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Last week an AI startup called Higgsfield announced it had premiered a fully AI-generated feature film at Cannes. The Wall Street Journal covered it. The founder posted on LinkedIn that “for decades, Cannes has been the room where new cinema gets legitimized.” The story spread fast.
There was one problem. Cannes said it never happened.
According to Futurism, which reached out to festival organizers directly after failing to find the film on the official Cannes schedule, a festival spokesperson confirmed that “Hell Grind was not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program.” The film was presented during an industry event organized by third parties in Cannes. That’s a meaningfully different thing and the distinction matters because the entire credibility of the announcement rested on the Cannes name.
It’s a clean example of how AI hype gets manufactured and how quickly it travels before anyone checks.
What Hell Grind actually is
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Higgsfield, a San Francisco startup valued at $1.3 billion, made a 95-minute action film called Hell Grind in two weeks using AI video generation tools including Google’s Veo 3. Total cost was $500,000. Of that, $400,000 went to compute costs, which tells you something about where AI filmmaking economics currently sit.
The film follows four street thieves whose heist goes wrong when an ancient artifact pulls one of them into the underworld. It’s campy, action-heavy, and exactly the kind of spectacle you’d expect from a proof-of-concept designed to sell Hollywood studios on AI video tools rather than win awards.
The technical process was more involved than the “just prompt an AI” framing suggests. Each prompt averaged 3,000 words. Every generation produced about 15 seconds of footage which then had to be generated multiple times with tweaks to get a usable shot. The first 25 minutes of the film required 16,181 initial video generations that became 253 final shots. Maintaining visual consistency across a feature-length film is genuinely hard with current AI tools and the team had to build detailed style prefixes into every prompt defining lighting, camera type, physics behavior, and more to avoid the over-lit artificial look that gets dismissed as slop.
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