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Lionsgate announced last September it had inked a deal with AI startup Runway to allow filmmakers the chance to “augment” their work and to help the studio “enhance and supplement” their operations. The pact was touted as Runway’s first deal with a Hollywood studio. So how exactly does Lionsgate plan to use AI? Vice chairman Michael Burns recently spoke to New York Magazine and said his studio is trying stuff to “see what sticks” when it comes to AI.
Burns said the driving force behind the Runway deal was to allow filmmakers to “make movies and television shows we’d otherwise never make. We can’t make it for $100 million, but we’d make it for $50 million because of AI… We’re banging around the art of the possible. Let’s try some stuff, see what sticks.”
As reported by New York Magazine: “With a library as large as Lionsgate’s, they could use Runway to repackage and resell what the studio already owned, adjusting tone, format and rating to generate a softer cut for a younger audience or convert a live-action film into a cartoon.”
Burns said the studio can use AI to take one of their signature action franchises (the studio is behind the “John Wick” and “Hunger Games” movies, for instance) and “now we can say, ‘Do it in anime, make it PG-13.’ Three hours later, I’ll have the movie.” The executive stressed he would still have to pay the actors and all other rights participants, adding: “But I can do that, and now I can resell it.”
As for another example of how the studio can use AI, Burns said to consider this scenario: “We have this movie we’re trying to decide whether to green-light. There’s a 10-second shot — 10,000 soldiers on a hillside with a bunch of horses in a snowstorm.” Using Runaway’s AI technology, the studio can avoid a pricy film shoot that would cost millions and take a few days and use AI to create the shot for about $10,000.
“He wasn’t sure the film would be made at all, but the math was working,” New York Magazine notes.
When the deal was first announced, Burns stressed that several filmmakers the studio works with were “already excited about its potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process.”
Runway, based in New York City, includes investors such as Google, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures. The company says its AI research is “shaping the next era of art, entertainment and human creativity.”
