The Generated Radar Week 45: five stories in generative film
Five stories from Week 45, from Minuit's autumn short to a self-taught crew's 4 billion play AI drama. Nothing is proved yet in the Runway case, and most AI dramas will not earn back their costs.
Five stories from this week in generative film, in running order, with the biggest last.
01 Creator spotlight: In One Kiss Too Many, a 30-second short by Minuit (@minuit.art.ia), a playful leaf steals a kiss from a girl and the whole forest follows. The palette and the character consistency hold up with color and movement in every shot. Minuit lists Midjourney, GPT Image, Seedance 2.5 and CapCut in the post. 02 New tool: Kling opened its fast 4.0 Flash tier to everyone on November 4 at a list price of $0.094 a second, capped at 720p and 20 seconds. A day later Google made Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash generally available at $0.07 a second for 720p, 30% under its last version. 03 Studio move: Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman rebuilt the images of their 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys with AI studio New Territory Media across about 4,000 shots, and every interview stays intact. It premieres free on YouTube on November 13. A reported cost of about $200,000 and a plan for a YouTube-first studio have not been confirmed by anyone else. 04 Legal and policy: Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York refused to dismiss a class action alleging Runway got around YouTube's download protections to train its video models. The claim rests on a rule against breaking those protections, not plain copyright, which sidesteps the fair use fight. Nothing is proved yet, and the case now moves to Runway's answer and the evidence stage. 05 Big story: Zhang Hansheng, 54, taught himself AI video from March 2025, and his remote crew's Armed Into the Song passed 4 billion plays by early October. The core team includes a former ride-hailing driver and a courier. Investors are betting on the format too, but a Guosen report puts break-even near 6 million plays a title, so most AI dramas will not earn back their costs.
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Sources: Minuit on X, Kling, Google, The Ankler, Law360 and Shanghai Daily, Oct 30 to Nov 6, 2026.
