An AI Film Crew of Eleven Just Made a Full-Length Action Comedy. Here's How Far Short It Still Falls.
Higgsfield's 'Cully Hill Boys' is the most polished AI feature yet, and its making reveals exactly what still can't be automated.
Key points
- Higgsfield, an AI filmmaking platform, released Cully Hill Boys, a full-length action comedy, publicly online in 2025.
- The film used likenesses of three real public figures (streamer N3on, content creator Matt Kiatipis, UFC fighter Israel Adesanya) under signed licensing agreements, with none shooting a single scene on set.
- Prompts used to generate footage explicitly named directors Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie as style references.
- Anthropic's Claude generated the text prompts, while ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 handled video and speech, Seedream handled image editing, and Google's Nano Banana handled video editing.
- The script was written by human screenwriter Tim Planagan, who retained the rights to produce it through traditional means.
Three lads nursing pints in a grimy London pub, dreaming of rap stardom, then accidentally stealing a crime lord's cash. It's the setup for a Guy Ritchie film. That's the point.
Cully Hill Boys is the latest feature from Higgsfield, a platform that sells access to various AI video-generation tools. The company uploaded the film free online, alongside most of the text prompts used to make it. It's a movie and a product demo simultaneously, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.
What actually went into making this?
Directors Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali led a team of nine others. No actors walked onto a set. Instead, Higgsfield licensed the real-world likenesses of streamer Mikyle "N3on" Rafiq, basketball creator Matt Kiatipis, and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya, building AI avatars from their photos and voice recordings.
The script came from screenwriter Tim Planagan, whose original draft appeared on the Black List, a submission service for unproduced screenplays. Higgsfield bought the AI production rights. Planagan held onto every other right, so he can still sell a traditional film adaptation separately.
The production pipeline split across four AI tools:
| Tool | Made by | Job on set |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | Anthropic | Wrote the generation prompts |
| Seedance 2.5 | ByteDance | Generated video clips and speech |
| Seedream | ByteDance | Image editing |
| Nano Banana | Video editing |
Two separate Claude instances ran concurrently because, as Higgsfield put it, "the rules of one job poison the other." One wrote prompts shaped for image generation; the other wrote prompts shaped for video clips.
Why do the action scenes feel familiar?
Because the prompts told them to. Published prompt text asks for "GUY RITCHIE COVERAGE" and "DYNAMIC clip-style (Edgar Wright snap.)" Wright and Ritchie are two of British cinema's most recognisable action-comedy directors.
Naming a style in a prompt is common practice. The wrinkle, as first reported by The Verge, is that calling those styles up only works if the underlying AI models were trained on footage from those directors. Higgsfield hasn't disclosed what data its models learned from. We covered the question of how AI video platforms compensate the artists in their training data on 2 August, and Higgsfield's silence here is the more familiar answer.
Does it actually look like a movie?
Closer than almost anything else made this way. Seedance 2.5 generates clips of around 30 seconds, longer than most video AI tools manage. Shorter clips mean more visible seams where footage gets stitched together; longer clips mean scenes that breathe.
The story holds together largely because a human wrote it. Characters have clear wants, dialogue has internal logic, and the avatars show something close to emotion.
Look harder and the cracks show: text in books comes out as gibberish, and the leads share little on-screen chemistry. It's a proof of concept rather than something most viewers would choose on a Friday night. The honest read is that the film's best qualities trace back to two humans: Planagan's script and the directors whose names appear in the prompts.
Common questions
Do the real people in this film have any control over how they appear?
Yes, to the extent of their licensing agreements. Each person signed a contract allowing Higgsfield to use their likeness for this project. What those contracts permit beyond the film itself isn't publicly detailed.
Can a traditional film still be made from this script?
Yes. Tim Planagan retained the rights to a conventional production, so a studio could option and film his screenplay independently of anything Higgsfield produced.
