The history of cinema has been one of restraint. A dark theater. A fixed screen. A single ending. For over a century, audiences remained passive observers as stories unfolded before them. Interactive cinema breaks that arrangement. It asks viewers not just to watch, but to enter the story and choose how it moves forward.

In recent years, interactive cinema has moved from the fringe to the mainstream, especially in China, where titles such as The Invisible Guardian, The Painter, His Smile and Road to Empress have appeared on major platforms. These works fuse cinema with game logic, retaining the emotional impact of cinema but adding choice. Viewers tap, swipe, and shape the story.

The change is transformative. Traditional cinema follows a single line: beginning, development, twist, climax, ending. Interactive cinema shatters that line. One story can branch into multiple paths, each with its own twists and consequences. Basic branches may converge to a shared conclusion; advanced ones yield multiple endings. The most sophisticated ones even let storylines intersect and reconnect, forming a narrative web rather than a straight road. Interactive cinema is a story world built for exploration.

This is why the form has become so attractive. A viewer is not merely choosing between A and B. They are moving through a narrative space, testing different relationships, decisions, and even moral positions. One branch may last 90 minutes. Explore them all, and the total running time can stretch to four or six hours. The experience begins to resemble not only watching a movie, but mapping one. The audience is no longer following a plot but tracing a route.

Though the concept dates back to the 1967 film Kinoautomat, it is only with the rise of digital media and works like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch that interactive cinema has entered the mainstream. The trend has gained momentum across China. Today, creators pre-film every narrative branch and let viewers steer the story at key moments. In The Invisible Guardian, audiences must choose between "reveal the truth" and "cover it up to survive". The Painter offers 28 decision points and five endings. In Target Person, viewers shape a locked-room mystery by selecting perspectives. These choices are what the drama hinges on.

Yet there is an important limit here. However active the viewer may feel, the story remains a carefully built space. The choices are real, but they are also pre-written. The audience chooses the route, but remains within a pre-designed "house". That is why interactive cinema often feels like a theme park: exciting, immersive, and full of turns, but still enclosed within a fixed architecture.

The next stage of interactive cinema transforms not just what viewers do, but how they exist in the story. Beyond screens and buttons, some works turn choice into bodily experience: controllers vibrate, interfaces shift, and 3D and VR technologies let audiences step into the narrative world itself. In China, this embodied immersion has taken striking forms. Nobody: Journey with the Monsters XR (2025) lets viewers crouch, grab, and swing to drive the story; Tang Palace Night Banquet XR invites audiences to become Tang Dynasty (618-907) guests, advancing the plot through subtle gestures like gazing and nodding.

That shift matters because it changes the grammar of participation. Screen-based choice tells the audience: I choose, therefore I influence. Embodied immersion suggests something deeper: I sense, therefore I exist. The body enters the narrative. A pause, a swipe, a flicker of tension, a lean of attention — all feed back into the story. The line between observer and participant begins to blur.

But this is only the start. The next frontier is intelligent generation, where interactive cinema is powered by AI. Here, the form moves from selection to creation. Earlier works offered a fixed menu of pre-filmed paths. Generative systems open the material itself. Vast libraries of worlds, characters, scenes and dialogue become modular and responsive. Guided by an AI agent, the system learns a viewer's tastes, mood and habits — and shapes the story accordingly.

Viewers begin to act as co-authors. They can ask AI to change a character's identity, retell a story in a new style, add roles, or even insert themselves into the plot. The result may be a new scene, a new storyline, or an entirely new work.

This logic extends beyond viewing to promotion. Before release, studios can deploy official AI agents that let audiences interact with characters, engage with actors, or generate trailers and clips tailored to their tastes. The boundary between production, marketing and audience participation grows increasingly fluid.

This is why the interactive cinema carries significance not only technologically but also culturally. It reflects a broader shift in media consumption: people no longer want to hear stories the way they once did. They want entry, response, and participation. They want stories that bend to them, and perhaps stories they can bend back.

So the future of interactive cinema may not simply be about better devices or more branches. It may be about a renewed understanding of authorship. The task of filmmakers will no longer be only to tell a good story. It will also be to build a story world large and flexible enough for audiences and AI agents to explore, reshape, and extend. In that sense, the next generation of cinema may not be defined by what viewers watch. It may be defined by what they help make.

Xu Hailong is a professor at the School of Literature, Capital Normal University; and Wang Danfeng is an assistant researcher at the Creative Industry and Media Culture Research Center, Capital Normal University.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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