The first fully ai-generated feature, hell grind, premiered at cannes in 2026, and tribeca followed…
the first fully ai-generated feature, hell grind, premiered at cannes in 2026, and tribeca followed with dreams of violets, built with kling, claude and gemini, while the average production cost of ai short dramas in china fell from about $747 a minute to a few hundred yuan a minute in the first half of the year. ai video platforms took $716 million in 2025.
the question for hollywood stopped being whether ai footage looks real, it is who gets paid when the minute costs a few hundred yuan.
Context
Verified dates: Hell Grind, a 95-minute fully AI-generated film, premiered at the Marche du Film in Cannes on May 21, 2026 (WSJ, May 21; Wikipedia). The WSJ says it cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of it AI compute. Tribeca accepted Dreams of Violets, set to premiere June 10, which one outlet says cost about $2,000 to make (Variety, May 27; CBC, May 28).
Cocoloop (Sep 7, 2026) says per-minute rates for AI short dramas fell from 5,000 yuan to a few hundred yuan, while custom productions still command 10,000 to 20,000 yuan.
Both premieres match the sources, with Hell Grind in the Cannes market. Variety and CBC call Dreams of Violets the first fully AI-generated film in Tribeca's lineup; the tools it used and the $747 a minute starting price were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. The yuan figures match Cocoloop, which gives 5,000 yuan as the starting rate. The $716 million AI video platform figure for 2025 was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. 'Who gets paid when the minute costs a few hundred yuan' is the author's.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the $716 million AI video platform figure and the $747 a minute baseline.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 20:16 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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