Busan 2026: Big Tech and AI Move Into the Film Market

Google DeepMind, AWS, Kling AI and Alibaba are arriving at the Asian Contents & Film Market with a program that connects production, distribution and even the audience’s biometric reactions.

The future of cinema, at least in Busan, is not presenting itself as a film but as an ecosystem. From October 10 to 13, during the Busan International Film Festival, the professional market ACFM will host InnoAsia 2026: four days in which artificial intelligence, cloud computing, visual effects, microdrama, advertising and audience analysis will be arranged along a single production chain.

The festival’s official announcement describes an environment in which cinema and technology co-evolve. Looking at the program, however, that evolution already appears to be organized as a supply chain: from screenplay analysis all the way to measuring the viewer’s emotions.

Alongside Google DeepMind, Amazon Web Services, Kling AI, BytePlus and Alibaba Cloud there will be Eyeline Studios, Netflix’s VFX studio; i.AM, the Korean Film Archive’s digital-asset exchange platform; AI and XR production companies such as Atlas V and Mateo AI Studio; and the microdrama platforms Mango TV, FlickReels and Vigloo.

Big Tech does not enter the theater: it enters where films are financed

The InnoAsia program includes around twelve initiatives divided among technological experimentation and investment, creation and production, industry and public policy. Kling AI will organize two events devoted to the new cinematic possibilities of video generation and to commercial relationships with the Asian market. AWS and MegazoneCloud, meanwhile, will launch the AWS Awards: startups will be selected after a proof-of-concept phase, and the winners will receive credits to use Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

At the center of the program will be the Cinematic AI conference, devoted to Google DeepMind’s animation work and to a project associated with Darren Aronofsky that had already been presented at Cannes Next. In 2025, Google announced that Primordial Soup, the studio founded by the director, would produce three shorts directed by emerging filmmakers, assisted by the DeepMind research group and supervised by Aronofsky. The first, ANCESTRA, was directed by Eliza McNitt; the next, Goodnight Lamby, presented at Cannes, is the work of artist Dustin Yellin.

It was Aronofsky himself who defended these experiments at Cannes, arguing that they do not replace traditional productions because those films would not have existed without AI.

From the screenplay to heartbeats: production and consumption in a feedback loop

The most interesting part of the program does not concern the most famous names, but the seven Korean startups selected through a call organized with AWS and the Busan Center for Creative Economy & Innovation. Taken together, their technologies describe almost every stage of audiovisual production.

CASTLINK by Lumicraft uses AI to identify actors and connect casting, contracts and payments. PRE-FLOW by Reproduction analyzes screenplays and shares the data required for production. Voithru, with Totus, offers an automated dubbing system in up to 29 languages, while XL8 works on video localization and real-time interpretation. The i.AM platform turns models and VFX elements into tradable assets; Digion Cinema brings viewing to online cinemas and augmented-reality glasses.

MyStarChain will present a blockchain-based voting system, while HiStranger will showcase Insight Flow, a technology that uses biometric signals to analyze viewers’ emotional reactions. Within a single ecosystem, then, the screenplay is broken down into data, the cast is selected, the film is produced and localized, viewing is mediated by devices, and the audience’s response is converted back into information.

A further session will address independent foundation models, intellectual property, AI assets and copyright: issues that the industry has often treated as legal complications and that it now recognizes, more realistically, as parts of the infrastructure.

Advertising becomes cinema, cinema becomes a format

The most revealing experiment is Cinema by Brand 2026, an ACFM and INNOCEAN competition for short films intended for OTT platforms and theaters. The theme is solar energy generated in space, linked to Hanwha’s industrial strategy: from around twelve proposals, three projects will be selected, each receiving up to 500 million won in funding, and then brought together in an anthology film.

The director’s autonomy remains central, provided it moves within the established narrative orbit: the product no longer enters the film; rather, the film is born as an evolved form of the product. The brand does not buy thirty seconds of attention, but finances a story constructed so that it does not look like advertising.

The same logic returns in microdrama, a market that ACFM values at 18 billion dollars. Short formats, accelerated production, automated localization and reaction analysis make it possible to test stories and characters at a speed traditional cinema cannot match. Busan already offers the necessary industrial scale: in 2025 the market brought together 1,222 companies, 3,024 professionals from 55 countries and 8,438 business meetings.

The screen, then, no longer represents the end of the film but becomes the sensor through which the audience re-enters production in the form of data.