Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns dropped a number that should make every studio CFO sit up straight: the company expects AI integration to save “tens and tens of millions of dollars a year” across its film, television, and streaming operations.
For a studio that generated over $3 billion in revenue in its latest fiscal year, that’s not exactly pocket change.
The Runway partnership and its growing pains
The foundation for Burns’ optimism traces back to September 18, 2024, when Lionsgate announced a strategic partnership with Runway, the AI video generation company. The deal gave Runway access to Lionsgate’s proprietary content library to train a custom generative model designed specifically for the studio’s creative pipeline.
By September 2025, roughly a year into the collaboration, reports surfaced that the partnership was running into scaling problems. The core issue was that Lionsgate’s catalog, while substantial, may not have been large enough to train an effective generative model. Exclusivity concerns also emerged, raising questions about whether the custom model could deliver the differentiated output Lionsgate was hoping for.
