Will the Runway-Lionsgate AI partnership be a blessing or a curse for Hollywood?

The company declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal.

Lionsgate’s custom model will initially assist with more background creative tasks, like assembling storyboards, and will eventually be used to generate tricky special effects, like explosions. Runway is currently exploring options for licensing the model out to other production companies or individual creators, according to the company spokesperson.

In a statement, Lionsgate vice-chair Michael Burns said that many of the studio’s filmmakers are “excited about [the model’s] potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process” and that the brand views AI generally “as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing and supplementing” its current operations.

Founded in 2018, Runway has quickly emerged as one of the leading companies in the field of AI-generated video. In June, the company unveiled its Gen-3 Alpha model, which specializes in depicting human likenesses – a feat that, as anyone who remembers the haunting AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti will be able to attest, seemed to be a long way away not so long ago. The Information reported in July that Runway was in talks with investors to raise $450m, which would bring its total valuation to around $4bn.

Runway is positioning its new deal with Lionsgate as a boon for creativity. “The history of art has always been deeply intertwined with the history of technology and this new model builds on our ongoing efforts to build transformative tools for artistic and creative expression,” the company spokesperson said.

That idea of a natural co-evolution between creativity and technology is also expressed by Dan Gardner, CEO of marketing agency Code and Theory, who regards the deal as an adaptive measure for a brand in the rapidly changing entertainment sector. “While some studios may reject this notion, history shows that technology is undefeated in transforming entertainment,” he says. “If you don’t embrace it, you typically lose.”

Some creative professionals, however, are less enthusiastic. “I’m pissed,” wrote Reid Southen, a film concept artist who worked on The Hunger Games, in a post on X yesterday. “This is the first step in trying to replace artists and filmmakers.”

Lionsgate has partnered with Runway. I wonder how the directors and actors of their films feel about having their work fed into the AI to make a proprietary model. As an artist on The Hunger Games? I'm pissed. This is the first step in trying to replace artists and filmmakers. https://t.co/IWw8mKgt0E pic.twitter.com/EeVC4TeRHV

— Reid Southen (@Rahll) September 18, 2024

Independent filmmaker Noam Kroll says that Lionsgate’s efforts to incorporate AI more deeply into the creative process could potentially backfire, given the ongoing controversy surrounding the technology’s role in filmmaking. “The best edge that a studio can have is great relationships with talent – both behind and in front of the camera,” he says. “Prioritizing AI will inevitably drive many creatives in the opposite direction and perhaps benefit other studios that are more talent-focused.”

While Runway is currently one of the wealthiest and best-known companies building AI models capable of generating lifelike video, it has been facing growing competition from bigger tech companies such as OpenAI and Adobe that are developing their own models.

Given the growing interest in AI-generated video in both the tech and the entertainment industries, deals similar to the one that has been struck between Runway and Lionsgate are likely to emerge, according to Julian Togelius, associate professor of computer science at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. “Runway may be the leader among standalone companies doing video generation, but it is far from the only one, so I suspect [we’ll see] more partnerships like this,” he says.

Generative AI was a major concern during the recent Hollywood strikes, with writers and actors expressing fears that the technology – if unregulated – could soon supplant human talent.

In the aftermath of the strikes, leading entertainment and production companies have had to tread carefully in their early experiments with AI. Disney, for example, announced plans last summer to assemble an AI task force focused on using the technology to develop the company’s production capabilities and its theme park division; some experts argued at the time that it could alienate an already disgruntled community of writers and actors. Earlier this year, Paramount’s chief technology officer, Phil Wiser, urged the industry to take a “sensible“ approach in its deployment of AI.

Runway has been faced with its own controversies as its fame has grown. The company is currently being sued by a group of artists who claim that it – along with leading generative AI developers Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt – illegally used their work to train models. In July, 404 Media claimed in a report that Runway’s Gen-3 model was trained using pirated films and thousands of popular YouTube videos.

Generative AI is already being used by many film studios to provide a touch of special effects where traditional computer-generated imagery may fall short. In Alien: Romulus, for example, the technology was used to recreate the likeness of the actor Ian Holm, who died in 2020 and played an AI ’synthetic’ in the franchise’s original films.

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