Runway and Lionsgate are deepening their Hollywood AI experiment in a significant way. The two companies announced an expansion of their partnership that goes well beyond the original 2024 tooling deal: Lionsgate has taken an equity stake in Runway, and the pair will now co-develop original intellectual property together. This is no longer just a studio licensing AI tools. It is a studio betting on an AI company with real money, and asking that company to help create the next generation of content from scratch.
From tools to ownership
When Lionsgate and Runway first announced their collaboration in September 2024, the structure was relatively straightforward. The partnership was centered around the creation and training of a new AI model, customized on Lionsgate's proprietary catalog, designed to help its filmmakers and directors augment their work by generating cinematic video. The model was exclusive to Lionsgate and its designated creators, and the focus was squarely on pre-production workflows like storyboarding and pre-visualization.
The new deal is structurally different. Under the new agreement, Lionsgate has taken an equity interest in Runway, and the two companies will be launching a joint development program to develop and produce new IP. As part of this program, the companies plan to roll out a slate of co-developed projects blending AI and content, beginning with a short-form episodic series drawing on some of Lionsgate's existing IP and Runway's generative models. Lionsgate is also serving as a presenting partner at the Runway AI Festival, which is being held in New York today.
The rocky road to here
The expansion announcement comes after a year that was more complicated than either company publicly acknowledged at the time. A year after the original deal, the partnership hit some early snags. Utilizing AI proved harder than it sounded, and the deal 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.
The core technical problem was a data scale issue. The reality is that utilizing just a single custom model powered by the limited Lionsgate catalog was not enough to create large-scale projects. It was not that there was anything wrong with Runway's model, but the data set would not be sufficient for the ambitious projects they were shooting for. As one person familiar with the situation put it: "The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model." That is a striking admission for a studio sitting on over 20,000 titles.
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