AI Film Promoted as a "Cannes Film Festival Premiere" Worth $500,000 Was Not an Official Selection

The claim that the 95-minute AI action film 'Hell Grind', produced by AI startup Higgsfield, was screened in the official Cannes Film Festival program has turned out to be untrue. The film was screened not at the official festival but at a separate commercial market, Marché du Film.

This incident is being cited as a textbook example of "hype," where AI companies attempt to artificially build credibility by leveraging associations with prestigious institutions.

Production Costs and Technical Details:

• Total production cost: $500,000 (of which $400,000 was spent on compute costs)
• Tools used: AI video generation tools including Google's Veo 3
• Production process:
  • To maintain visual consistency, an average of 3,000 words per prompt was used, detailing lighting, camera type, laws of physics, and more.
  • To create the first 25 minutes of the film, 16,181 initial video generations were performed, from which a final 253 shots were extracted.

This shows that going beyond simply entering a prompt, creating consistent, long-form footage requires massive computing resources and extremely sophisticated prompt engineering.