A studio let a model company train on its entire catalogue

The process wall

Studios license individual titles for remakes, sequels and format changes as a matter of routine, a right-by-right process built around a specific story. On 18 September 2024, Lionsgate did something structurally different: it let the video-model company Runway train on its 'proprietary catalog' as a whole, so the licensed asset was not one title's story rights but the audiovisual content of a back catalogue used as training material.

What the documents show

Runway's announcement states the resulting model would be 'customized on Lionsgate's proprietary catalog' and 'generates cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway's suite of controllable tools,' intended to 'help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work.' Lionsgate Vice Chair Michael Burns called Runway 'a visionary, best-in-class partner' and said the studio views AI 'as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing and supplementing our current operations,' while Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela framed the model as giving 'artists, creators and studios the best and most powerful tools to augment their workflows.' A later announcement, dated 11 June 2026, shows the relationship growing well past a tool licence: Lionsgate took an equity stake in Runway and the two agreed to a joint development program producing new IP, including a short-form series drawing on Lionsgate's existing catalogue.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism is a studio exercising its own copyright in finished films to license them as training data, which is a right a copyright owner can grant regardless of who appears on screen in the underlying footage. Neither announcement states what consent, credit or compensation, if any, applies to the actors, writers, directors or crew whose performances and work make up that catalogue, and neither addresses whether guild agreements covering digital replicas or AI provisions, several of them negotiated by unions the same year, would reach a training use like this one. The 'augment, not replace' language is a vendor and studio characterisation, worth labelling as such rather than treating as a verified labour outcome.

What survives

What a maker or performer can check is narrower than the announcement's own framing: whether a specific performer or crew contract addresses a later training use of a finished film, and whether a guild agreement already in force covers that use. The 2026 expansion shows how quickly an initial training licence can grow into equity and co-production, which is worth watching in any similar deal.

• Check a performance or crew contract for any clause addressing later AI training use of the finished work.
• Compare a catalogue-training deal against the digital replica and AI terms already negotiated in guild contracts covering the same performers.
• Track whether an initial tool-licence deal like this one later converts into equity or joint content development, as it did here.

The two announcements together document a studio-side business relationship in detail while leaving the people whose past work fills the catalogue entirely outside the frame.