In a history-making deal, Lionsgate has partnered with AI firm Runway to “build exclusive AI models on its own film and TV library.” Didn’t Fran Drescher fight against this during the last SAG strike? Maybe it’s not the same thing, but who can tell, the language with this partnership is almost impossible to understand.
Michael Burns, Lionsgate vice chair, is so vague about its precise use, that reading between the lines is almost incomprehensible. He says Runway will be used in the “pre-production and post-production process” and “augmenting, enhancing, and supplementing our current operations.” Huh?
The studio has been struggling and this partnership may be its only lifeline. Movies such as The Crow (remake), Imaginary, Boy Kills World, and Borderlands were all failures. but Lionsgate has some solid franchises too, such as John Wick, Saw, and The Hunger Games. However, a few popular IPs probably aren’t enough to sustain a studio struggling with inspiration. And with Runway’s bot having access to Lionsgate’s entire library, it could be used to cull past films to create stories on its own.
In fact, IndieWire talked to an insider with knowledge of the deal, and he said , “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.”
Reid Southern, who did concept art for Hunger Games is concerned, he Tweeted:
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
As much as some fear the use of AI in the artistic space, there is no question that it is here to stay, or at least for the time being. The technology can create almost anything, from writing and performing songs to art, to now movies. Unlike CGI where the creator goes in and manipulates an image by hand, AI can do it all by itself, and in this fast-growing technological age, it’s only a matter of time before it’s so convincing the term “uncanny valley” and “de-aging” will be a thing of the past.
Filmmaking has been around for just over a century and in that time we have seen advancements using celluloid itself. There have been innovations in camera equipment and sound design. Even the projection of the movie itself has been re-formatted for modern times.
Perhaps people are right when they say there is no originality in moviemaking anymore; everything that is done has been done before. But are we ready to switch to having a full intellect transfusion, taking away ideas from the human brain and allowing them to be generated by a bot with free will? Only time (and Lionsgate) will tell.