Fuji TV plans generative AI in every drama by October 2027

Fuji Television said on November 5 that it will build a production system that lets every drama it makes use generative AI by October 2027, and that from the October 2026 season it will designate at least one drama each broadcast season as an "AI-enhanced" slot, according to the broadcaster's own announcement.

The announcement is Fuji Television's own. The commercial broadcaster, part of Fuji Media Holdings, created an "AI Center" inside its digital strategy division in a July 2026 reorganization, and under that center a project team has run an experimental site called "AI Sandbox" at Wangan Studio in Koto, Tokyo, since September, the announcement states. The team is drawn from its first studio, which handles drama and film production, its tech art design bureau and the video production company ANDENT.

Fuji Television said it has confirmed that some video production processes take 70 to 80 percent less working time than conventional methods. It limits the figure in the same announcement: the result covers specific processes and does not represent the average reduction in a finished drama's production cost or in its production process as a whole. The Chinese-language TechNews report on the plan, which I read, repeats the caveat and adds that the AI Sandbox folds generative AI into live-action shooting, VFX and CG and picks a method per work or scene.

The case study Fuji Television published is Emergency Room 24 Hours, a medical drama it revived this October after 13 years. The announcement and the TechNews report say the explosion scene in episode one used an aerial view of a fictional landscape generated with AI, with smoke composited over it, and that AI also handled fine image processing in medical scenes. SBS News, in an English report I read, describes the same work more concretely: the spraying of blood in surgery scenes was created with AI, and the aerial shots of the accident site were generated rather than filmed from a helicopter.

Two of the people behind the work described its limits in the accounts I read. Shinya Masaki, a deputy director in Fuji Television's tech art design bureau who oversees the technology, said the aim is not to hand everything to AI but to combine it with existing VFX and other methods, deciding with production staff what suits each work, according to the TechNews report. Ryotaro Adachi, the producer of Emergency Room 24 Hours, said in the same report that disaster scenes and scenes set overseas are reaching visual quality beyond what he had expected.

Fuji Television produces 16 serial dramas a year in the terrestrial golden and prime bands, the 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. slots, it said. From around October 2027 it plans to extend the approach to video-related companies under Fuji Media Holdings, and by fiscal 2029 it aims for the whole group to hold AI capability at the level of Japan's top vendors.

The plan lands against falling advertising revenue. SBS News, citing Nikkei Asia, reports that the programming production costs of Japan's five major commercial broadcasters fell 12 percent in the year to March 2026 compared with nine years earlier as viewers moved to mobile. Nikkei Asia itself reports that Fuji Television will use generative AI across all live-action drama series from October 2027, and that the technology was used to simulate blood during surgery and an explosion. Other Japanese broadcasters have used AI in production, SBS News says, naming TBS's VIVANT and Nippon TV's Tokyo Miconinja; Impress Watch reports that VIVANT used Google's Veo 3. SBS News also reports that Fuji Television plans to use Google's video generation tool among others and took a technology transfer from an AI video production company.

Japanese social media pushed back after the announcement, according to the TechNews report, with users arguing that the real goal is cost cutting and that the plan does not respect actors' work. Fuji Television says the aim is to reduce workload and shorten production time, not to replace actors or production crews.

For creators, the durable part is the template. A national broadcaster is building AI into its standard production pipeline and attaching a dated target for full coverage, with an in-house lab, a named external partner and a quarterly slot to test on real productions. If the October 2027 target holds, decisions that have sat with individual artists and small vendors, how a director's intent is visualized before a shoot and which effects a production keeps in house, move into a commissioning process that decides who gets the work.

The next milestones are the October 2027 target for all Fuji Television dramas and the fiscal 2029 target for the wider Fuji Media Holdings group.