Chinese production company Huace has teamed up with AI label Utopai Studios to make a new series based on Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel. This time, they’re doing it with generative AI.
Every Dragon Ball fan already knows the connection. In the early years of the series, Akira Toriyama borrowed a lot from Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century story about the monk Xuanzang and his 19-year pilgrimage. But if there’s one part people remember above all, it’s Sun Wukong, the wildly overpowered monkey whose name should sound very familiar for obvious reasons: he’s the character Son Goku was built from.
Now, after hundreds of adaptations, generative AI has apparently decided it needs its own crack at it. And no, nobody asked for this.
Enter the AI boom
Huace and Utopai Studios say Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years will tell Sun Wukong’s untold origin story, and at least so far, there doesn’t seem to be a single human being attached to the project. No directors, no writers, no actors. Really off to a great start.
And somehow that still isn’t the worst of it. Huace and Utopai Studios are already selling the whole thing as the launchpad for a long-running franchise, with sequels and spin-offs planned for both streaming platforms and theaters.
Generative AI has been welcomed much more openly in China than it has in the West, where plenty of us simply refuse , on principle, to watch something that wasn’t made by an actual human being. So yes, there’s a real chance we’re going to get a lot more AI slop in the next few years: lower investment, higher profit.
“This is exactly why we created Utopai Studios: to help companies build iconic IP, expand worlds into full-scale franchises, and bring ambitious stories to life in ways that simply weren’t possible before,” Utopai Studios said, because apparently the thing people are supposed to get excited about now is even more franchise-ready IP. Still, here we are.
