A San Francisco startup just produced a feature-length action-comedy for roughly $2 million and four weeks of work. The typical indie film takes one to two years and north of $20 million. Higgsfield AI decided that timeline was about 50x too long.
The Cully Hill Boys, a 110-minute film about three East London rappers tangled up in a drug war while chasing music careers, premiered on August 5 at The Glasshouse in New York City. The entire thing was generated using AI, from scenes rendered in 4K to performances built from licensed digital likenesses of real people.
How a 28-person team replaced a Hollywood production pipeline
The film was directed by Aitare Zholdaskali and Adilet Abish, working from an original screenplay by Tim Planagan. Their crew numbered between 25 and 28 people total.
Higgsfield built the movie using its proprietary Seedance 2.5 AI video model, developed by ByteDance. The model supports 30-second video clips with native audio, multi-reference inputs, and region editing, essentially letting creators generate and refine cinematic sequences at a granular level before stitching them into a coherent narrative.
About half of the roughly $2 million budget went to compute costs. The other half covered everything else: licensing, creative direction, screenplay work, and finishing. Some reports place the total closer to $2.5 million.
The cast is where things get particularly interesting. The Cully Hill Boys features the licensed digital likenesses of MMA fighters Israel Adesanya and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, popular streamer N3on, and Matt Kiatipis. These aren’t deepfakes or unauthorized reproductions. Higgsfield secured licensing agreements, making this the first AI-generated feature film to use real celebrity portrayals with formal permission.
Open-sourcing the playbook
Perhaps the most consequential decision Higgsfield made wasn’t artistic. It was structural. The company open-sourced the entire production, publishing the prompts, production logs, and workflow documentation that went into making The Cully Hill Boys.
This isn’t Higgsfield’s first open experiment. The company previously released Hell Grind, another AI-generated project designed to push the boundaries of what its tools could produce. But The Cully Hill Boys represents a leap in scale, moving from proof-of-concept shorts to something that could plausibly sit on a streaming platform alongside traditionally produced films.
Higgsfield is also running a $1 million Global Film Festival contest focused on AI-generated shorts.