When Hell Grind debuted in Cannes, France, this spring, the action film garnered no buzz from the involvement of an A-list movie star or an Oscar-winning director.
Instead, what caught the public’s attention was that Hell Grind was created with artificial intelligence. A team of 15 at AI video startup Higgsfield AI made the 95-minute movie in under three weeks with a budget of just $500,000, with four out of every five dollars spent on compute, and personnel accounting for the rest of the sum.
All of the synthetic actors and visuals were entirely AI generated in Hell Grind, and yet, the startup’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, Mahi De Silva, contends that future films will still require directors, screenwriters, set and costume designers, and yes, even actors. “What we have found is that filmmaking is still an art,” says De Silva.
Still, startups are offering up an aggressive pitch to entertainers, audiences, and investors that AI will massively disrupt the way movies are made from Hollywood to Bollywood. They envision that AI will disrupt almost all of the creative work that goes into filmmaking, almost certainly resulting in job losses for production crew and visual-effects workers.
By 2030, AI could influence up to 20% of original content spending on films and TV, according to consulting giant McKinsey, opening up new opportunities for small studios, more personalized projects, and short-form content formats. But will this be what audiences want? It’s too early to tell, though a cautionary theme emerged in 2026 as some of the biggest box office hits like The Odyssey and Obsession were made using practical effects. Moviegoers were less keen to open up their wallets for films that heavily relied on computer-generated effects.
AI’s star turn in filmmaking was a main provision negotiated in a new four-year contract that was ratified between major studios and the SAG-AFTRA labor union that represents 160,000 actors, broadcast journalists, news writers and editors, and other artists. The agreement put strict guardrails around how AI could be used and when content and payment would be required.
Higgsfield AI, which was founded in 2023, is having a breakout year with investors, raising $400 million in a Series B at a reported valuation of $5.4 billion in August a mere eight months after it raised $80 million in an earlier round that valued the startup at $1.3 billion.
De Silva says Higgsfield AI’s technology centers on Cinema Studio, an AI-powered filmmaking platform that’s designed for video production and allows creatives to access 33 AI models including OpenAI’s ImageGPT, Google’s Nano Banana, and TikTok parent company ByteDance’s Seedream. “We’re constantly evaluating new ones,” says De Silva.
The company is also experimenting with just how much AI it would like to use in its production process. For this year’s Cully Hill Boys, Higgsfield AI legally licensed the likeness of four actual humans, including UFC fighter Israel Adesanya, for the AI-created characters in the film.
The AI video-generation startup Runway’s approach has evolved since it first debuted its own proprietary video generation model, Gen-1, in early 2023. Early use cases were extremely limited, focused on using AI to restyle a video that had already been created. But the startup’s technology has quickly advanced and its Gen 4.5 AI model, which debuted in December, can generate videos based on written prompts.
“There really isn’t a part of the production lifecycle that can’t benefit from AI,” says Jamie Umpherson, Runway’s chief creative officer.
This year, Runway raised $315 million in a Series E round that valued the startup at $5.3 billion and has sold an equity stake to Lionsgate, working with the Hunger Games and John Wick film studio to create content with AI.
Runway’s recent projects have included collaborating with animator Jeremy Higgins to use AI to augment the production of the animated series Mars and Siv and the creation of a short film called Rules of Horse…for Dummies, the latter taking under two weeks to produce. Horse also incorporated an interactive component: Runway made the character sheets, prompts, and production process available to the public on X, encouraging users to make their own version of the film.
“Everyone thinks that AI is reducing things to sameness and a lack of originality, but we actually see it as the opposite,” says Umpherson. “These are tools that can amplify unique points of view.”
Aaron Sisto, the co-founder and CEO of Chronicle, says his AI startup is still focusing on fairly narrow subsegments of the movie-making process. The company uses AI to help studios and individual creatives to better understand how audiences will respond to the content they plan to make and craft more targeted marketing campaigns and trailers depending on the target audience or international market.
There are some limits to how well AI can work on predicting the future. The cautionary tale of using technology to predict box office outcomes centers on Relativity Media, which pitched data analysis in a pre-generative AI world but later went bankrupt. Sisto says that AI cannot predict how every viewer will respond to content. “We just don’t have the models or the data to do that,” he says.
But, his co-founder, Scott Greenberg, says Chronicle is able to deploy AI agents that watch YouTube channels to better understand what type of content is a hit with a creator’s fanbase. Those insights can help optimize the channel.
Greenberg, who also co-founded Bento Box Entertainment, the animation studio behind Bob’s Burgers, also expressed some limits to the AI-enabled Hollywood boom. “You never want to tell a creator what to make,” says Greenberg. “There’s nothing worse than an overly opinionated creative executive.”
Another AI video generation startup is Luma, which most recently raised $900 million in November 2025, with big-named backers including the Saudi AI company Humain and chipmakers Nvidia and AMD. In March, the company debuted Luma Agents, which can execute creative work across text, images, video, and audio on behalf of studios, marketing teams, and agencies.
One of Luma’s more high-profile projects was its involvement in The Old Stories: Moses, using generative AI for a hybrid production process for a series that was financially backed by Amazon Web Services and starred Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley.
Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma, says creatives will have to be more expansive in how they approach their work. He believes that a costume designer won’t only be responsible for what can be physically crafted, but also for virtual representations in the digital world.
With image and video generation AI models continuing to improve, “the priority shifts toward doing longer and longer horizon work,” says Jain. “The job will still be done by humans, but AI will be doing parts of the task.”
John Kell
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
