Hell Grind

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Hell Grind is a 2026 action fantasy feature film produced by the AI video generation company Higgsfield, which says every character, setting, and prop in the 95-minute film was generated with AI tools on its platform.^[1][2] A 15-person team assembled the film in 14 days for what the company puts at under $500,000, roughly $400,000 of it compute costs, and Higgsfield billed it as the first feature film produced entirely on its platform.^[1][2] The film was screened in Cannes in May 2026, timed to the Cannes Film Festival but outside its official program, a distinction the festival itself publicly insisted on after The Wall Street Journal described the film as debuting at the festival.^[4][5] On August 4, 2026, Higgsfield published the full production project, including all prompts and generated assets, on its platform as part of its $1,000,000 Higgsfield Global Film Festival.^[11][13]

Plot

The film follows four orphaned street thieves, Roco, Lulu, Jax, and Rein, whose failed heist activates an ancient artifact and opens a portal to the underworld, pulling Lulu through it.^[1][7] The remaining three, who gain superpowers in the process, team up with a secret military unit, hunt for further artifacts to reopen the portal, and battle a Japanese-speaking demon and its hordes across locations including a Tibetan temple and feudal Japan to rescue their friend.^[1][6] The ending teases a sequel, which Higgsfield CEO Alex Mashrabov told Variety was not an active project as of June 2026.^[6]

Production

Hell Grind was produced under Higgsfield's in-house Higgsfield Originals banner, with the UK finance and production company Goldfinch attached as a studio partner.^[1][3] It was directed by Kazakh filmmaker Aitore Zholdaskali, whose live-action feature Sicko was selected for the Bright Future section of the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam, and co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, a Kazakh director whose films have twice appeared in Cannes official programs.^[1][3] Production ran for 14 days, with the 15-person team of directors, cinematographers, and editors working mostly in person from Almaty, Kazakhstan.^[2][3] Mashrabov told Variety that about 15 people and 30 AI agents worked on the film inside the platform, with the script largely written before generation began.^[6]

The toolchain combined Higgsfield's own products, Soul Cinema for generative AI image generation, Soul Cast for character and face consistency, Cinema Studio 3.5 as the multi-shot workspace, and the DoP image-to-video model, on top of ByteDance's Dreamina Seedance 2.0 as the primary video backbone, with Google Veo 3 also in the mix, running on Nebius and CoreWeave infrastructure.^[3] The company says the first 25-minute segment alone required 16,181 generations to produce 253 final shots, a ratio of roughly 64 to 1, with prompts averaging about 3,000 words and each attempt yielding roughly 15 seconds of footage.^[3][10] According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal and The A.V. Club, the prompts included explicit instructions to respect physics and avoid a synthetic "AI sheen," and Higgsfield content lead Adil Alimzhanov stressed that conventional film grammar, such as opening on an establishing shot and not cutting between consecutive close-ups, still had to be supplied by the human crew.^[2][5] Mashrabov described parts of the generation process as having "a feeling of a slot machine," with some shots requiring hundreds of iterations before spatial logic and character placement worked.^[1]

All but one of the songs in the film were AI-generated, a company spokesperson told Variety.^[6] The $500,000 budget figure and the claim that a comparable traditional production would cost upward of $50 million are Higgsfield's own numbers.^[2][10]

Release and the Cannes dispute

Higgsfield premiered the film's teaser trailer at a Cannes industry event co-hosted with Goldfinch on May 16, 2026, a private preview held on the Vieux Port, and screened the full film at the Cinema Olympia on May 21.^[1][3] The Olympia is a commercial cinema in the town of Cannes rather than a Festival de Cannes venue, and both events took place in the orbit of the Marche du Film, the festival's industry marketplace, rather than the Official Selection.^[3]

The Wall Street Journal's May 21 report described the film as debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, and the festival pushed back directly: a spokesperson confirmed that "Hell Grind" was not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program and said it "was presented during an industry event organized by third parties" in Cannes.^[2][4] The A.V. Club covered the episode under the headline "AI movie hallucinates 'Cannes' debut."^[5] The 2026 festival had already staked out a position against generative AI: at the April 9 press conference unveiling the Official Selection, president Iris Knobloch and general delegate Thierry Fremaux described a curatorial exclusion of films primarily driven by generative AI from the Competition, and on opening night director Guillermo del Toro punctuated the point with a blunt "Fuck AI!", which Fremaux called the first political statement of the festival.^[3]

Beyond the Cannes events, Higgsfield screened the film privately in New York in June 2026 and later posted the full feature publicly on X and YouTube.^[6][13][15] CineD reported that the company was also releasing the work on its own platform as an episodic series of roughly 22 to 25 minute installments.^[3]

Reception

Variety's Corbin Bolies, who attended the New York screening, called the plot "nonsensical" but found the film technically impressive within its genre, writing that the characters looked strikingly real and consistent, children in particular, while noting persistent limits: the demon was largely stuck on one expression, voice performances were flat, and small continuity errors such as a headset with two microphones slipped through.^[6] Mashrabov told Variety the goal was to showcase the platform's technology rather than to produce a Hollywood-quality film, and that genres beyond action, such as comedy and drama, were probably six to nine months away.^[6] CineD framed the film as "the pitch" in a sales demonstration aimed at Hollywood studios, arguing the production pipeline mattered more than the film itself.^[3]

Higgsfield says the film drew coverage from The Wall Street Journal, Variety, and BBC News.^[13] The Journal ran an exclusive on the production's cost structure on May 21, 2026, and Variety published a first-person feature on June 10, 2026; no BBC News article on the film was identified as of August 7, 2026.^[2][6]

Open release and the Higgsfield Global Film Festival

On August 3, 2026, Higgsfield announced the Higgsfield Global Film Festival, an AI short-film contest with a $1,000,000 prize pool split across 14 winners: $500,000 for first place, $200,000 for second, $100,000 for third, $100,000 for an audience choice award, and $100,000 shared among ten honorable mentions.^[11][12] The jury includes Edwin Catmull, the Turing Award laureate and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael.^[12] Submissions, which must be made in the platform's Cinema Studio, open in early August (the contest's rules table says August 7, 2026, while the same page's timeline widget says August 10) and close on August 31, 2026, with winners announced around the end of September; entry is limited to Higgsfield subscribers aged 18 or over, solo or in teams of up to four, with films of at least three minutes.^[12]

As part of the festival, Higgsfield announced that Hell Grind and two other in-house productions, Zephyr and Mork, would be "open-sourced, every prompt public."^[11] The Hell Grind project opened on August 4, 2026, when the company posted that the film was "now fully open-sourced" with all prompts and assets public.^[13] What is actually published is the full project canvas on the Higgsfield platform, including the generated image and video assets and the prompts behind them; the festival page listed a second project opening on August 6.^[12] The company uses "open-sourced" loosely: the material is hosted on its own platform rather than in a public repository, and no formal license terms for reuse of the prompts or assets were identified on the festival page as of August 7, 2026.^[12] On August 5 the company added a 19-minute tutorial breaking down how the film was made, with the production prompts shown on screen.^[14]

Significance

Hell Grind is one of the most prominent attempts to stretch text-to-video and image-to-video generation, a field led by models such as Sora, Veo, Kling, and Seedance, from short clips into long-form cinema. Its significance is less artistic than economic: it demonstrates a feature-length production assembled by a small team in two weeks at a claimed cost two orders of magnitude below a conventional blockbuster, and it doubles as marketing for Higgsfield, a company that reached a $1.3 billion valuation in January 2026 and told Variety its annualized revenue run rate hit $400 million in May 2026.^[2][6][16] The Cannes episode also made the film a flashpoint in the film industry's debate over generative AI, illustrating both AI companies' eagerness to borrow prestige-festival legitimacy and institutions' resistance to granting it.^[3][4][5] The subsequent publication of the complete prompt and asset set is unusual: AI video vendors typically show finished demo reels, and the release gives outside filmmakers and researchers a rare full view of the iteration volume, prompt style, and curation ratio behind a long-form AI production.^[3][11][13]

See also

• Higgsfield
• AI video generation
• Seedance
• Sora
• Runway
• Veo
• AI in entertainment

References

1. ^Screen Daily (Davide Abbatescianni). "In pictures: Higgsfield unveils fully AI-generated feature 'Hell Grind' in Cannes." May 19, 2026 (promotional feature). screendaily.com/...5216871.article
2. ^The Wall Street Journal (Isabelle Bousquette). "Exclusive: This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs." May 21, 2026. wsj.com/...e-400-000-was-ai-compute-costs-a823b08d
3. ^CineD (Nino Leitner). "Hell Grind: The 95-Minute AI Feature Cannes 2026 Says It Never Screened." May 28, 2026. cined.com/...re-cannes-2026-says-it-never-screened
4. ^Futurism (Frank Landymore). "Cannes Film Festival Says the Wall Street Journal Is Wrong: It's Not Debuting an AI-Generated Feature Film This Week." May 22, 2026. futurism.com/...nes-not-showing-ai-generated-movie
5. ^The A.V. Club (Matt Schimkowitz). "AI movie hallucinates 'Cannes' debut." May 22, 2026. avclub.com/ai-movie-hell-grind-cannes-film-festival
6. ^Variety (Corbin Bolies). "I Saw Hell Grind, AI-Generated Film That Premiered in Cannes." June 10, 2026. variety.com/...annes-shocking-realistic-1236770720
7. ^Yahoo Entertainment (Robin Melrose, syndicated from CGMagazine). "Meet Hell Grind, The First Feature Film 'Created Entirely On The Higgsfield AI Platform'." May 19, 2026. yahoo.com/...meet-hell-grind-first-feature-164726710
8. HorrorFuel (Kelli Marchman McNeely). "Watch the Trailer for the First All AI Action Fantasy Film, 'Hell Grind'." May 20, 2026. horrorfuel.com/...i-action-fantasy-film-hell-grind
9. No Film School (Jourdan Aldredge). "Watch the Trailer for the AI Sci-Fi Heist Feature Film Screening at the Cannes Film Festival." May 19, 2026. nofilmschool.com/...eld-ai-hell-grind-film-trailer
10. ^Higgsfield AI (@higgsfield) on X. "Tomorrow we premiere Hell Grind in Cannes..." May 20, 2026. x.com/...2057185280940261720
11. ^Higgsfield AI (@higgsfield_ai) on X. "We are announcing a $1,000,000 festival. Higgsfield Global Film Festival is here." August 3, 2026. x.com/...2084359051627131074
12. ^Higgsfield AI. "Higgsfield Global Film Festival | $1,000,000 AI Film Contest." Accessed August 7, 2026. higgsfield.ai/...higgsfield-global-film-festival
13. ^Higgsfield AI (@higgsfield) on X. "Our 95-minute AI feature film, Hell Grind, is now fully open-sourced for the Higgsfield Global Film Festival." August 4, 2026. x.com/...2084702370764820572
14. ^Higgsfield AI (@higgsfield_ai) on X. "As part of the $1,000,000 Higgsfield Global Film Festival, our 95-minute AI feature film, Hell Grind, now comes with the full tutorial on how we made it." August 5, 2026. x.com/...2085042052618981582
15. ^Higgsfield Originals on YouTube. "Hell Grind | World's First Ever AI Feature Film | Higgsfield Originals (2026)." youtube.com/watch
16. ^TechCrunch. "AI video startup, Higgsfield, founded by ex-Snap exec, lands $1.3B valuation." January 15, 2026. techcrunch.com/...x-snap-exec-lands-1-3b-valuation