During this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a film titled Hell Grind was screened in Cannes, drawing significant attention from the technology and film industries. The 95-minute fantasy action film is billed as the world’s first feature-length movie “entirely generated by AI.” Produced by San Francisco AI startup Higgsfield, the entire film was completed in just 14 days by a 15-person team. However, it did not come cheap: the total budget reached $500,000 (approximately NT$16.25 million), challenging the common assumption that AI-generated films are low-cost.
Higgsfield should ring a bell; the company is an AI video generation service provider and has run aggressive advertising campaigns across YouTube, Facebook, and X. Following the launch of Seedance 2.0, it released several impressive AI videos, many of which reach Hollywood film (or TV series) standards, such as the one we previously introduced, “ZephyrThe mecha-girl K-POP video is their showcase work:
What kind of movie is Hell Grind?
Hell Grind is a fantasy action film directed by Aitore Zholdaskali and co-written with Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov, whose work includes The Gentle Indifference of the World and who has twice been selected for Cannes’ official selection. The story follows four street thieves—Roco, Lulu, Jax, and Rein—who accidentally activate an ancient artifact during a heist, sending Lulu to hell. To rescue their companion, the protagonists set out on an international adventure through Tibetan temples and feudal Japan. The film’s official one-line summary of its tone is: “Fantasy as tragedy. Action as grief.”
Based on the trailer, the visual style leans toward dark fantasy, featuring plenty of monsters, mythical creatures, and action sequences. Although the characters’ facial expressions look more natural than those in typical AI-generated videos, closer inspection still reveals traces of AI.
Behind the Astonishing Numbers: How Was the $500,000 Budget Spent?
It is understood that the total budget for Hell Grind is $500,000 USD (approximately NT$16.25 million), which sounds far lower than Hollywood films of the same genre (traditionally costing around $50 million USD, or NT$1.625 billion). However, as much as $400,000 USD (approximately NT$13 million), or 80% of the budget, was spent on AI computing costs, while the amount actually used for personnel salaries and post-production was only a small fraction.
The production process was far more demanding than expected. For just the first 25 minutes of the film, the team generated a total of 16,181 AI video clips, but the vast majority had flaws, including incorrect character eye contact, stiff facial expressions, and continuity errors. Ultimately, only 253 usable shots were selected—a selection rate of 1/64, or less than 2%—costing up to $69,000 USD. (Editor’s note: Generally, you don’t need to generate this many samples; it seems the team had particularly high quality standards.)
Even more astonishing, to get the AI to generate each scene accurately, the team had to write extremely detailed prompts—averaging up to 3,000 words for every 15 seconds of footage.
The company’s project lead also shared the film’s complete creative process in detail on YouTube:
Tools used: Dreamina-Seedance 2.0 + Soul Cinema + Soul Cast
The technical foundation of Hell Grind does not simply rely on a single AI model; according to the project lead, the film employed multiple AI tools working in collaboration:
- Dreamina-Seedance 2.0A video generation model developed by ByteDance’s Dreamina team, Seedance 2.0 officially became available to Higgsfield users in April 2026 and is currently one of the most powerful AI video generation models.
- Soul CinemaHiggsfield’s proprietary model handles character consistency and narrative-world coherence, ensuring that AI-generated visuals in long-form videos don’t suffer from drifting or inconsistent character appearances.
- Soul CastAnother Higgsfield proprietary model, focused on character roster management.
Higgsfield founder Alex Mashrabov said on LinkedIn: “Hell Grind is a signal to the entire industry, showing what this technology is capable of when scaled. A traditional film production of the same caliber would cost around $50 million, and we completed it for under $500,000.”
Controversy: “Cannes Screening” Is Not the Same as “Cannes Film Festival”
Although multiple media outlets used the phrasing “premiered at the Cannes Film Festival,” a Cannes Film Festival spokesperson made it clear that Hell Grind was “not included in the official Festival de Cannes program.” In reality, Hell Grind was screened at a third-party industry event held in Cannes during the festival—more specifically, a private industry preview on May 16 at Vieux Port and a market screening on May 21 at Cinema Olympia. While these events took place during the Cannes Film Festival, they were not part of the festival’s official selection.
Analysis: The Reality and Myths of AI in Movies
The emergence of *Hell Grind* burst many people’s intuitive assumption that “making films with AI is cheap.” A budget of $500,000 is far below Hollywood standards, but for independent creators or small studios, it is still a significant amount. Moreover, 80% of the budget goes to GPU computing power rather than labor costs, which means that as compute prices fall, the cost of such AI films could indeed drop substantially.
However, a usable-footage rate of less than 2% also reveals another harsh reality: current AI video-generation technology is still a long way from “one-click generation of usable feature-length films.” Behind every usable 15-second clip may lie numerous failed attempts, and ordinary users would also find it hard to adopt Higgsfield’s expensive tools—the company does not come cheap—or craft the detailed 3,000-character prompts often required for each clip.
But from an industry-impact perspective, AI feature films won’t replace traditional cinema in the foreseeable future. Still, they have opened a door: for creators who can’t afford Hollywood-level production costs, $500,000 can now yield a 95-minute genre film, which was unimaginable five years ago.
The first 22 minutes of Hell Grind have been released on the official channel. Check it out if you’re interested—the quality is quite good:
Conclusion
Hell Grind is undoubtedly a milestone in the history of AI film and television creation: it is the first full-length film entirely generated by AI, demonstrating the limits of current technology in everything from character consistency and world-building coherence to narrative structure. Yet at the same time, it is also a reality check, reflecting that AI cinema still has a long way to go before it can truly replace traditional production. High computational costs, an extremely low generation yield, and prompt engineering that is far more labor-intensive than imagined all show that the public has seriously underestimated the true difficulty behind the phrase “AI filmmaking.”
For movie buffs, perhaps they can rest assured for now—traditional films won’t be phased out anytime soon. However, replacing certain special effects post-production work should be no major problem, and I believe we’ll be seeing more and more films of this kind going forward.
好萊塢危險了？K-POP AI怪獸機甲片「Zephyr」全片使用 Nano Banana Pro 與 Seedance 2.0 製作
Source: KOCPC Chinese