AI startup Higgsfield has set its next film: Cully Hill Boys, a 110-minute feature that aims to be the first AI-generated production built around legally licensed celebrity likenesses, Variety reported on 5 August 2026.

The film features characters modelled after streamer N3on, UFC middleweight Israel Adesanya, actor and UFC fighter Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, and basketball-focused influencer Matt Kiatipis. Licensing real people's faces and personas into an AI-generated film is the central premise — each likeness cleared for use rather than scraped or imitated without consent.

Behind the camera, the credits are human. Aitore Zholdaskali, who directed Higgsfield's earlier fully AI-generated film Hell Grind, returns to direct. The screenplay comes from Portland, Oregon-based writer Tim Planagan, who worked on the script for years and uploaded multiple iterations to the Black List — a screenplay submission service that lets writers post scripts for industry discovery. Higgsfield purchased the script from that platform.

The deal with Planagan was structured narrowly. His agreement with Higgsfield covered AI adaptations only, and he was paid "on par" with Writers Guild of America rates, Variety reported. The WGA sets minimums for screenwriter compensation; matching them places the deal within established industry benchmarks even as the production method is anything but conventional.

Higgsfield's broader ambition is platform-driven. The company intends Cully Hill Boys to showcase its Cinema Studio platform, which it hopes Hollywood studios will adopt for AI experimentation. In other words, the film doubles as a product demonstration — a feature-length proof of concept for tools Higgsfield wants to sell to the studios already wrestling with how, and whether, to fold AI into their pipelines.

Cully Hill Boys arrives on the heels of controversy. Hell Grind, Higgsfield's first fully AI-generated film, drew criticism from parts of the film industry in the spring of 2026. That earlier production put Higgsfield on the map for some and on a watch list for others. Whether the licensed-likeness approach on Cully Hill Boys softens that reception is a question the film's release will answer.

No release date has been announced.