Hell Grind trailer – The $500,000 AI feature film debuting at Cannes | Films | Entertainment

As AI videos continue to get better and better, it was only a matter of time before the first AI-generated feature-length film arrived. Now, startup Higgsfield AI has done just that on Seedance 2.0 in two weeks after spending $500,000 on their movie.

What might surprise you is that $400,000 of that sum went solely to AI computing costs. Hell Grind is a 95-minute action-fantasy created entirely on Higgsfield, a first in movie history.

According to the startup’s synopsis: “Hell Grind follows four inseparable street thieves – Roco, Lulu, Jax, and Rein – whose heist goes catastrophically wrong when Roco accidentally activates an ancient artifact that sends Lulu through a portal to the underworld. What follows is a globe-spanning race through a Tibetan temple and feudal Japan to recover what was lost, with Roco growing increasingly unrecognisable. The film pitches itself as genre filmmaking with genuine emotional stakes: ‘Fantasy as tragedy. Action as grief.”

Although the film is entirely AI-generated, it involved a lot of human prompting.

Speaking with WSJ, Higgsfield’s Adil Alimzhanov revealed that the film was made by 10s of thousands of individual prompts, which on average were 3000 words each. Every 15 seconds of footage was generated several times with different tweaks until the prompters were satisfied. For example, the first “25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots.”

Hell Grind is screening at the Cannes Film Festival today for market.