CJ ENM Made a Feature Film With AI in 4 Days — Here's How

South Korea just premiered what may be a landmark moment in film history — and it happened in just four days. CJ ENM, one of Korea's largest entertainment conglomerates, has unveiled Apartment (아파트), the country's first feature film produced almost entirely using artificial intelligence tools. The film made its debut on April 30, 2026, at a special screening event held at CGV Yongsan I'Park Mall in Seoul, before beginning its streaming run on Tving on May 1.

What makes this milestone remarkable is not just the technology involved, but the speed and cost at which it was achieved. A production that would typically require months of work and hundreds of millions of additional won was completed in a four-day shoot on a budget of 500 million KRW — roughly $375,000 USD. According to Jeong Chang-ik, head of the AI Studio at CJ ENM, conventional production for a film of this scale would have cost at least five times more.

A New Kind of Filmmaking

The film Apartment takes an approach that flips the traditional filmmaking model on its head. Rather than constructing physical sets or using conventional post-production CGI, the production team implemented all backgrounds and visual environments using AI-generated imagery — with real human actors performing in front of AI-rendered scenes in real time.

The tools powering this production came from Google's AI suite. The team used Imagen for generating still images, a correction tool called Nano Banana for refining generated visuals, and Veo for AI video generation. The production methodology was called "Detect and Foundation," a pipeline that allowed the team to build and adjust visual environments at an unprecedented pace.

What sets this apart from typical green-screen or chroma-key work is the immediacy of the feedback. Actor Kim Shin-yong was able to see the AI-generated backgrounds in real time during filming — rather than performing against a blank green wall and imagining the environment later. This live preview capability allowed for more grounded performances and tighter collaboration between the acting and technical teams.

The production was developed under the umbrella of the AI Contents Alliance, a collaborative initiative launched in February 2026 and led by CJ ENM. Partner companies on the project included Daehan Film and Saltmakers, reflecting a broader industry push toward pooling resources and expertise around AI-driven content creation.

Inside the Production: What AI Actually Did

To understand the scope of this project, it helps to break down exactly where AI was applied — and where human creativity remained central. The performances, the script, and the directorial vision remained entirely in human hands. What AI replaced was the enormous logistical machinery that typically surrounds a film shoot: location scouting, set construction, lighting rigs for non-human environments, and much of the post-production background work.

The Detect and Foundation method involved generating a library of visual foundations — essentially AI-rendered backdrops and environments — that the production team could call up, modify, and finalize in real time. When a scene called for a specific location or atmospheric setting, the team could generate, adjust, and lock it within hours rather than weeks.

The budget figure of 500 million KRW is especially striking when placed in context. Korean independent films typically range from 500 million to 2 billion KRW for a modest production. A mainstream commercial feature can easily exceed 5 to 10 billion KRW once cast fees, location costs, and post-production are factored in. By keeping nearly all non-human visual elements in the AI pipeline, the CJ ENM team compressed that cost dramatically while producing a feature-length film — estimated to run approximately one hour.

Jeong Chang-ik was direct about the implications. The statement signals CJ ENM's intention to move beyond proof-of-concept and integrate AI workflows into mainstream content pipelines.

What This Means for Korean Cinema

Korea's film industry has long been a global benchmark for quality and ambition — a reputation cemented by Bong Joon-ho's Parasite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020. But the industry also faces real economic pressures: rising production costs, a shrinking theatrical audience in the post-pandemic era, and intense competition from streaming platforms that demand ever-greater content volume.

Against that backdrop, the Apartment project has arrived at a moment when the industry is actively searching for ways to do more with less. The ability to produce a feature film in four days — regardless of its artistic ambitions — is not just a technological curiosity. It is a business argument. If AI tools can genuinely compress timelines and costs by a factor of five or more, the implications for how studios, streamers, and independent producers plan their slates are significant.

CJ ENM is not the only major player exploring this space. Studios in Hollywood and across Asia have quietly been integrating AI tools into post-production workflows for several years. But the Apartment project is notable for how openly and ambitiously it has made AI central to the entire production process — not just the finishing touches — and for premiering the result publicly rather than keeping it as an internal pilot.

The choice to debut the film on Tving, CJ ENM's own streaming platform, also reflects a strategic alignment between AI production capability and streaming distribution needs. Tving has been aggressively expanding its original content library to compete with Netflix Korea and other platforms. A pipeline that could dramatically reduce the cost and timeline of producing original content — even short films and limited series — would represent a meaningful competitive advantage.

The Broader AI Content Push

The AI Contents Alliance that backed Apartment is part of a wider movement within the Korean entertainment industry to establish frameworks for AI collaboration rather than waiting for individual companies to develop competing internal solutions. By launching the alliance in February 2026 and producing a feature film within three months, CJ ENM has demonstrated a willingness to move quickly and publicly on this front.

The inclusion of Daehan Film and Saltmakers as production partners is also worth noting. These are not AI-native startups — they are established names in Korean film production. Their participation suggests that the project was not viewed internally as a novelty experiment, but as a serious production exercise with real filmmaking standards applied to AI-assisted workflows.

For audiences watching Apartment on Tving, the experience will ultimately be judged on its own terms: story, performance, atmosphere. But for industry observers, the film carries a second layer of significance as a living proof-of-concept for what AI-assisted production can realistically deliver in 2026.

South Korea has a long track record of being an early and enthusiastic adopter of new technologies — in consumer electronics, in social media, and increasingly in entertainment. The debut of Apartment suggests that the country's entertainment industry is positioning itself not just to use AI tools developed elsewhere, but to lead in defining how those tools are applied at the production level.

Whether Apartment becomes a commercial hit or a critical footnote, it has already accomplished something: it exists. A feature film, made with AI, produced in four days, now streaming on one of Korea's largest platforms. The question the industry will be asking next is not whether this is possible — but how quickly it scales.