iQIYI opens a 110-square-meter AI film studio in Shanghai

iQIYI opened the AI Film Studio at its Creative Center Shanghai in late October and began filming the internet feature "Cop in Trouble" there on October 28, the Chinese streaming platform said in a press release published November 1. iQIYI describes the roughly 110-square-meter room as China's first AI film studio, a ranking the company states and no outside body certifies.

The facility pairs live-action shooting on a compact stage with AI post-production. It records with multiple cameras, captures synchronized high-resolution video and audio, keeps a digital continuity log and lets the crew review footage in real time. From the set, iQIYI says, on-set footage syncs automatically into NadouPro, the company's AI-powered film and TV production platform.

Through NadouPro, filmmakers get immediate access to nearly 30 AI models, the release states, naming ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 and Kuaishou's Kling 4.0, which became available to all users on October 15 according to Kling's own release notes. The platform also carries hundreds of production-focused AI agents and skills. The pipeline is designed to let a production generate or adjust visual elements after filming while preserving the actors' original performances, so a scene's environment can be built around a recorded take rather than invented alongside it.

"An actor's performance is the core of any film or series," said Liang Zhu, iQIYI's vice president and head of intelligent production. "The AI studio lets directors preserve that performance while adjusting sets, lighting and costumes, makeup, and props more flexibly, opening up greater creative space for filmmakers and creative professionals alike."

"Cop in Trouble" follows Jian Zhang, a low-ranking constable whose web of lies to take down a notorious outlaw begins to unravel. The release says the live-action recordings serve as reference for AI generation in character appearance, performance, composition, lighting and spatial relationships, and that the film mixes live performances with AI-generated environments and detail.

The release leaves several figures out. It gives no budget, no delivery or premiere date, and no share of the finished film that will be AI-generated, as AI Chat Daily and AI Weekly noted. It also does not disclose commercial terms with the model providers behind Seedance 2.5 or Kling 4.0. alfw.ai noted that the release's only efficiency number, gains of over 30%, belongs to iQIYI's earlier Hengdian virtual studio: it carries no baseline or method and measures nothing about the new room.

The studio is the facility layer under an AI push SLOP TV has followed this fall. iQIYI ran a Global AI Creator Challenge on the international version of NadouPro through September 23, requiring at least 60% of each entry to be generated with Alibaba's Wan3.0 (SLOP TV). In September it also unveiled the trailer for "Immortals Over Mortal Love," a 16-episode hybrid live-action and AI drama (SLOP TV). The Chinese business outlet 21st Century Business Herald reported on October 10 that NadouPro had served more than 200 professional film projects. AASTOCKS reported on October 21 that Kling 4.0's API launched with iQIYI's Nadou Pro among the platforms carrying the model.

That places the Shanghai room in a crowded field of live-action-plus-AI production in China, where platforms and studios are testing hybrid formats. For creators outside iQIYI's system, the studio's practical value is integration rather than exclusive access: it standardizes performance capture and feeds it straight into a platform that already hosts the models. Whether that shortens real production schedules remains unproven, because iQIYI has published no throughput, cost or timeline comparison for the room.

iQIYI has not announced a release date for "Cop in Trouble," so the studio's first measurable test will be the film itself.