Moviegoers just took a stand against slop and won.
Following a flurry of online backlash, AMC Theaters said it would no longer allow an AI-generated short film to be shown at its US locations, in the latest example of the mounting resistance to AI’s encroachment on the arts.
The short film, Igor Alferov’s “Thanksgiving Day,” won first prize at the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival last week. Part of the prize involved getting a national two-week run in theaters with several major chains, including AMC. The film would play during in the advertising pre-roll that starts twenty minutes before the feature film begins.
But news of the film’s distribution quickly sparked outrage online, most of it targeting AMC, the largest movie chain in the world. After the Hollywood Reporter reached out to the company, it provided a statement distancing itself from involvement in the decision to distribute the AI film, and said it would effectively pull it from its theaters.
“This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC’s US locations,” AMC said in the statement. “AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate.”
“Thanksgiving Day” is described as following a bear and his assistant platypus as they “travel through the galaxy on a spaceship that resembles a flying dumpster.” That may be lending it too much credit: as it happens, the film resembles a dumpster, too. It plays out in such a commercial-style montage that watching its official upload on YouTube may leave you coming away confused as to whether you just sullied your eyeballs with a badly stitched together trailer or the actual complete film, since basically nothing happens.
It was purportedly made using Gemini 3.1, presumably to write the story, and Nano Banana Pro to create the imagery. Joel Roodman, the head of Modern Uprising Studios, which co-organized the festival, glazed it as a “masterclass in original storytelling.”
It wouldn’t have been the first time that AI films have been allowed to imbrue the silver screen. A selection of them were shown in August as part of the AI startup Runway’s “AI Film Festival” at ten IMAX locations, leaving many critics unimpressed.
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