The first full-length AI drama premiered on national satellite TV channels and became a runaway smash hit.

People who watch the series are all making complaints, while those who hold related stocks get the daily limit up on their positions.

At 20:00 on August 31, an AI-produced long drama *After Journey to the West* premiered on Hunan TV's prime time slot.

This is the first domestic full-length AI TV series in China. Its first season has 30 episodes in total, each running for 40 minutes, with all the visuals and character performances generated by AIGC. It is also the first TV series that implements the "simultaneous production, review and broadcast" mechanism after the release of the "21 Provisions for Radio and Television Industry".

Mango Excellent Media saw two consecutive 20% daily limit ups on August 31 and September 1, rising from 14.15 yuan per share to 20.38 yuan per share, with its market value increasing by nearly 11.7 billion yuan within two days.

In the early trading hours of September 3, the short drama and AI film & television concepts kept strengthening repeatedly: Mango Excellent Media rose by more than 10%, H&R Century Pictures notched 4 consecutive daily limit ups, Bona Film Group recorded 3 limit ups in 4 days, followed by Happiness Blue Sea, Dasheng Culture, Zhongguang Tianze, Enlight Media and IReader Technology. However, by market close, the popularity of relevant sectors cooled down slightly, ending the day with a minor overall decline.

Why can an AI TV series drive such a rally for film and television companies?

The answer may not lie in the drama itself, but in the fact that AI has for the first time pushed "content generation" into the actual production and commercialization links of long-form dramas.

Two consecutive limit ups: What exactly is the market betting on?

There have been no lack of hit works in the film and television industry in 2026.

*Pegasus 3* during the Spring Festival holiday delivered impressive results; *The Love Letter to Grandma* reaped huge returns with a small production cost; the drama market saw popular titles such as *Chasing Jade*, *The Protagonist* and *Nine Gates*; after *Welcome to Dragon Restaurant* became a smash hit, it also drove the stock prices of media companies including Ruyi Pictures to hit daily limit ups. Even the viral work *Here Comes the Ox* also made the capital market see the possibility that content popularity can be converted into corporate value.

But most of these are one-off hit effects, whose popularity comes from a single work, and market attention is usually focused on the content itself.

What makes this time different is that *After Journey to the West* is an AI-produced long drama.

The pricing logic for traditional hits is that the box office revenue, advertising revenue, membership fees and copyright income brought by a certain work exceed expectations, which leads to a re-evaluation of the company's profitability.

However, *After Journey to the West* leaves far more room for market imagination.

In the first half of 2026, Mango Excellent Media recorded a revenue of 6.194 billion yuan, up 3.86% year on year, but its attributable net profit was only 202 million yuan, down 73.58% year on year, and the net cash flow from operating activities was -342 million yuan. The revenue of Mango TV's internet video business, which accounts for the main part of the total revenue, declined year on year, and the traditional content business is still under pressure.

Under such fundamental conditions, a newly released AI drama can hardly explain the nearly 11.7 billion yuan increase in market value.

More likely, the capital market is trading a new production method: if AI can reconstruct film and television production, then what Mango Excellent Media sells is not just the next hit, but a set of continuously replicable content production systems.

In the past, after a film or TV drama was shot, the scenes, costumes, makeup, actors' performances and a large amount of production costs would disappear along with the completion of the project.

AI can retain part of these production factors. Characters can be digitized, scenes can be digitized, shots can be disassembled and reused, and the production process can also form standardized tools.

This means that the asset logic of film and television companies will change, shifting from one-off project investment to reusable and continuously developed digital assets as well as IP development capabilities.

*After Journey to the West* Lands on Hunan TV Prime Time Slot

At 18:00 on August 31, *After Journey to the West* was launched on Mango TV; at 20:00, it was broadcast on Hunan TV's prime time slot.

It is adapted from the myth novel of the same name created in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, which is one of the sequels to *Journey to the West*. It tells the story of "the second generation of Westward Journey" represented by Sun Xiaosheng, who re-take the westbound journey a thousand years after the scripture pilgrimage.

This drama is produced by Mango TV, made by the AIGC Innovative Content Center of Mango TV, and co-produced by Bojing Culture. All its visuals and character performances are generated by AI, with no real-life actors involved. The first 5 episodes were released at launch, and the subsequent episodes are still being produced, reviewed and broadcast simultaneously.

Behind *After Journey to the West* is the self-developed "Mango Lingchuang" AIGC content creation platform of Mango TV, and the Seedance 2.0/2.5 video generation model from ByteDance provides underlying visual generation technical support for this project. This production process has accumulated 109 character digital assets and 143 scene digital assets, and adopted functions including character skeleton control, virtual camera and partial precise editing to standardize characters, scenes, shots and the entire production process. AI has begun to enter the complete film and television production workflow from being a single-point tool.

Mango did not bet on AI all of a sudden.

Ren Xu, General Manager of Mango TV AIGC Innovative Content Center, revealed in an interview with Sina Tech that Mango TV began to lay out AI algorithms as early as 2018; in 2020, it reserved technical talents through the "Malanshan Cup" International Audio and Video Algorithm Competition; in 2024, it launched the "Mango Large Model", and continued to build an AI content creation team afterwards.

In February 2026, Mango TV officially established the AIGC Innovative Content Center, which is a first-level center on a par with the Program Production Center and Technology Center.

Ren Xu said that Mango's path is to "make AI with content" instead of "make content with AI".

Mango itself is a platform "deeply rooted in content". The content copyrights accumulated by Hunan TV and Mango TV over the past two decades can serve as the data foundation for large model training; director thinking, script disassembly, aesthetic system, production logic and other experience can also be transformed into AI's content production capabilities.

Therefore, *After Journey to the West* is verifying whether a platform with IP resources, content capabilities, technical strength and broadcast channels can truly embed artificial intelligence into its own content industrial system.

The "21 Provisions for Radio and Television Industry" has just filled in the key missing link.

*After Journey to the West* has become the first drama that implements the "simultaneous production, review and broadcast" model, which forms a closed loop for AI generation, long drama production, content review and satellite TV broadcast in one work for the first time.

From this perspective, this is essentially an industrial trial, not a simple entertainment content experiment.

What Becomes Most Valuable After AI Cuts Production Costs?

The first aspects that AI changes in the film and television industry are cost and efficiency.

According to the research report of CICC, film and television production accounts for about 70% to 80% of the total industrial chain cost. With artificial intelligence, virtual shooting can save up to 85% of the scene construction cost, digital human actors can reduce 80% of the modeling and original painting cost, and the special effect production time can be shortened by up to 40%.

According to National Business Daily, Cai Huaijun, Chairman of Mango Media, said on September 2 that the overall cost of *After Journey to the West* is "a fraction" of that of similar S-level live-action dramas; for the 30 episodes each running 40 minutes, the production cycle from planning to launch is 70% shorter than that of traditional 3D animations.

How much content can be produced with the same amount of capital in the future?

When the marginal cost of content production gets lower and lower, the value of IP will be reassessed.

In the past, some mature IPs were not worthless, but their development cost was too high and the cycle was too long, so only top-tier projects were worth investing in. After AI digitizes production factors such as characters, scenes and shots, a large number of long-tail IPs may re-enter the development list.

What Mango is doing is turning such possibilities into production plans.

Ren Xu said that Mango will continue to develop Chinese-style cultural projects including *Sou Shen* and *The Life of Xin Zhui*, and promote serialized content such as *The Female General Returns*; at the same time, it will lay out tracks including children's animation and high-quality mid-to-long dramas targeted at female audiences. Even Mango's own mature IPs such as *Who's the Murderer* and *Singer* are exploring AI-based film and television adaptation.

If the core assets of traditional film and television companies are hit works and celebrities, then in the AI era, the scarce resources are IP reserves, data assets, model capabilities, content industrialization capabilities, as well as the channels to finally deliver content to audiences.

Mango just has all these capabilities.

Also on August 31, a noteworthy signal emerged in the video generation track: Beijing Keling under Kuaishou received a 1.4 billion yuan cash investment from the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, with the equity ratio accounting for about 1.14%. Right after the news was released, Kuaishou's stock price rose for two consecutive days.

State-level industrial capital has started to bet on video generation models, which indicates that the market is no longer just focusing on "AI-generated videos", but on whether video generation capabilities can truly enter the industry and generate revenue. Video generation models are evolving from "technical products of AI companies" into infrastructure that industrial capital is willing to invest in for the long term.

Upstream, the underlying video generation technology has obtained endorsement from the national team; midstream, the radio and television regulator has opened a compliant and accessible broadcast channel for AI dramas; downstream, Mango has built the first commercially operational AI long drama production line.

Some netizens have raised a question: Will actors be replaced?

Higher production efficiency cannot guarantee that the value of content will also increase accordingly. According to the *Guidelines for Micro-Drama Creation*, about 128,000 micro-dramas were launched across the whole industry in the first quarter of 2026, among which about 122,000 are AI-generated micro-dramas, accounting for more than 95%. However, it is worth noting that although the number of live-action micro-dramas launched during the 2026 Spring Festival holiday is only about 1/50 of that of AI dramas, the total view count of live-action micro-dramas is 25 times that of AI dramas.

Content can be produced faster and cheaper, but the time and attention of the audience are still limited.

Wang Xiaohui, Chief Content Officer of iQiyi, said at the earnings call in August this year: Long dramas and feature films with the highest emotional and artistic concentration and the greatest value see the slowest penetration of AI, so iQiyi still adheres to the principle of live-action shooting as the main part and AI as the auxiliary tool.

AI will not replace all actors, directors and production teams at one go. But for content that highly relies on virtual scenes, special effects and digital characters, such as myths, fantasy and xianxia works, most of them follow the logic of "the world matters more than the people". Once AI is applied, the cost structure will be redefined; for works that rely on real emotions, character relationships and realistic texture, live-action actors still have value that cannot be replicated quickly.

When production costs decline and content supply continues to explode, what becomes scarce is no longer "whether the work can be produced", but whether there are high-quality IPs, good stories and the capability to turn them into excellent content.

Conclusion

In 1995, *Toy Story* was released.

It showed the world for the first time that a full-length animated feature film could be completely made with 3D computer animation. After that, 3D computer animation gradually evolved from an emerging production technology to the main production method of the animation industry.

30 years later, *After Journey to the West* stands at another inflection point.

It is certainly not perfect: there are still traces of AI in character performances, some continuity errors in scenes, and there is still room for improvement in picture consistency, action logic and narrative rhythm.

But the reason why *After Journey to the West* can get a different market valuation is not that the drama is extremely well-made, but that it proves one thing: a 30-episode drama can pass the review, be broadcast on satellite TV and top the viewership of provincial satellite TV in the same time slot, without a traditional film crew, real actors or on-location shooting.

As AI continuously drives down video production costs, the truly scarce resources in the film and television industry will become more and more valuable. High-quality IPs, good stories, and the capability to keep audiences engaged are the assets that never depreciate in the AI era.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Thecapital" (ID: thecapital), written by Li Bingzhi, edited by Wu Ren, and authorized for release by 36Kr.