Crossed Wires: Hollywood

It was produced by a film and video company called Higgsfield in the San Francisco area. The screenplay was written by Timothy Planagan, who had worked in independent film and had been shopping this script for years.

The two lead directors are Aitore Zholdaskali and Adilet Abish, both filmmakers from Kazakhstan. I am pretty sure that no one who reads this will have seen this movie.

What Happened

It is not on any film circuit and can only be found online. But it is turning out to be one of the biggest movie stories of the year.

• The news is not that it was made with AI assistance (that is already old hat) but that this is an entirely different kettle of fish from the other big 2026 AI-film story, which.

• It was made for $2-million, almost all of it in compute costs (as compared to an industry average of many tens of millions of dollars for this sort of genre).

• Would you ever fork out $250-million for a big-budget sci-fi movie again?

Key Details

First, some facts, which set up a story of the coming upheaval of a legacy industry. The 110-minute film was made in four weeks (as compared to an industry average of one to two years).

• Business Maverick AI AI movies AI-generated films digital filmmaking tools future of filmmaking Steven Boykey Sidley Crossed Wires Comments Loading your account… Scroll down to load comments...

• His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick451 in South Africa and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.

• Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice (ex-JBS, University of Johannesburg), a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, where he writes the weekly Crossed Wires column.

Why It Matters

It had a crew complement of 28 (as compared to an industry average of hundreds). But it is not the startling production economics that are the big story.

• They will make and watch these new films, and they will construct the yardsticks, and they will decide on their artistic merit, and our outrage will be as dying voices on the wind.

• There is a new generation of eager storytellers and audiences untroubled by legacies and history, and they will colonise the land.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by Daily Maverick as more details emerge