Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns says AI will save studio tens of millions annually

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.

Lionsgate’s blockchain history adds another dimension

Back in 2021, Lionsgate explored content distribution through the Theta Network, a decentralized video delivery protocol built on blockchain. Then in 2022, the studio partnered with Tom Brady’s Autograph platform to produce NFTs tied to the Saw franchise.

What this means for investors

If Burns’ savings projections hold, the implications extend well beyond one studio. AI-driven production cost reductions at scale could fundamentally alter the economics of mid-budget filmmaking, the category where Lionsgate has historically thrived with franchises like John Wick, The Hunger Games, and Saw.

The risk side of the ledger is equally important. The Runway partnership’s scaling difficulties are a reminder that generative AI in creative industries is still early. Models trained on limited datasets can produce generic or unusable output, which doesn’t save money if human creators have to redo the work.

There’s also the labor dimension. Hollywood’s guilds fought bitterly over AI protections during the 2023 strikes, and any studio loudly projecting tens of millions in AI savings is essentially telegraphing workforce displacement.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.