The Cully Hill Boys

The Cully Hill Boys is a feature-length action comedy from the San Francisco AI company Higgsfield, billed as fully AI-generated and running about 114 minutes (some press reports say 110). It had a private premiere at The Glasshouse in New York on 5 August 2026 and went online free on 10 August, on YouTube and on Higgsfield's own site.

Higgsfield's project brief says every shot and all speech were generated in Seedance, with Soul Cinema for character sheets, Seedream and Nano Banana for edits and reverse angles, and Claude writing the prompts. Production ran from a canvas of about 600 approved assets across 137 scenes. The rapping was driven by tracks recorded beforehand rather than music generated by a model, and the only filmed material was one stunt fight shot on a phone as motion reference. The four leads are licensed digital likenesses: Higgsfield says their faces and voices were captured from contract photography and recordings, with rights closed before the first generation, and nobody was filmed. One account says Higgsfield deleted the source assets within a set window after production wrapped.

Press reports put the budget at about $2 million, roughly half of it compute, and the schedule at four weeks, with a crew of 25 to 28 that included nine directors. Aitore Zholdaskali and Adilet Abish, who made Hell Grind, are credited as directors. The screenplay is by Timothy Planagan, who reportedly spent about five years on it; his deal covers AI adaptations only and pays roughly WGA scale, one account says. Higgsfield published its prompts, skills and production notes as a showcase for its tools. One outlet presents the film as a response to the criticism of Hell Grind, which used no human likeness rights.

On Higgsfield's page the film showed 291,859 views and 473,214 generations when read on 12 October 2026, with an upload date of 10 August. The YouTube upload had 195,078 views on 2 October, and Higgsfield's own page 278,360 on 6 October.

Reviewers called it a step up from earlier AI features while noting its flaws. The Verge credited the human script but noted garbled prop text and little chemistry between characters. Barron's called it average streaming-grade fare with weaknesses mostly in the script. Semafor said the writing was the film's strongest element and the dialogue read as human-written, but pointed to over-polished visuals and "prompt fatigue" in a beating scene. Daily Maverick's columnist watched about ten minutes and found the visuals believable but the film "a bit wooden and a little silly". Letterboxd users are split, with many half-star ratings rejecting AI film outright.

Semafor said it "marks a dramatic shift for the technology", and Daily Maverick called it one of the biggest movie stories of the year, arguing that the story is how work and money are redistributed rather than that AI was used. One outlet calls it a proof of concept for Higgsfield's Cinema Studio platform ahead of pitches to Hollywood studios.