Lionsgate’s Runway AI Deal Could Reshape How Studios Greenlight Movies

Proprietary AI models could allow Lionsgate execs to watch a rough draft of a movie before they make greenlight decisions.

The dam broke. That’s how several artificial intelligence experts who spoke to IndieWire described the news of Lionsgate‘s partnership with AI research firm Runway. While the deal is the first of its kind with a major Hollywood studio, it’s already likely that other studios will follow suit. One source speculated that almost all studios are weighing the option, but are reluctant to go public.

Lionsgate was also reluctant to explain why they’re heavily investing in allowing Runway to build exclusive AI models on its own film and TV library. Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns cited its uses in the “pre-production and post-production process” and that AI can be a tool for “augmenting, enhancing, and supplementing our current operations.”

That could mean almost anything, but Reid Southern, a concept artist on the original “The Hunger Games,” had a clear take. “This is the first step in trying to replace artists and filmmakers,” he tweeted.

UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer at a conference Thursday called the Runway deal “concerning” for artists: “If I’m an artist and I’ve made a Lionsgate movie, now suddenly that Lionsgate movie is going to be used to help build out an LLM for an AI company, am I going to be compensated for that?”

Also noted: After the snafu of the first “Megalopolis” trailer, Lionsgate already has a shaky track record in bespoke AI.

Deal terms specifically restrict Runway from building a public model based on the Lionsgate library. And since Runway’s specialty is text-to-video generators rather than LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, sources IndieWire spoke to said it’s unlikely that this arrangement will focus on script generation.

According to an individual with knowledge of the deal, top of mind for Lionsgate is opportunities with pre-vis and storyboarding. For example, if Lionsgate is weighing a greenlight for “John Wick 5,” Runway could use the first four Wick movies and the spinoffs to train an AI text-to-video model. When prompted with a script for “John Wick 5,” that model could then generate a more realistic storyboard approximation of the film; leadership would use that to make their decision.

From a studio’s perspective, it looks like an extraordinary opportunity: In the always-uncertain, always-expensive world of filmmaking, who wouldn’t want an idea of how the end product will look before you commit to spending millions?

Sure. But is that AI storyboard version of “John Wick 5” now considered a blueprint? Is there any obligation for the non-AI creators to follow it?

That’s one of many would-be complications of the AI-generated version of “John Wick 5.” Presumably, there would be a renewed anxiety around hacking and piracy; there’s also the question of whether that AI version would look or sound like Keanu Reeves or any of the other stars. If so, per SAG-AFTRA’s guidelines, Lionsgate would need to negotiate that in advance.

The director-as-author question only gets stickier from there. Fable Studios’ Edward Saatchi theorized that Lionsgate could one day make such a model available to fans who want to create their own user-generated content inspired by a new movie. Offering the possibility to make their own scenes or insert themselves into the story could drive new revenue.

“Hollywood stops being top-down, focused on passive content and auteur driven, and becomes interactive, bottom-up, and decentralized, where there’s one canonical version of a show or movie, but the fans are able to make their own,” said Saatchi, “There’s more of a dialog between the people making the canonical shows and the people making the fan-driven shows, which means that their content does move more towards social media and interactive media.”

It’s not surprising that Saatchi might view the Lionsgate strategy from that angle; this summer, he announced Showrunner, an app that lets users create animated episodes that look like “South Park” and other properties. It’s also possible that studios could see the possibility of choose-your-own adventure as an exciting revenue stream, auteur theory be damned.

A director might also use an AI model to generate alternate versions of a scene and envision other story or visual possibilities, but per DGA and WGA contracts, directors and writers have the right to refuse to use AI tech and could not be able to be replaced by it.

Lionsgate had no comment for this story.

For Runway, this deal means high-value, high-resolution training data that improves its own tech along with the likelihood of a fee for each model it generates.

Most of all, Runway now has a foothold in Hollywood. Traditional VFX houses are also building their own AI models and until now they kept Silicon Valley companies on the outside looking in. Lionsgate is the first to leave the door open.