The Cully Hill Boys, a new AI-generated movie starring licensed celebrity likenesses, marks a dramatic shift for the technology.
The 110-minute action-comedy, produced by startup Higgsfield AI, had a budget of $2 million, half of which went to AI tokens, and took just four weeks to create. The company says it plans to democratize long-form video production and provide scalable AI workflows for creators. The film follows a group of struggling East London rappers who, desperate to outdo another rising star, steal a boat for a music video only to discover it’s stuffed with cash, landing them between rival crime cartels.
While the movie comes a long way from the 2023 uncanny AI clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti — the characters in this film have the correct number of fingers — it has, at times, an unrealistic over-polished sheen. The writing is its strongest suit: You can’t hear the em-dashes in the dialogue. But that’s because Higgsfield tapped a human screenwriter, adding authorial voice underneath images that are sometimes obviously AI-generated.
There are also moments where prompt fatigue is apparent: In one scene, for example, when one of the characters is violently beaten, his reaction is overly nonchalant. In the case of AI films, poor prompting is just the equivalent of bad acting.