In September of 2024, Lionsgate and Runway announced they were building a model trained on Lionsgate’s own films and television. The library runs past twenty thousand titles. At the time it read like the opening of a category rather than a one-off: a studio with a deep catalog, a model company with an appetite for video, and a training corpus nobody else could assemble.
A year later, TheWrap reported that the partnership had run into complications. Two of them, and they are not the same problem. The first was scale. People familiar with the work told Roger Cheng and Jeremy Fuster that a model trained on Lionsgate’s catalog alone could not do what the partnership had promised, and that the same would be true of Disney’s. The second was rights. Whether Lionsgate held full authority over its own films, and whether ancillary claims belonging to performers, writers or directors would have to be settled first, was reported as an open question.
Nobody at Lionsgate conceded that the second problem stopped anything. The studio said its AI work was continuing on several fronts and that the Runway arrangement was never exclusive, and the partnership did in fact expand in June of 2026, with Lionsgate taking an equity interest and the work running across previsualization, storyboarding and finished frames. So this is not a story about a deal that died. It is a story about which part of the deal turned out to be hard, and the hard part was not the modeling.
Ray Seilie, an attorney at Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir, put the underlying condition plainly, observing that each production will have a variety of interested rights holders. Everyone in the business already knows this. What is new is being asked to say who they all are before anyone has requested anything.
The thin volume of studio training deals has plenty of obvious explanations. Litigation posture, valuation disagreement, an unwillingness to arm a competitor. All of them are probably operating. Underneath them sits a mechanical problem that has nothing to do with strategy, and it is one the business has been carrying, quietly and successfully, for about seventy years.
The scale finding does not compete with that problem. If one studio’s library is too small to be useful on its own, the corpus that works spans more than one owner, and each owner added is another rights estate that has to answer the same question.
What the Archive Actually Sells
Anyone who has licensed archive footage already knows the shape of it.
Sony Pictures Stock Footage will license you a clip. What it will not do is tell you the clip is clear. The license covers the footage. Identifying the performers who appear in it, determining whether they were guild members, working out which residuals and reuse fees the intended use triggers, and paying them, all of that lands on the licensee.
This is not a loophole and nobody involved treats it as a scandal. It is how the business has functioned for decades, and there is an entire professional layer, researchers and business affairs departments and guild administrators, whose work is exactly this. The International Documentary Association has described the practice plainly, noting that archives often cannot themselves say whether a particular use triggers payments, or whether the people who worked on the material were union members at all.
What makes the arrangement function is the unit. Somebody wants twelve seconds for one production. That request generates a specific question with a findable answer. The clearance cost is irritating and finite, it gets paid, the deal closes.
The rights state of the asset is never resolved in advance. It gets assembled on demand, around a use somebody has actually named.
That is the system. It has never been a database. It has always been a research process, and it has always started when someone asks.
This Has Happened Before
Now hand that architecture to a buyer who wants the whole catalog.
Corpus licensing inverts the sequence. It asks for the answer before anyone requests a clip, across every asset at once, without a particular downstream use to make the question finite. The clearance layer that has served the business for seventy years has no procedure for this, because it was never asked to produce one. Everything it knows how to do, it does one request at a time.
It would be convenient to call this an AI problem. It isn’t. The pattern is older.
Google scanned tens of millions of books without seeking permission title by title, and the Second Circuit eventually held the scanning and the snippet display to be fair use. The litigation ran for years, and the resolution, when it came, arrived through fair use rather than through clearance, which is to say the question of how you would clear tens of millions of books was never answered. It was routed around.
The Copyright Office took the administrative version of the question seriously and proposed an extended collective licensing pilot for mass digitization in 2015. More than eighty comments were filed. By 2017 the Office concluded there was not sufficient consensus to proceed, and the pilot went nowhere.
Streaming produced the other kind of answer. As programs moved into subscription streaming, the guild agreements supplied collectively defined residual formulas for the new reuse market. Nobody reopened every performer agreement to negotiate the new market separately. The collective rule made the new use administrable across the whole body of covered work.
So the pattern is old. A use appears whose commercially interesting scale exceeds the granularity at which rights were originally administered, and the industry has to find some way out of the one-at-a-time system. Sometimes collective bargaining does it. Sometimes collective licensing gets proposed and dies in committee. Sometimes a party proceeds without asking and lets a court sort it out afterward.
One thing about the current version is genuinely different, and it is worth being precise about it. Google’s route never required constructing a grant. A studio selling training access cannot make that move. Selling requires affirmatively stating what is being conveyed, which means somebody has to determine, in advance and in writing, what sits inside the thing being sold.
