How AI is becoming Hollywood's newest star, changing work on and off camera

Hollywood keeps talking about AI like it’s some distant threat, but the industry is already paying for it. At Cannes this spring, the action film Hell Grind got attention not because of a star name or a famous director, but because it was made with AI. Higgsfield AI says a team of 15 built the 95-minute movie in under three weeks for $500,000, with most of that money going to compute.

That kind of number is hard for the old studio system to ignore. Mahi De Silva, Higgsfield’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, says filmmaking still needs directors, screenwriters, costume designers, and actors. But the startup pitch is clear enough: AI can take a huge bite out of the creative and technical work, and that likely means fewer jobs for production crews and visual-effects workers.

The money chasing that promise has been wild. Higgsfield, founded in 2023, raised $400 million in a Series B in August at a reported $5.4 billion valuation, after an $80 million round eight months earlier that valued it at $1.3 billion. Its Cinema Studio platform gives creatives access to 33 AI models, including OpenAI’s ImageGPT, Google’s Nano Banana, and ByteDance’s Seedream. For Cully Hill Boys, the company also legally licensed the likenesses of four real people, including UFC fighter Israel Adesanya, for AI-generated characters.

Runway is pushing in a different but equally disruptive direction. Its early Gen-1 model mostly restyled existing video, but Gen 4.5, which debuted in December, can generate video from written prompts. The company raised $315 million this year at a $5.3 billion valuation, sold an equity stake to Lionsgate, and says there’s no part of production that can’t benefit from AI. It has already used the tech on projects including Mars and Siv and the short film Rules of Horse…for Dummies, which took under two weeks to make.

Other startups are going after the business side of Hollywood. Chronicle is using AI to help studios and creatives predict audience response, shape trailers, and target marketing by market or audience. Luma, which raised $900 million in November 2025, has gone broader still with Luma Agents, built to handle creative work across text, images, video, and audio. Taken together, the pitch isn’t subtle: AI won’t just change one corner of filmmaking. It wants a seat at every table.