The AI startup Runway is helping to retool Lionsgate, the producer of blockbuster movie franchises like The Hunger Games and John Wick, for the era of generated video.
What’s new: Runway will build a custom video generator to help Lionsgate streamline its production processes. It also launched an API for its Gen-3 Alpha Turbo model.
Runway + Lionsgate: Runway will fine-tune its proprietary models on Lionsgate productions to enable the filmmaker to generate new imagery based on its previous work. The companies didn’t disclose financial terms of the arrangement.
- Lionsgate plans to use the custom model for pre-production tasks like visualization and storyboarding, and for post-production processes like editing and special effects.
- The custom model could save Lionsgate “millions and millions of dollars,” a Lionsgate executive told The Wall Street Journal.
- Other studios, too, are looking into building video generation models that are fine-tuned on their own productions, Variety reported. Runway is in talks with some of them, the startup’s CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told Axios.
Gen-3 API: Concurrently with announcing the Lionsgate deal, Runway unveiled an API that drives its Gen-3 Alpha and Gen-3 Alpha Turbo models as well as updates to Gen-3 Alpha.
- The company charges around $0.60 to $1.20, depending on the service tier, to generate outputs up to 5 seconds long and twice that for up to 10 seconds long.
- Third-party user interfaces that connect to the API must include a “Powered by Runway” banner that links to Runway’s website.
- Gen-3 Alpha now allows users to transform existing videos into new styles using text prompts and steer its output using video input in addition to a prompt. The model’s output will follow the input video’s shapes and motions.
Why it matters: Although the plan is to use Runway’s technology for pre- and post-production, this deal puts state-of-the-art video generation at the heart of Lionsgate’s operations and encourages professional cinematographers, editors, special effects artists, and other cinematic specialists to see what they can do with it. For Lionsgate, it’s a bid to stay ahead of competitors. For AI, it could be a major move into the Hollywood spotlight.
We’re thinking: While upstart competitors are using pretrained models, Lionsgate will be using a model that has internalized its own style and capabilities.