Movie Studio Lionsgate is Struggling to Make AI-Generated Films With Runway
Last year, the AI video company Runway joined forces with the major Hollywood studio Lionsgate in a partnership the pair hoped would result in AI-generated scenes and even potentially full-length movies. But the project has hit a snag.
According to a report by The Wrap, the past 12 months have been unproductive. Lionsgate distributes Hollywood blockbusters including The Hunger Games, John Wick, The Twilight Saga, and Saw franchises. But despite its huge catalog, it is simply not enough for the AI to produce quality content.
“The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model,” a source tells The Wrap. “In fact, the Disney catalog is too small to create a model.”
Despite Runway being one of the leading names in AI video, the technology needs a copious amount of data to produce AI-generated films. It is the reason AI has proven to be such an unpopular technology, as AI firms help themselves to any type of media they can get their hands on — whether it has copyright protections or not.
Another issue is the rights of actors and the model for remuneration if their likeness appears in an AI-generated clip. It is a legal gray area with no clear path.
“In the movie and television industry, each production will have a variety of interested rights holders,” an attorney tells The Wrap. “Now that there’s this tech where you can create an AI video of an actor saying something they did not say, that kind of right gets very thorny.”
AI Limitations
Despite the huge hype that has surrounded AI for the past couple of years, the technology still falls short of what investors and proponents would like — leading to fears of a bubble.
And using a relatively narrow data set such as the Lionsgate back catalog simply isn’t enough. Adobe, for example, leverages multiple different models for its Firefly model, most recently announcing that it has added Luma AI’s Ray3 video model to go with models from Google and OpenAI.
Even AI video models like Google’s much-vaunted Veo 3 still has its drawbacks. And that is trained on the entire YouTube library.
So while Runway’s plan of having its own customized AI model that only it can use may sound like a good idea. It is ultimately flawed because editors need access to multiple models to produce anything close to a professional job. And even then, whether fans will buy into AI flicks remains an open question.
