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Lionsgate is betting that a dedicated chief AI officer can do what most studios haven’t managed: move AI from a cost-reduction talking point into a structured creative partnership. Kathleen Grace, hired this winter as the first person to hold that specific title at a Hollywood studio, is building a rigorous internal testing process that deliberately avoids touching existing IP until tools prove themselves. The Runway deal, which trained a video-generation model on Lionsgate’s catalog including John Wick and Twilight, remains the most concrete signal of where audience engagement strategy is heading.
What this means for your business
The CMO watching this story has a specific problem to locate themselves inside: AI in entertainment marketing is splitting into two camps, and which camp you’re in will depend less on budget than on whether you have someone who can hold the creative side and the technical side in the same hand. Grace’s background at Vermillio, a rights-tracking AI company, is the tell. Lionsgate didn’t hire a technologist who learned Hollywood; they hired someone who already knew how talent and IP protection interact with model training.
The Runway pact is the underreported part of this story. When a studio trains a generative video model on a curated proprietary catalog, the output isn’t just cheaper visual effects. It’s the ability to produce fan-facing content, marketing assets, and extended-universe material that is tonally consistent with the original property because the model has internalized it. Grace’s comment about “new ways to deeply engage” Twilight and John Wick fans reads as a signal that the marketing funnel is about to get a third lane, somewhere between a theatrical campaign and user-generated content, built and scaled with AI. The brands that establish this capability first own a distribution surface their competitors can’t copy by writing a check to the same vendor.
Grace’s stated biggest fear, eroding trust with creative partners, is actually the leading indicator CMOs should track. If the writers’ room and the production team don’t believe the AI output meets their standard, the marketing team never gets the good material. Studios that skip the internal trust-building phase and go straight to audience-facing AI features tend to produce content that fans read as hollow. The bet worth watching isn’t whether Lionsgate uses AI in marketing; they already are. The bet is whether the creative pipeline produces AI-assisted material that the talent will publicly stand behind, because that’s what determines whether the audience engagement holds.
Based on reporting from Lionsgate AI Chief Kathleen Grace Explains the Job, Runway Pact, originally published 2026-05-01 03:00:00.
