Here is the plot twist nobody ordered: the buzziest "AI movie" of the year is not the one where a robot takes over a spaceship. It is a comedy about three bumbling London rappers who steal the wrong bloke's money, and the best parts were apparently written, directed, and — yes — heavily paddled by actual humans. Buckle up.
A California startup called Higgsfield just premiered "The Cully Hill Boys," which the company bills as a fully AI-generated feature-length film. The movie tells the story of Cal, Horace, and Oli, three struggling East London rappers who accidentally swipe a crime lord's cash and spend the runtime trying not to end up in concrete. It clocks in at around 110 minutes, was put together in roughly four weeks, and needed a team of about 28 creatives to wrangle. That last detail is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and it is the most interesting part of the whole thing.
An AI Movie That Looks Suspiciously Human
The Verge's film reporter actually sat down and watched the thing, and the headline says it all: the best parts are human. The movie is codirected by Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali — the same pair behind Higgsfield's earlier, gloriously nonsensical "Hell Grind" — and it leans hard on the writing of Tom Planagan, a screenwriter who says he does not use AI tools at all. When the "AI film" is good, it turns out a person probably made the call.
That is not to say the pixels are fake news. Anthropic's Claude generated much of the prompting, and the video comes from Seedance 2.5, which can churn out clips of about 30 seconds instead of the usual blink-and-you-miss-it fragments. The model is fast, and the length is a real upgrade. But the film's strengths — the planning, the comedy beats, the visual style that nods at Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie — arrive by way of human choice, not model magic.
Here is where it gets delightfully weird:
- The "cast" includes AI-rendered likenesses of UFC champion Israel Adesanya, MMA veteran "Rampage" Jackson, and livestream creator N3on.
- Higgsfield published the full film online and released most of its prompts, effectively turning the feature into a two-hour advertisement for its own Cinema Studio tools.
- The whole thing was finished in a month, which is Hollywood's idea of a lunch break.
Teach People to Skip the Slop
The startup, led by co-founder and CEO Mahi de Silva, argues it is not trying to replace filmmakers. It wants to hand them better tools. De Silva is refreshingly blunt about the state of the art: "We are not in the content creation business. We're in the tools distribution business." For a company peddling movies that are literally made of AI, that is a surprisingly humble flex.
Higgsfield has been busy. Within the last 14 months, it says it passed a $500 million annual revenue run rate, claims more than 390 Fortune 500 companies and 170,000 corporate accounts use its platform, and just launched Higgsfield Academy — a free online curriculum where anyone can get "certified" in the exact workflows behind its films. The company is basically teaching the next generation of filmmakers how to use its own product, which is either genius or a very long con, and possibly both.
Its content lead, Adil Alimzhanov, is on a mission to beat the "AI slop" look out of every frame — the plastic skin, the too-perfect lighting, the uncanny valley where everything is alarming and symmetrical at once. Early lessons literally ask students to stare at images and identify what is wrong, on the theory that audiences may not name a flaw but will still feel that something is off and get yanked out of the story.
That is a charmingly honest vision of the future: the machine does the heavy lifting, but taste is still the job. "Art doesn't exist without a storyteller," de Silva said. "We see this as really a celebration of creators."
None of this means the backlash went away. Major YouTube creators are taking heat right now for suddenly championing Higgsfield without disclosing the arrangement, and the industry remains split between "embrace AI" and "screen it out." Whether "The Cully Hill Boys" is a proof of concept or a genuinely new way to work, one thing is certain: the best AI movie of the summer was held together by the humans who pressed the buttons.
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