BUSINESS REFLECTION: Crossed Wires: A new kind of movie looks set to burn Hollywood

A new 110-minute movie provides a glimpse of the future of films, acted by lookalikes and imaginaries, written and helmed by real and perhaps even exceptional human talent – and costing a fraction of the millions of dollars that it normally takes to make a Hollywood movie

On 6 August a feature movie called The Cully Hill Boys was released. I watched about 10 minutes of it online. It is not really my genre (London underworld/violent/rap/drug story), but there are plenty of these sorts of films out there. Some are very good, including Netflix’s 2019 hit Top Boy which was revived from an earlier UK Channel 5 release. Others are less so, but even so there seems to be an insatiable audience for them – mainly teenage boys and young men.

The Cully Hill Boys is one of these. It was produced by a film and video company called Higgsfield in the San Francisco area. The screenplay was written by Timothy Planagan, who had worked in independent film and had been shopping this script for years. The two lead directors are Aitore Zholdaskali and Adilet Abish, both filmmakers from Kazakhstan.

I am pretty sure that no one who reads this will have seen this movie. It is not on any film circuit and can only be found online.

But it is turning out to be one of the biggest movie stories of the year. The news is not that it was made with AI assistance (that is already old hat) but that this is an entirely different kettle of fish from the other big 2026 AI-film story, which saw the Iranian-themed film Dreams of Violets admitted into the Tribeca Film Festival, of which I have written previously.

First, some facts, which set up a story of the coming upheaval of a legacy industry.

The 110-minute film was made in four weeks (as compared to an industry average of one to two years). It was made for $2-million, almost all of it in compute costs (as compared to an industry average of many tens of millions of dollars for this sort of genre). It had a crew complement of 28 (as compared to an industry average of hundreds).

But it is not the startling production economics that are the big story.

About half of the crew had real film experience, in addition to the writer and directors. The Higgsfield filmmaking platform (built on top of the leading Chinese text-to-video generator Seedance 2.5) has been designed specifically for the top creative team – the director, cinematographer, art director.

Filmmakers do not think in prompts – they think in cameras, lenses, lighting, movement and storytelling. Higgsfield shifts the user away from writing adjectives such as “cinematic” or “filmic” into prompts and towards making the kinds of creative decisions a director or cinematographer would make. Users select virtual camera bodies such as an Arri Alexa, choose lenses, focal lengths and camera movements and film-style lighting setups, and construct scenes as though they were working on a physical set.