Shengshu's AI Feature Film Flops as Hong Kong IPO Approaches

Box Office Reality Check

Shengshu Technology positioned its Vidu model as a powerhouse for professional filmmaking, culminating in the release of China's first AI-assisted feature film, *Sanxingdui: Future Past*. However, with a meager box office of 1.68 million yuan and near-empty theaters on weekdays, the movie became a public counterexample rather than a commercial showcase, dealing a blow to the company's valuation narrative just as its Hong Kong IPO approaches.

Market Pressures and Margins

While Shengshu has raised over 6 billion yuan and boasts a valuation above $2 billion, the broader market mood for AI has soured. Video generation APIs are locked in a brutal price war, with costs dropping to mere pennies per second. Independent startups struggle to compete against tech giants who can endlessly subsidize inference, making pure video generation a tough business with low customer loyalty.

The World Model Pivot

Recognizing the limits of simple video generation, Shengshu has increasingly branded itself as a general world-model company, expanding into robotics and physical simulation. Yet, critics and industry leaders remain skeptical, noting that predicting pixels is a poor substitute for true physical understanding, and real-world deployment for robots remains a distant, expensive dream.