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It's hard not to feel the ripple effect when big shifts happen. One such shift came Wednesday when Lionsgate—the studio responsible for the John Wick, Hunger Games, and Twilight franchises—announced it had teamed up with artificial intelligence firm Runway for a "first-of-its-kind partnership" that would give the AI firm access to the studio's archives in order to create a custom AI tool for preproduction and postproduction on its film and TV shows. Runway's forthcoming tool will "help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors, and other creative talent augment their work" and "generate cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway's suite of controllable tools," according to a press release announcing the deal.
If that sounds like it might pique the interest of those who have been watching AI's influence on creatives' work, it did. Hours after The Wall Street Journal broke the story, writer-director Justine Bateman, who was vocally critical of AI during the Hollywood strikes last year, made a post on X that almost felt like a warning: "Over a year ago, I told you that I assumed the studios were NOT sending lawyers to the #AI companies over their models injesting [sic] their copyrighted films, because they wanted their own custom versions. Well, here you go.
" If anything, the new deal could serve as a test of the AI protections that unions like the Screen Actors...
Angela Watercutter.
