Peter Chan: AI Will Replace Blockbuster Films Within Three Years

"Basically, AI can replace any blockbuster or commercial film in three years, I believe". Peter Chan Ho-sun, one of the most commercially successful directors in Chinese language cinema, delivered that verdict at the Hong Kong International Film and Television Market in March 2026. He was not predicting a distant future. He was describing a shift he believes is already underway.

Chan offered the timeline at a Filmart panel on international co production, alongside Singapore director Anthony Chen and Janet Yang, the first Chinese American president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The panel covered industry fragmentation, audience behavior, and the specific threat AI poses to commercially oriented production.

The Distinction He Drew

Chan was precise about what AI can and cannot replace. "I don't think AI is an enemy to auteur film. But AI would be an enemy to mediocre blockbusters". The logic follows commercial production's structure: if a film exists to fulfill genre expectations, satisfy market testing, and hit demographic targets, an AI system can approximate that function at far lower cost.

Art house cinema, by contrast, depends on a filmmaker's individual observation of the world. Chan, whose films include "Comrades: Almost a Love Story", "Perhaps Love", and "Dearest", built his reputation on exactly that kind of observation. Personal cinema is, in his framing, the category AI cannot reach.

Big Data and the Industry's Mistake

Chan was equally direct about the industry habits that accelerated this vulnerability. He called reliance on big data "one of the dirtiest words I've ever heard for creative people", pointing to a cycle in which studios replaced creative judgment with audience analytics and produced films that now have no advantage over what an AI system can generate from the same inputs.

"Those days of the blockbusters are gone", he said. The franchise model and the commercial calculation behind it are, in Chan's reading, the precise characteristics that make a film type susceptible to AI replacement.

Filmart 2026: A Different Register

Chan's remarks came at one of 28 sessions devoted to AI at the market. The Hollywood Reporter described AI as having "virtually taken over Filmart", a stark contrast with the labor driven AI debates in Hollywood, where guild protections and contract negotiations dominate the conversation.

The same event produced a very different kind of statement from Chinese director Jia Zhangke, who presented AI shorts made with Seedance 2.0 and Kling and described facing new technology "without making premature judgments". Chan's alarm and Jia's curiosity occupied the same hall. Both agreed the technology would not replace their own kind of filmmaking.

The View From Hollywood

Western directors have largely framed AI as a tool question rather than an industry structure question. Kathleen Kennedy has questioned whether AI generated work can achieve what she considers great filmmaking. Carlos Saldanha brought a comparable director's perspective to Busan, focused on the creative choices that separate human from machine production.

Chan's framing is more structural. He is not primarily concerned with whether AI can be creative. He is arguing that the commercial film industry organized itself around criteria that AI can now satisfy more cheaply. The guild negotiations now underway in Hollywood, including the DGA contract talks opening May 11, are in part a response to the same structural shift Chan described.

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Sources

Variety | Deadline | The Hollywood Reporter