Skip to main content
MANIFOLD
In 2028, will an AI be able to generate a full low-quality movie to a prompt?
383
Ṁ1.6kṀ340k
2028
89%
chance

Same as the main market but the AI must only be at the level of the worst filmmakers, rather than the best. So instead of a Marvel movie level of quality, think The Room level of quality. That's the yardstick that I will be using. Alternatively it can be any other well-known bad movie, like Birdemic or Who Killed Captain Alex. It doesn't need to have the "so bad it's good" qualities of The Room, but it needs to have a minimally coherent plot structure and cinematography. It must not be too painful for humans to watch the entire thing, and it needs to have the basics like characters say and do things that advance the plot, at least usually.

Main market:

Get
Ṁ1,000
to start trading!
Sort by:

Things are getting to a point where we will probably see some attempts at resolving this in the next couple weeks/months so would like to get a better sense of where everyones head is at.

The main limitation that I see for this (and the high quality market) is that cobbling something together wouldn't clear it, having a director at all wouldn't clear it, and having a script definitely wouldn't clear it, "to a prompt" does a lot of heavy lifting. It is, in large part, a market on context rot being solved or not by then. It does require an end-to-end solution that scales to a fairly long script to clear it. I don't think video quality was likely to ever be the main limiting factor.

I understand it does not have to be able to do it consistently, and doing it once to a prompt would probably clear the threshold, but producing something that is 1h20+ in a way that is consistently somewhat coherent still seems ways away. I haven't been tracking every new releases, but it does seem like every feature length project that would come close to the quality bar did not involve writing the script and had a lot of humans in the loop. I'm curious if someone has some examples of things that they would consider to be close to warranting a resolution that goes in the direction of "to a prompt".

@LuEE I think at current capabilities, someone could probably do this with Opus 5.5 using Seedance and like $10k

@LuEE I've already seen ~1 hr long vertical microdramas that probably clear the "quality" bar here or are very close. These films have some amount of human curation but like... I think Opus 5.5 could write a better script than the incredibly bad and pointless scripts that these films rely on, so I don't think that's the bottleneck.

@bens Thats the main disconnect, I don't think current models can take on a task as long as a feature length script even with a good harness. Unlike something more modular like coding a large project, writing a feature length script does require the model to keep the whole thing in mind, at least a lot more of the context in much more granular detail. Context cluing from heavily compressed representation leads to a lot of inconsistencies so I'm not sure compacting is the way forward. And it doesn't feel like this is an axis where improvements have been quite at the pace of other capabilities, the couple long reasoning benchmarks I'm aware off basically publish with bad results across the board and are ignored entirely thereafter, doesn't feel like anyone is looking to deal with context rot or knows how too. Altough bad movies tier script might very well be within reach here

What’s surprising is that “to a prompt” seems the clear bottleneck to me although I don’t have access to the latest models. I don’t know if the trivial minimal prompt examples provided will be sufficient for an AI to do it in the following narrow sense: the AIs have access to tools now so it could scrape a bunch of tool sets and other prompts that contain the structure/instructions to produce such a movie, but this would seem to be a gray area that goes against the spirit of the market, yet on the other hand we might not even likely know that it it did such searching unless it was a locally run AI or relied on prompting where we said “don’t search the internet and don’t use the internet for any resources for this project.”

@LuEE I think this should only resolve to Yes if there’s a clear consensus that Yes, this is now possible. One offs with an unknown amount of human curation shouldn’t be sufficient.

sold Ṁ5,335 NO

Seems like we might be at this point already. What will you do if it costs ~$10k in tokens to do?

@TheOtherKC Now I haven't seen The Room or any of the other bad film examples to compare, but this one is pretty bad. The main character is obviously a different person in each scene, and he keeps doing things that make no sense like going in the opposite direction of what the plot suggests he should be doing.

oh hi mark

I like to periodically revisit this. Here's what can be created using only open source tools (gemma4, LTX23, Flux-Klein-8b). Took about 9 hours to generate. Obviously you could do much better by using commercial models (Gemini-pro-3.1, NanoBanana Pro, Veo3) but would cost a few hundred dollars.

bought Ṁ1,500 NO

I don't think the intelligence difference between making Who Killed Captain Alex and Saving Private Ryan is that big from an AI's perspective. I would think this should be much closer to the high-quality movie market.

@ItsMe there is no intelligence difference between Who Killed Captain Alex and Saving Private Ryan

bought Ṁ75 NO

So if I'm getting this right, it has to be good enough that you can't tell it was obviously made by AI?

@ItsMe Nope

Nope, what?

@ItsMe nope, you are not getting this right. Nothing in the markt says anything like this. This is not one of the requirements

If it's so bad you can easily tell an AI made it, then I don't think it would pass the criteria in the description.

@ItsMe lmk if you want to bet that most people would read it the same way

That is way too meta for me

@Bayesian this is why I love this place

opened a Ṁ5,000 YES at 60% order

@Joshua if you want some more, I'm looking to sell out of some of my large NO position

Who Killed Captain Alex is a masterpiece