MiniMax Launches Hub at SIFF as AI Reshapes Chinese Film Production

The 28th Shanghai International Film Festival closed on June 22, 2026, with generative AI embedded deeper into its programming than any previous edition. MiniMax, the company behind Hailuo video generation, used the festival as the launchpad for Hub, a multimodal platform that consolidates image creation, video, voiceover, music, and editing into a single workflow. The design principle behind Hub is blunt: the tool pauses at key creative decision points rather than running from prompt to finished output, keeping the filmmaker in control at every stage.

MiniMax Hub Keeps the Filmmaker in the Loop

Hub combines five functions that previously required separate tools: image creation, video generation, voiceover, music composition, and an editing layer. Rather than generating a finished asset from a single text prompt, Hub interrupts the process at decision points and returns control to the filmmaker before continuing. The position MiniMax stated publicly was unambiguous: creative direction and aesthetic judgment must ultimately be left to humans.

That framing is a direct response to one of the most consistent complaints from working filmmakers about AI video tools. End to end generation produces outputs that are technically proficient but hard to steer with precision. Hub's approach accepts slower generation in exchange for more reliable alignment between the filmmaker's intent and the final output. MiniMax built Hailuo as an underlying generation capability. Hub is the interface that makes it a production instrument.

The SIFF launch made MiniMax an institutional collaborator of the festival, a designation that carries weight in China's state linked film industry calendar. It is also the company's clearest public statement to date about how it intends to compete with consumer facing AI video tools: not on raw output speed, but on how much creative control the filmmaker retains at each step.

Compute Power as the Defining Obstacle

At the SIFForum panel "Smart Tech, Immersive Worlds, The Next Film Revolution," industry leaders identified three core challenges holding back the next phase of AI filmmaking: compute power, distribution, and the ability to direct generative video AI with precision. Of the three, compute drew the most attention.

Yan Yijun, VP of AI foundational model development at MiniMax, called it the absolute core of the problem. "For a generative video model to achieve greater fidelity, what you really need is greater computing power to repeatedly refine and experiment," he said. The statement reframes the AI filmmaking bottleneck from a creative or ethical question to an infrastructure one. The tools exist. The training pipelines exist. What limits output quality is the compute available for iterative refinement during generation.

Panelists at the same session repeatedly framed AI as complementary to human filmmaking rather than a substitute for it. The audience response, as Variety reported from the room, suggested the industry is not yet convinced. The gap between the official position and the floor level anxiety reflects a real tension: AI is advancing fast enough that "complementary" may not describe what the technology looks like in five years, and everyone in the room knows it.

A Period Epic in Seven Days

One detail from SIFF 2026 illustrated the current state of AI assisted production more concretely than any panel statement. An AI first company, which spoke with Variety at the festival but declined to be named, disclosed that it had completed a live action period epic running 120 minutes, finished in seven days. The production used AI for background replacements, relighting, and VFX work. Crew members stood in for the principal performances, which were later replaced entirely by AI generated actors.

The company's decision not to go public with its name or the film title is itself a data point. The Deadline analysis published the same day described how studios and production companies routinely keep AI use undisclosed, crediting the technology on only a fraction of the projects where it was used. The SIFF disclosure is an exception to a pattern, not a representative example.

What the seven day production does demonstrate is where compute bottlenecks and creative control trade off in practice. A production company with access to sufficient AI infrastructure and the willingness to replace human performers entirely can compress a feature's production schedule to less than two weeks. The question Yan Yijun and the SIFForum panelists were circling is: how many productions will have that combination of resources, and how soon.

SIFF as a Live Lab for AI Filmmaking

The festival ran workshops across four AI related tracks this year: image creation, audio tuning, AI writing, and a legal tutoring session on AI and rights. That programming sits on top of the institutional infrastructure that SIFF launched at the festival's opening, including the Technology Creation and Fabrication Unit and five service platforms at Shanghai High-Tech Films and Televisions City in Songjiang.

The combination of government backed infrastructure and a company like MiniMax using the festival as a product launch stage is not accidental. China's approach to AI in film has consistently run through centralized institutional channels. The Songjiang platforms, the SIFForum panels, and the MiniMax institutional partnership are all operating at the same level: building the conditions for an AI capable film industry before individual productions start demanding those conditions exist.

That stands in contrast to the Hollywood pattern, where individual productions, studios, and guilds have been negotiating AI adoption one agreement at a time. Tony Leung's closing ceremony statement that "AI has no soul" reflects the anxieties that arrive in the absence of that kind of coordinated framing. MiniMax is not answering Leung's philosophical position. It is building the platform that the next wave of Chinese filmmakers will be trained to use before the philosophical debate is resolved.

Filmmakers outside China who want to explore the latest AI video and image-to-video tools are able to try them directly through the AI FILMS Studio video workspace.

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Sources

Variety | The Hollywood Reporter | Sixth Tone | Deadline