This is the best scene in Hell Grind, an entirely AI-made movie, the flashback.
Watch it and read this analysis on where we are with AI movies today: time, cost, quality.
Overall:
Phenomenal technical demo by Higgsfield. Mediocre movie. Good graphics, hints of emotion, but superhero movie level quality in certain scenes at best. Too many cuts. That said, 660x fewer man hours, 50x faster and 36x cheaper than the median US film.
Time:
The 95 min film took 15 people 14 days. The median US theatrical production takes ~200 people ~2yrs. That’s a 660x improvement in man-hours and 50x in calendar time.
Economics:
It took $500k, 80% of which was compute. The final footage was cut from ~100hrs of footage generated from text to video / image to video models like Bytedance’s Seedance: a 64:1 “curation” ratio. The median US movie takes ~$18M, with even indie films costing $1-5M. Thats 36x cheaper than median.
Quality:
Average watch *at best*. Way too many cuts between shots, several characters change accents and have “AI” synthetic voices and characters feel like it’s AI too. Movement, editing and blocking feel artificial too.
On the plus side, we’ve more or less solved character consistency, camera angles and realism. The reason the movie wasn’t amazing was more about poor directorial choices than innately unusable video models. Hard to put a number on it but maybe we’re at ~90% on quality that is technically achievable. If Scorsese made an AI movie, I reckon it would be quite good.
I know the visceral reaction to anything AI is real and well-studied. But I think it’s folly to fight the inevitability of AI film. It’s too cheap and quick to ignore and almost there on quality. Creators with distribution *will* make AI films and shows and just put them on YouTube. This is the worst quality, slowest and most expensive it will ever be. In the end, good content beats “real” content.