a production tool, not a novelty. Their projects range from AI-generated short films to a 105-minute animated feature, and the conversation had moved past whether AI can make movies to how it changes who gets to make them.

Four films, four experiments

Korean director Sung-Soo Kim, best known for 12.12: The Day, used AI for the first time for his short film Worm Train, a dark comedy inspired by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. It follows an office worker overwhelmed by corporate life who turns into a giant insect and still has to commute to work. Kim began the project with Kling 3.0 in early 2026, then resumed production with Kling 4.0. The turning point was a subway scene he had abandoned in March: with Kling 4.0 Preview, he could finally render the realistic physical interaction and weight as the insect collided with passengers, the scene he had given up on.

Sang Wook Lee, who heads the AI Contents Lab at MBC C&I, presented Rendering Love, a short-form AI series co-developed with Barunson E&A, the production company behind Parasite. The series blends live-action scenes with AI-generated virtual idols, leaning on Kling 4.0's advances in character consistency and motion control. The model's Omni Reference supports up to 10 keyframes for scene planning and 15 multimodal references, keeping characters consistent from shot to shot. Lee's team uses motion control to preserve the dance movements and physical nuances of real performers, transferring their performances onto virtual characters rather than replacing them.

Chinese animation director Wei Li, with more than 20 years in the industry, is developing Born of the Tide, a 105-minute animated feature built with Kling AI. The film has more than 2,350 shots and over 152 characters, and uses the model's native 4K generation for sequences like a dragon boat race and an action set piece in a fish market. Then there is Natasha, a 100-minute AI-hybrid mystery thriller and period romance from MooAm founder and director Harry Hyun, whose film Crypto Man topped Netflix Korea's film chart in 2025. Set during the harsh winter of 1944 under Japanese colonial rule, Natasha leans on Kling 4.0's 10-bit HDR output for high-contrast backlit and nighttime scenes, plus a 21:9 aspect ratio for widescreen compositions.

"AI has not eliminated the creative process. Instead, it has made collaboration between people more efficient and more closely connected," said Sung-Soo Kim, director of Worm Train

The scale of the shift

Kling AI has grown fast since launching in June 2024. The platform has gone through more than 30 product iterations, and as of June 2026 it had surpassed 100 million users worldwide, spread across 224 countries and regions, with nearly 50,000 enterprise customers. That scale is the real context for Busan: this is no longer a demo for early adopters, it is infrastructure professionals now plug into their pipelines.

The theatrical side of the story is arriving this month too. Sanxingdui: Future Past, announced by Bona Film Group as China's first hyper-realistic theatrical film to involve AI throughout the production process, opens nationwide in Chinese cinemas on October 23. The 100-minute film blends the ancient Shu civilization with a futuristic science-fiction setting and has secured an official screening license. All of its characters are original digital creations, with no digital replicas of real actors, sidestepping the likeness-rights disputes that have haunted AI casting.

According to its production team, AI was not the director. Image generation and content production were AI-assisted, while the creative concept, narrative direction and final artistic decisions stayed with a professional team of more than 100 people at Bona's AIGMS division, working through a conventional film-production workflow. That is the industry's emerging template: AI in the pipeline, humans in charge.

Los Angeles gives AI films a stage

On October 24, the AI Film Summit Los Angeles 2026 will put AI-assisted filmmaking in the spotlight at City Club Los Angeles, where the Tyrannus Angel Awards will honor work chosen for emotional impact rather than technical novelty. The summit drew 636 submissions from more than 80 countries, 35 works made the official selection, and recipients of nine awards will be announced during the evening ceremony.

The panels tell you where the industry's head is. Four themes, MAKE IT, BUILD A CAREER, SELL IT and OWN IT, cover production, professional opportunity, distribution and creative rights, with former Disney animator Davy Liu, director and cinematic artist Mark Cheng, and filmmaker Tony Shyu among the featured voices. A Creator Lab and an industry exchange round out the day with tool demonstrations and meetings between creators and collaborators.

The question nobody has dodged

The hard questions are being asked in public too. When Netflix released Ben Affleck's thriller Animals on October 9, Affleck disclosed that proprietary AI tools had been used in postproduction for tasks such as lighting and continuity, and coverage quickly shifted from the film itself to transparency, studio-owned AI, and what it means for labor protections and guild rules. On October 7 in Dhaka, industry stakeholders held a roundtable on AI's impact on Bangladesh's film industry, calling for policies to protect the intellectual property of filmmakers, actors and crew members, plus training to help creators adapt.

Kim himself was blunt about the limits at Busan. AI can generate footage endlessly, he said, but it still cannot create the connection between shots. For Worm Train he assembled a nine-person team, including VFX supervisor Ryu Jae-hwan and specialists in art direction, narrative editing and music. Rather than focusing on how much AI could cut production costs, he began to consider how it might transform the filmmaking process itself.

What October is telling us

Put the three events side by side and the picture sharpens. At Busan, established filmmakers are building features with AI video generation inside conventional production workflows. In China, a 100-minute AI-assisted feature is about to face the toughest test of all: a theatrical audience that paid for tickets. In Los Angeles, AI-assisted films are getting an awards ceremony, the industry's most traditional form of legitimacy. And in each case, the humans remain the credited authors.

The business model is taking shape too. Kling's enterprise customer count, the official screening license for Sanxingdui, and a summit with panels on distribution and rights all point to the same conclusion: AI filmmaking is commercializing from the middle of the pipeline outward, not from viral novelties inward. The question for the next year is whether audiences care that AI helped, and whether the people behind the cameras get paid, credited and protected as the tools improve. October 2026 may be remembered as the month the industry stopped treating that question as hypothetical.