AI Is Everywhere — All the Time — at Hong Kong’s Filmart

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BY PATRICK BRZESKI, MATHEW SCOTT, Hollywood Reporter

As Hollywood remains locked in labor and legal battles over generative AI, Filmart is showcasing Asia’s increasingly full-throated embrace of the technology as both a foregone conclusion and the industry’s next growth engine — with 28 talks devoted to the subject this year.

While Hollywood’s unions and studios are engaged in an ongoing power struggle over AI’s future role in filmed entertainment, Asia‘s screen industries are rushing toward a full embrace of the technology.

For an indication of the region’s stance on AI’s rapidly evolving role in screen entertainment, look no further than the 2026 lineup at Hong Kong’s Filmart, Asia’s leading content market and media industry convention.

Not long ago, Filmart’s popular seminar series was populated by top studio executives from Hollywood and China, each side keen on the potential for doing business together in the traditional realm of theatrical film. But as geopolitics has cast a pall over collaboration between the world’s two largest film markets in recent years, such executives have mostly vacated the scene at Filmart. Instead, perhaps unsurprisingly, the event’s organizers have pivoted toward the technologies and formats purported to be the industry’s next sources of growth, if not demise: AI, vertical microdramas — and, well, more AI.