Lionsgate signs deal to train AI model on its movies and shows

Today, Lionsgate — the studio behind films like the John Wick and Hunger Games franchises — announced that it is partnering with Runway to create a new, customized video generation model intended to help “filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work.”

In a statement about the deal, Lionsgate’s vice chair Michael Burns described it as a path towards creating “capital-efficient content creation opportunities” for the studio, which sees the technology as “a great tool for augmenting, enhancing and supplementing our current operations.” Burns also insisted that “several of our filmmakers are already excited about its potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process.”

Runway’s co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela echoed Burns’ sentiment about the new model’s usefulness as an augmentation tool, and said that the company’s goal is to give filmmakers “new ways of bringing their stories to life.”

Specific details about the deal — like whether creative teams will be compensated if / when their projects are used as training material for the model — are currently scant. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes, the prospect of being able to keep production costs down could have been one of the big selling points for Lionsgate, a studio known for sticking to smaller budgets compared to other entertainment outfits.

Those concerns were part of what led to California governor Gavin Newsom signing two SAG-AFTRA-backed bills earlier this week that will grant performers and their estates more control over how and when their digitally-created likenesses can be used by studios. And later this month, Newsom could very well end up signing into law SB 1047, another piece of hotly-contested legislation that would make AI developers liable for the “critical harms” caused by their products.

(We reached out to SAG-AFTRA for comment about Lionsgate and Runway’s partnership, but did not hear back in time for publishing.)