A 95-minute science fiction film made entirely by artificial intelligence just screened during the Cannes Film Festival’s market week. It cost less than $500K to produce. A traditional studio would have spent somewhere around $50 million on a comparable project.
Higgsfield AI, a company now valued at $1.3 billion, showed “Hell Grind” on May 21 at a third-party event organized around the Marché du Film. The sci-fi heist and action-fantasy feature was built by a 15-person team, primarily based in Kazakhstan, in just 14 days from start to finish.
How a $500K movie gets made in two weeks
Here’s the thing about AI filmmaking economics: the expensive part isn’t the people anymore. Of the sub-$500K budget, roughly $400K went to AI compute costs. That’s 80% of the total spend going directly to processing power, not actors, not sets, not catering trucks.
Higgsfield’s technology sits as an orchestration and consistency layer on top of third-party AI models.
