Higgsfield Debuts $2M AI Feature Film With Licensed Stars

The startup Higgsfield has produced "The Cully Hill Boys," a 110-minute action-comedy created entirely through text-to-video generation. The project represents the first feature-length AI film to legally license and incorporate celebrity likenesses, featuring digital versions of Israel Adesanya, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, N3on, and Matt "MK" Kiatipis. To secure these rights, the production team contracted voice and likeness permissions before filming began and deleted all source assets within 30 days of wrapping production.

A 28-person team, including nine directors led by Aitore Zholdaskali and Adilet Abish, completed the film in just four weeks. Remarkably, 40 percent of the crew had no prior experience with artificial intelligence. The production cost $2 million, with approximately $1 million dedicated to compute costs and the remainder covering human staff like editors and costume designers. This stands in stark contrast to traditional independent films of similar scope, which typically require one to two years and budgets exceeding $20 million. It also represents a massive scale-up from Higgsfield's previous 95-minute film, "Hell Grind," which cost $500,000 and used only 100 assets.

For AI filmmakers and practitioners, Higgsfield has open-sourced the entire production pipeline. The company released all prompts, character sheets, 100 AI-generated locations, nearly 1,000 assets, and a highly detailed 137-entry production log. Every shot was generated strictly from text and reference assets using the Seedance video model on Higgsfield's Canvas, utilizing a structured prompt system called the CINEDANCE skill. No image-to-video generation was used. The project serves as a public showcase for the upcoming Cinema Studio 4.0 platform update, offering creators a concrete, reproducible methodology for high-end generative filmmaking.