The AI video startup Runway has struck a groundbreaking deal with the film and TV giant Lionsgate.
Under the arrangement announced Wednesday, Runway will use Lionsgate’s vast catalog of content—including classics like the Twilight, John Wick and Hunger Games movies—to train an AI model that Lionsgate’s own filmmakers and creatives will then use as a tool in upcoming productions.
Lionsgate will initially use the model for storyboarding, before eventually moving onto things like generating explosion effects, once the model has been sufficiently fine-tuned.
“Several of our filmmakers are already excited about its potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process,” Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns said in a statement, adding that it would save the studio money on production costs.
Runway’s models go beyond simple text-to-image generation, offering things like automated video editing, effects, and rotoscoping (a form of animation based on realistic footage.)
Its most high-profile rival is probably OpenAI’s Sora, which is more of a straight text-to-video tool. But Runway’s more analogous peers include Metaphysic—whose AI tools have recently been used to recreate familiar faces in franchise entries like Alien: Romulus and Mad Max: Furiosa—as well as Odyssey and Flawless.
Runway declined to discuss financial terms of the deal, but CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told Fortune that the Lionsgate deal was “the first time any studio of this caliber has worked with a company to create different models.”
This is essentially an enterprise deal, with the customer being both the sole provider of the data that’s involved and—for now—the sole user of the resulting AI model. However, Valenzuela said there were various options on the table about future uses of the model, including allowing individual creators and perhaps even other studios to use it.
“If you have a physical studio, you can rent the studio to others to use it—you can think about it in a very similar way,” he said.
The use of AI in creative endeavors is a massively controversial subject and Runway, whose investors include Google, Nvidia and Salesforce, is very much in hot water over copyright.
Alongside other AI imagery companies such as Stability AI and Midjourney, Runway has been sued by artists over copyright infringement—a judge last month refused to throw out the suit—and a 404 Media report in July accused Runway of training its models on popular YouTube videos without permission.
Valenzuela, who claimed that “a lot of the conversations we’ve been having around use cases and implications and challenges are somehow imaginary,” hopes the kind of deal that was revealed on Wednesday will help to change the narrative around AI in art.
“We’re entering a stage where technology needs to be not seen as an antagonist,” he said. “Technology for filmmaking and art has always been the way things work and should work. For us it’s about starting to be more nuanced on how AI is actually getting deployed and how creators and artists are actually gaining value from this.”
Runway has so far raised $237 million in funding and The Information reported in July that it was in talks to raise a fresh $450 million round at a $4 billion valuation. Valenzuela declined to comment on that report. Runway’s most recent round in mid-2023 valued the company at $1.5 billion.
