John Wick Chapter AI
Jessica Toonkel
In a world, where AI is coming to "destroy" Hollywood, one studio stood alone...
The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood.
Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process.
You can already hear the screams of terror coming from Los Angeles about this news. But this deal seemingly makes a lot of sense. This isn't about replacing writers or actors or anyone else – at least not yet, or anytime soon – it's about augmenting some work and allowing other work that many productions normally couldn't afford to be done:
Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate Studio, expects the company to be able to save “millions and millions of dollars” from using the new model. The studio behind the “John Wick” franchise and “Megalopolis” plans to initially use the new AI tool for internal purposes like storyboarding—laying out a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds—and eventually creating backgrounds and special effects, like explosions, for the big screen.
Even with the latter, I suspect it will augment the work of visual artists, not replace them. I understand this is all a bit unsettling at the moment – in part because the technology continues to move so fast – but if we simply look at it through the lens of previous technological shifts rather than the 'AI-is-coming-for-us-all' lens that you might find in a sci-fi movie, again, this is likely to be additive. And get this, may even create new jobs for humans to learn and do.
For now, Runway’s models are likely to save time and money on preproduction work, like storyboarding or showing scenes to audiences of internal executives, said Brianna Domont, who oversees visual effects for Lionsgate’s motion picture group.
For example, Lionsgate could use Runway to show what a scene could look like rather than have different executives interpret what it could be. The new Runway tool is expected to become a “game-changer” for Lionsgate’s lower-budget films because it will give them access to the same resources as bigger ticket movies, Domont said.
And, importantly, Runway doesn't even have the capabilities to do any of this yet. They're going to get to work on such tools now that they have access to content needed to help train such tools. While AI is moving fast, it also feels like we're moving beyond the studios-suing-YouTube phase of this a bit faster...
“We do a lot of action movies, so we blow a lot of things up and that is one of the things Runway does.”
M.G. Siegler