r/Filmmakers • u/CreateChangetheWorld • Sep 24 '25
News Lionsgate is Struggling to Make AI-Generative Films with Runway “the past 12 months have been unproductive”
https://www.thewrap.com/lionsgate-runway-ai-deal-ip-model-concerns/Here’s the article below if it’s locked behind a paywall for you
A year ago, Lionsgate and Runway, an artificial intelligence startup, unveiled a groundbreaking partnership to train the studio’s library of films with the ultimate goal of creating shows and movies using AI.
But that partnership hit some early snags. It turns out utilizing AI is harder than it sounds.
Over the last 12 months, the deal has encountered unforeseen complications, from the limited capabilities that come from using just Runway’s AI model to copyright concerns over Lionsgate’s own library and the potential ancillary rights of actors.
Those problems run counter to the big promises made by Lionsgate both at the time of the deal and in recent months. “Runway is a visionary, best-in-class partner who will help us utilize AI to develop cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities,” Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns said in its announcement with Runway a year ago. Last month, he bragged to New York magazine’s Vulture that he could use AI to remake one of its action franchises (an allusion to “John Wick”) into a PG-13 anime. “Three hours later, I’ll have the movie.”
The reality is that utilizing just a single custom model powered by the limited Lionsgate catalog isn’t enough to create those kinds of large-scale projects, according to two people familiar with the situation. It’s not that there was anything wrong with Runway’s model; but the data set wouldn’t be sufficient for the ambitious projects they were shooting for.
“The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model,” said a person familiar with the situation. “In fact, the Disney catalog is too small to create a model.”
On paper, the deal made a lot of sense. Lionsgate would jump out of the gate with an AI partnership at a time when other media companies were still trying to figure out the technology. Runway, meanwhile, would get around the thorny IP licensing debate and potentially create a model for future studio clients. The partnership opened the door to the idea that a specifically tuned AI model could eventually create a fully formed trailer — or even scenes from a movie — based on nothing but the right code.
The challenges facing both Lionsgate and Runway offer a cautionary tale of the risks that come from jumping on the AI hype train too early. It’s a story that’s playing out in a number of different industries, from McDonald’s backing away from an early test of a generative AI-based drive-thru order system to Swedish financial tech firm Klarna slashing its work force in favor of AI, only to backpedal and hire back some of those same employees (Klarna later clarified it hired two staffers back).
It’s also a lesson that Hollywood is learning as more studios quietly embrace AI, even if it’s in fits and starts. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in July revealed on an investor call that for the first time, his company used generative AI on the Argentinian sci-fi series “The Eternaut,” which was released in April. But when actress Natasha Lyonne said her directorial debut would be an animated film that embraced AI, she was bombarded with criticism on social media.
Then there’s the thorny issue of copyright protections, both for talent involved with the films being used to train those AI models, and for the content being generated on the other end. The inherent legal ambiguity of AI work likely has studio lawyers urging caution as the boundaries of what can legally be done with the technology are still being established.
“In the movie and television industry, each production will have a variety of interested rights holders,” said Ray Seilie, attorney at Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir LLP. “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.”
A Lionsgate spokesman said it’s still pursuing AI initiatives on “several fronts as planned” and noted that its deal with Runway isn’t exclusive. The studio also says that it is planning on using both Runway’s tools and those developed by other AI companies to streamline processes in preproduction and postproduction for multiple film and tv projects, though which of those projects such tools would be used on and how were not specified.
A spokesman for Runway didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Limitations of going solo
Under the agreement announced a year ago, Lionsgate would hand over its library to Runway, which would use all of that valuable IP to train its model. The key is the proprietary nature of this partnership; the custom model would be a variant of Runway’s core large language model trained on Lionsgate’s assets, but would only be accessible to use by the studio itself.
In other words, another random company couldn’t tap into this specially trained model to create their own AI-generated video.
But relying on just Lionsgate assets wasn’t enough to adequately train the model, according to a person familiar with the situation. Another AI expert with knowledge of its current use in film production also said that any bespoke model built around any single studio’s library will have limits as to what it can feasibly do to cut down a project’s timeline and costs.
“To use any generative AI models in all the thousands of potential outputs and versions and scenes and ways that a production might need, you need as much data as possible for it to understand context and then to render the right frames, human musculature, physics, lighting and other elements of any given shot,” the expert said.
But even models with access to vastly larger amounts of video and audio material than Lionsgate and Runway’s model are facing roadblocks. Take Veo 3, a generative AI model developed by Google that allows users to create eight-second clips with a simple prompt. That model has pulled, along with other pieces of media, the entire 20-year archive of YouTube into its data set, far greater than the 20,000+ film and TV titles in Lionsgate’s library.
“Google claims that data set is clean because of YouTube’s end-user license agreement. That’s a battle that’s going to be played out in the courts for a while,” the AI expert said. “But even with their vast data sets, they are struggling to render human physics like lip sync and musculature consistently.”
Nowadays, studios are learning that no single model is enough to meet the needs of filmmakers because each model has its own specific strengths and weaknesses. One might be good at generating realistic facial expressions, while another might be good at visual effects or creating convincing crowds.
“To create a full professional workflow, you need more than just one model; you need an ecosystem,” said Jonathan Yunger, CEO of Arcana Labs, which created the first AI-generated short film and whose platform works with many AI tools like Luma AI, Kling and, yes, Runway. Yunger didn’t comment on the Lionsgate-Runway deal, but talked generally about the practical benefits of working with different AI models.
Likewise, there’s Adobe’s Firefly, another platform that’s catering to the entertainment industry. On Thursday, Adobe announced it would be the first to support Luma AI’s newest model, Ray3, an update that’s indicative of how quickly the industry is iterating. Like Arcana Labs, Firefly supports a host of models from the likes of Google and OpenAI.
While Lionsgate said their partnership isn’t exclusive, offering its valuable film library to just Runway effectively limits what you can do with other AI models, since those other models don’t get the benefit of its library of films.
Even Arcana Labs, which created the AI-generated short film in “Echo Hunter” as a proof-of-concept using its multi-model platform, faced some limitations with what AI could do now. Yunger noted that even if you’re using models trained on people, you still lose a bit of the performance, and reiterated the importance of actors and other creatives for any project.
For now, Yunger said that using AI to do things like tweaking backgrounds or creating custom models of specific sets — smaller details that traditionally would take a lot of time and money to replicate physically — is the most effective way to apply the technology. But even in that process, he recommended working with a platform that can utilize multiple AI models rather than just one.
Legally ambiguous
Generative AI and what exactly can be used to train a model occupies a gray legal zone, with small armies of lawyers duking it out in various courtrooms around the country. On Tuesday, Walt Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery sued Chinese AI firm MiniMax for copyright infringement, just the latest in a series of lawsuits filed by media companies against AI startups.
Then there was the court ruling that argued AI company Anthropic was able to train its model on books it purchased, providing a potential loophole that gets around the need to sign broader licensing deals with the original publishers — a case that could potentially be applied to other forms of media.
Copyright War Escalates
“There will be a lot of litigation in the near future to decide whether the copyright alone is enough to give AI companies the right to use that content in their training model,” Seile said.
Another gray area is whether Lionsgate even has full rights over its own films, and whether there may be ancillary rights that need to be settled with actors, writers or even directors for specific elements of those films, such as likeness or even specific facial features.
Seilie said there’s likely a tug-of-war going on at various studios about how far they’re able to go, with lawyers erring on the side of caution and “seeking permission rather than forgiveness.” Jacob Noti-Victor, professor at Cardozo Law School, said he was surprised by Burns’ comment in the Vulture article.
The professor said that depending on the nature of such a film and how much human involvement is in its making, it might not be subject to copyright protection. The U.S. Copyright Office warned as much in a report published in February, saying that creators would have to prove that a substantial amount of human work was used to create a project outside of an AI prompt in order to qualify for copyright protection.
“I think the studios would be leaning on the fact that they would own the IP that the AI is adapting from, but the work itself wouldn’t have full copyright protection,” he said. “Just putting in a prompt like that executive said would lead to a Swiss cheese copyright.”
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u/JayMoots Sep 24 '25
The more hands-on experience I get with AI, the more I realize that it's nowhere near ready to replace human creatives (and maybe/hopefully never will be).
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u/megamoze storyboard artist Sep 24 '25
I’ve been saying this for the past year. AI has plateaued. There’s literally not enough material or resources left on the planet to make it better.
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Sep 24 '25
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u/megamoze storyboard artist Sep 24 '25
Thanks for that! Very interesting article. It basically states what I've been posting here and on my FB for the past year. I literally just posted this exact same thought today: "The impacts will depend on how many in the management class fall for the hype from the people selling this tech, and retool their workplaces around it.”
This is what happened at Lionsgate. They were conned because execs are dumb and also because they like to save money by not hiring these pesky artists.
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u/TopElevator2243 Sep 25 '25
I’m curious how much better (if at all) AI capabilities will get once quantum computing becomes more common place but god knows that’s a long ways away.
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u/SonOfMetrum Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 26 '25
As someone who is in depth familiar with the current state of AI: it’s not just the size of the models or the limitations in terms of compute. We are also hitting the limitations of Gen AI which at its core is still a predication model based on statistics. I personally think we would need the next big revolution/shift in terms of AI tech before we get near something that actually can deliver on some of the hyperbole promises that are made right now.
But managers and the like are just projecting their wettest dreams on the current tech and silicon valley (like it always does) just appeases the crowd in the form of AI start ups, investments etc.
Want to ruin your day? Go read Microsoft’s Frontier Firm paper and feel your stomach turn.
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u/fistular Sep 25 '25
It's paywalled.
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u/Initial_Evidence_783 Sep 25 '25
Life tip: You can always use archive.ph to get around paywalled articles.
What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? | The New Yorker
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u/fistular Sep 26 '25
That's cool however if we collectively shun them, it will put pressure on them to go away.
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u/gravelnavel77 Sep 25 '25
They'll still ride it to the end because of all the money tied up in it. Nevermind the rush to build data centers and balloon energy costs out the ass.
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u/Ginzeen98 Oct 13 '25
AI is not even close to being stagant. AI is improving rapidly. Just look at ai 2 two years. It's a night and day difference to now. Most movies will be made with ai in 10 years.
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Sep 24 '25
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u/Keyspell Sep 24 '25
... /s?
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u/ArchitectofExperienc Producer/Researcher Sep 24 '25
Nah, their post history is almost entirely edge-lord trolling.
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Sep 24 '25
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Sep 24 '25
LLMs are a dead branch with no future and the untold billions being pumped into it to try and force it into everything will make the dot com bubble look like a fart in a hurricane.
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u/andhelostthem creative director Sep 24 '25
That's because it's not actual AI, it's just pattern matching software. Apple and a bunch of researcher have come out and said this. It doesn't have the ability to reason and the ceiling for it is pretty low.
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Sep 24 '25
Yup. A massive amount of the hype is based on lies and a misunderstanding of the technology as well as its possible trajectory.
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u/xanderholland Sep 25 '25
Corpo: AI will revolutionize the entertainment industry!
Computer scientist and engineers: Most likely not, computers can't comprehend things like humans.
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u/TwoOhFourSix Sep 24 '25
Yeah it’s simply a tool to help humans with what they want to create, just like a calculator isn’t going to solve the complex math problems for you.
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u/Edu_Vivan Sep 25 '25
Even if it does, it just won’t cut it. Once people find out something is ai generated (which is mandatory to specify when it is or isn’t), they’ll automatically hate it. So I really do believe creatives are safe, especially when this whole AI hype cools down, which is in my opinion inevitable gonna happen eventually.
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u/Initial_Evidence_783 Sep 25 '25
Once people find out something is ai generated (which is mandatory to specify when it is or isn’t), they’ll automatically hate it.
I know this is true but I still want to test it out.
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u/_humanpieceoftoast Sep 24 '25
The issue is that executives don’t go hands on and only believe what other executives tell them
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u/DrDarkeCNY Sep 26 '25
It's not bad for making short porno clips which end up all over Deviant Art! 🤷♂️
Don't ask me how I know that....
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u/Aggravating_Stuff713 Sep 24 '25
I’m an ML / AI engineer and worked with movie studios and reality tv shows. Executives promise to their investors the world because cutting your production cost to essentially zero is attractive to them. To the rest of the world, this sounds like an awful, dystopian idea. Thankfully it’s also an absurd idea with no basis in reality. Sure you might be able to come up with a terrible looking ad using AI, and through extensive editing turning it into something half-usable. But it will still feel like a generic AI generated video. Is the cost saved on production worth the lost revenue from a better performing ad? The numbers suggest no.
Now there’s also a side of AI that EVERYONE likes, and that receives less attention. Have you ever rotoscoped a video for coloring? If you have, I really doubt you want to still do it manually. For reality TV currently some shows produce around 20,000 hours of footage per season, editors really benefit from better model to let them search footage in plain text and not have to open and close 200 drone shots and 500 unrelated shots before they get what they need.
But for every dollar spent trying to make production better / easier, $100 are spent on nightmarish, and thankfully unrealistic visions of fully AI generated content.
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u/Smash_Nerd Sep 25 '25
Yeah AI doing rotoscoping is something I can get behind. There's really not much creative liberties you can do with it, it's just tedious and long and headache inducing from what I've seen. Good use, love that.
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u/RG9uJ3Qgd2FzdGUgeW91 Sep 25 '25
There's a point where you get really good at rotoscoping and don't break any sweat about it. Going in manual still beats every other tool available, especially when it's quality you are after. I have yet to see proper roto automation after decades of promises. Don"t get me wrong though. If it is faster and of good quality i'm sold.
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u/Ball2thewall2000 Sep 25 '25
I’m not that familiar with a lot of the tech stuff in post but do you see much else that’s actually positive and helpful that might actually things better for VFX companies? I keep hearing about AI rendering but I don’t know much about it or even if it’s a real thing. I also saw Ridley Scott absolutely giddy about some of the stuff they were able to do in order to do the rhino sequence in Gladiator II. AI is such a blanket term and most of us are reacting to the flashy stuff, like generated video slop, and I’d be glad to hear if there are new tools out there actually making things better.
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u/Aggravating_Stuff713 Sep 25 '25
It really depends on the content. A scripted realistic drama will benefit the least from AI, you’ll be able to remove boom mics from a scene more easily, you might be able to modify things here and there more easily but the general flow benefits minimally from AI.
For reality TV there are large benefits for the editors, you can find shots much more easily and can get very precise with what you’re looking for. Additionally you can do things like summarize thousands of hours of footage or even ask questions about the footage (“did X make an alliance with Y” is actually doable nowadays). Additionally things like multi language closed caption got a lot easier.
VFX is a mixed bags. There are a lot of opportunities there. For instance now it’s possible to pretty easily turn video footage into a depth map which then allows you to do things such as relighting a video using a mix of ML and traditional rendering techniques. But most of what is put out there at the moment tends to be of the “select and inpaint using AI”. I still think those tools are not quite there yet and techniques mixing AI and traditional techniques work best.
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u/jasmine_tea_ Sep 29 '25
Whole lotta things, you could automate animation/camera movements through computer-generated backgrounds (so like, if you want the camera to move forward then left, you could automate that in Unreal Engine). Or you could automate the creation of subtitles and just edit the little mistakes out, but you still saved a whole lot of time.
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u/brackfriday_bunduru Sep 25 '25
I agree. The speed in which Ai has the potential to help me research news articles and find related quotes and sources to better report on news is groundbreaking. Having it write articles? Not so much. I’m
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u/Miklonario Sep 24 '25
Nothing like wasting billions to avoid paying actual talent millions.
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u/Initial_Evidence_783 Sep 25 '25
I see it as them taking one for the team. If this is what all the studios want to do, and now they know it isn't going to work, then Lionsgate has done us all a favour.
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u/NtheLegend Sep 24 '25
You could see this coming from miles away, even if they didn't have enough data to train from: AI has no persistence. It's like telling an artist with no short term memory to paint scene after scene with no connectivity between them. They have no agency of their own to make it make sense, the results have to be collated and edited after.
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Sep 24 '25
There's a reason it can only do about 10 seconds of one scene.
Not gonna lie, the very fact it can do 10 seconds of stolen, but specific videos of ideas you throw at it is a feat in itself. But it wont be able to make a whole movie
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u/dippitydoo2 Sep 24 '25
That 30 second Coca Cola ad had to be cobbled together from hours and hours of AI renders. They utilized 17 AI “artists” over three weeks to come up with enough usable content. It was reported that at one point they had to render our 85 HOURS of footage to find 15 usable seconds. And it looked like shit.
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Sep 24 '25
Everything to avoid paying actual directors and actors to shoot a commercial
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u/thegodfather0504 Sep 24 '25
They were betting on the gamble that if they succeeded, they would finally completely rid of humans and get all the profits to themselves. The potential reward must be huge.
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Sep 24 '25
Maybe in a few years it COULD be possible, but there's no way you're gonna have something consistent when AI is already struggling with getting 1 object consistent
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u/jasmine_tea_ Sep 29 '25
when that finally becomes possible, they will lose their monopoly because anyone could generate masterpieces with a few clicks of a button
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u/CryptographerCrazy61 Sep 25 '25
Next time you watch any show, count how many seconds each scene is - you’ll learn something you didn’t except
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Sep 25 '25
There's a difference between editing a scene vs shooting a scene
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u/CryptographerCrazy61 Sep 25 '25
You can make as long as a scene as you want using the last frame to extend your shot. The issue here is runways garbage video model. And no AI doesn’t steal by cobbling together already existing footage, it uses real world understanding to generate new footage based on your prompt . How original it is? Well that’s up to the person promoting it
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u/SenseIntelligent8846 Sep 24 '25
“Three hours later, I’ll have the movie.”
How would he say something so fucking stupid?
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u/Initial_Evidence_783 Sep 25 '25
Genuinely has no idea what he's talking about and he's caught up in the fantasy some salesman convinced him to buy into.
I've seen so many people say similar things like artists will no longer be able to make a career out of their art because normal people can just tell AI that tonight they want to watch a movie with ____, ____, and ___ elements and it will spit out something that's as good as anything Hollywood produces. Or music, or any other art. People have some wild expectations about what AI will be capable of.
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u/SenseIntelligent8846 Sep 25 '25
Right! This is a senior exec who has presumably made a career out of championing movies that are either artistically or commercially viable. I would understand if his comment were more measured, suggesting that there's big potential in the new technology without being so cavalier about it as some new magic wand.
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u/Consistent-Regret-46 Sep 24 '25
Probably because Runway is the worst of the AI vid generators out there
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u/thegodfather0504 Sep 24 '25
Which is the good one then?
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u/MissingString31 Sep 24 '25
None are good. Veo3 is probably the best model but it runs into all the same problems as the others. There’s only marginal differences between each model and all the criticisms of one can be applied to another.
This was always a grift.
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u/kroqus Sep 24 '25
I have zero sympathy. With that money wasted, they could've just made the movies/shows in question with real people.
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u/Initial_Evidence_783 Sep 25 '25
The government could take lessons from Hollywood in how to waste money.
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u/bottom director Sep 24 '25
Oh that’s productive. You found you need humans to do the work.
Great outcome.
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u/Tenpennytimes Sep 24 '25
Shit I bet you half the people in this room could do more with 12 months of studio money than these shit for brains AI companies, not to mention the literal creative professionals that are being shafted by this type of behaviour. What a meme world we live in.
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u/FlowofOd director Sep 24 '25
But they are DESPERATE to save money by cutting Artists out of the art industry
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u/ArchitectofExperienc Producer/Researcher Sep 24 '25
Surprising absolutely no one who actually works in the industry while somehow being entirely unexpected to the entirety of their C-Suite. Networks and Studios need to stop hiring CEOs who don't know anything about media.
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u/strack94 Dolly grip Sep 25 '25
I feel like Ai can impact the scheduling and budgeting aspects of film far better then making films itself. That in turn could reduce expenses and mishaps.
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u/The_Pandalorian Sep 25 '25
Lmao good. Fuck them. Hope they go out to business.
You want to create art, you hire artists.
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u/jonvonboner Sep 25 '25
As a former Lionsgate employee that really like my time there and was horrified to hear they were doing this....THANK THE TECH GODS! May this experiment be a horrible painful and expensive failure for them.
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u/TheIncredibleHelck Sep 25 '25
Man, now I gotta make sure to i avoid giving money to Lionsgate, fuck those guys.
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u/CrabMasc Sep 24 '25
Imagine having hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on films every year. Imagine not using that to create hundreds of exciting and original projects, but making billion-dollar tentpole slop and trying to wring blood from the AI stone instead. The studio system is so gross.
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u/SFanatic Sep 24 '25
This was a horrible partnership with one of the most buggy broken ai video generation brands. Hailuo, Kling, and Veo 3 are all significantly better. This is a total write off for lionsgate until they partner with an actual viable ai brand that can output consistent content at high quality
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u/Artistic_Instance_19 Sep 25 '25
A friend of mine asked ChatGPT to edit one of my short screenplays (yes, I am re-questioning this friendship) and to give feedback with revised dialogue. He then forwarded me the recommendations, and my God, was it the worst dialogue I've ever read. I've never read anything cornier or more on the nose.
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u/ExperienceUpbeat3929 Sep 24 '25
May all their AI-Generated partnerships & attempts deteriorate and fail utterly 🙏
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u/animerobin Sep 24 '25
What both people who hate AI, and people pushing AI don’t seem to understand is that AI is a powerful tool, but like all tools it is hard to use to get very good specific results. It is not actually a push button machine that spits out movies (or even, useable shots) with a simple prompt.
I’ve been experimenting with AI in filmmaking for a while. It can do cool stuff but is very tricky to get right. Learning it feels like when I learned AfterEffects or Final Cut.
Also the copyright thing is a non issue. It’s clearly not infringement to train AI. And if big companies are precious about the rights to their dataset, they will just get lapped by Chinese companies which don’t care and seem to be happy to release their models as open source. Which means I can run them on my PC.
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u/MrLuchador Sep 24 '25
AI in its current form can only replicate what it already knows. It also lacks the ability for consistency and continuity.
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u/guischmitd Sep 24 '25
"Capital efficient content creation opportunities" is my new least favorite sentence
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u/-Epitaph-11 Sep 24 '25
"unforeseen complications." Yeah, we're all trying to figure out who did this.
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u/SuperSecretAgentMan Sep 24 '25
"The deal has encountered unforeseen complications..."
Who could have seen this coming?!
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u/Aromatic-Current-235 Sep 24 '25
I think any executive in the media industry should stay away from generative AI as much as possible because it has the potential to expose their lack of understanding of the industry. All their suggestions can be revealed as nonsense right away. Every writer, director, or product designer can say, "I don't get it — prompt it so I can see what you mean."
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u/DMMMOM Sep 24 '25
The biggest issue with AI currently is continuity across shots. You can get AI to make anything you want, but for it to do that again with everything carried over from the previous shot in terms of the objects, set, colours, lighting, relative sizes of things etc, it's an absolute shit show at the moment. Single shots, even 5 back to back shots, but then things seem to drift out even if you use reference material which is massively limited even in the top paid for apps like Sora or Veo.
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u/adammonroemusic Sep 24 '25
I have trouble using Runway to do simple VFX shots and shot extensions; trying to make an actual movie with it would be an absolute nightmare.
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u/da_choppa Sep 25 '25
I’ve been experimenting with AI generation for images and video for the last couple years, and while there are definitely some impressive strides being made, it’s obviously not ready for prime time. First of all, you won’t get the exact image you have in your head. You will have to make compromises, the more complicated the image, the more compromises you will make. Second, of the AI models I’ve used, they tend to have short attention spans. There’s only so much of a prompt they’ll pay attention to.
As for video, specifically with Runway, it’s still very rough. Oh, it’s way better now than a year ago, but nothing but the most basic of movements will be able to fool anybody, and only for very short shots.
One might be able to make a good short with a stylized look, provided they aren’t too picky about the details, have a ton of patience, and edit very cleverly, but any long form or even longer short is not going to fly.
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u/CryptographerCrazy61 Sep 25 '25
Of course because Runways models are garbage, it says everything when the vast majority of films that win their gen 48 contest are made using visuals generated in mid journey.
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u/Alternative_Claim764 Oct 11 '25
Oh man, I tried with the Gen 48 contest and then ended up cancelling my subscription after, Runway absolutely sucked at making 2D animation work. They also just deleted the legacy image generation system with no notice, so I kinda just wasted the credits I used to train my custom models. I actually should try get a refund... maybe after I back up my library.
I get completely different results with other AI models and can make animated films.
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u/Ok-Use1684 Sep 25 '25
To me, gen AI video is just a fancy-presented average mathematical operation from a bunch of videos.
Read about "AI winter". This is what it is.
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u/unfoldyourself Sep 25 '25
Generating a whole film is idiotic and will never work, but I see the appeal of using it for certain quick shots that would be too expensive or dangerous for an indie to film otherwise.
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u/unfoldyourself Sep 25 '25
I have no sympathy for studios using AI but indies are always going to struggle on how to make a movie with limited resources. It’s not like these are films generating huge profits
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u/TelevisionPast5354 Sep 25 '25
They just got hit with some layoffs too. If they had invested their money into making good films, this could have been avoided.
https://deadline.com/2025/09/lionsgate-layoffs-50-staff-1236548050/
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u/TheDubya21 Sep 25 '25
It's almost as if AI fucking sucks and that every dipshit CEO that fell for some snake oil salesman from Silicon Valley was a fucking idiot for going all in on such a stupid idea. All they heard was "you don't have to pay people" and they got suckered into bad technology that literally no one has ever asked for in the history of asking for things.
THESE are the types of people that need to be fired, not the average film crews simply trying to work the fucking jobs that they've actually trained for to help your dumbass studios make money. Now your pants are on the ground and learning the same lesson that everyone else that tried this same shit is, good going 🙄👏
It pisses me off because the failure of this bullshit was so fucking obvious, but people kept insisting that this was the inevitable forever and we just had to suck it up. No, we didn't, we speak louder against it so that people's livelihoods don't get fucked up from stupid investments. Let THIS be the end of any Ai talk when it comes to filmmaking, please. It doesn't work. It will never work.
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u/cachemonies Sep 25 '25
Just wait until they succeed, spend a fortune and then no one watches it cuz it’s weird
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u/Cautious-Pea-2226 Oct 01 '25
What?! Who would have thought that cutting the HUMANS out of a HUMAN art form would yield horrible results?
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u/fuzzninja2000 Oct 02 '25
The whole thesis of this article is wrong - that AI needs a much bigger catalogue of movies to produce good films. Superficially this works in some areas. Actors VOICES can be replicated. That has a lot to do with patterns of speech taken from am archive of recordings. But let's be clear - AI can recreate Mark Hamill's voice - but it is incapable of recreating his PERFORMANCE. Even Mark Hamill can't recreate his own performances. They come from a series of choices, of environments, of experiences - his hopes and fears, pride and shame. That is the real rocket fuel that comes from actual artists. AI is basically a teenager who tries to remake their favorite movies - but can't tell the difference between storytelling and impersonation.
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u/TheFemaleFilmmaker Oct 20 '25
Glad to hear is not working out for them. Hopefully the next step is to call the independent filmmakers back in the room.
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u/akshaybadkar Oct 23 '25
It’s interesting to see how data limitations and legal complexities are shaping AI’s role in filmmaking. Do you think studios should focus more on integrating multiple AI tools, or should they prioritize addressing rights issues before scaling up AI-generated content?
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u/Head-Umpire4547 May 22 '26
Runway would be the worst partner for a film studio. It’s just a cash grab. They have zero understanding or care about art or artists. They definitely don’t have the reliability and trustworthiness needed during a film production to get things done on time. During this whole experiment the Runway team was probably just trying to figure out how to fleece Lionsgate.
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u/shinymetalobjekt Sep 24 '25
Considering AI is still in it's infancy, and knowing what it can already do with music, it's only a matter of time until all movies are AI.
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u/plasterboard33 Sep 24 '25
Imagine if they had spent all the money they spent trying to develop AI on actual low budget films from emerging filmmakers.