Though moviegoers certainly have an appetite for franchise slop these days, it’s a stretch to say that they’d be willing to bite down on wholly AI-generated movies just yet.

Even more of a stretch: that the technology is anywhere near good enough to produce entire feature films.

This is the reckoning that the mammoth Hollywood studio Lionsgate is undergoing right now, as one of the first big studios to go in on the tech. Almost exactly a year ago, it announced a bold partnership with the AI startup Runway to develop a new model capable of generating “cinematic video” exclusively for Lionsgate to use. In return, the studio gave the firm unrestricted access to its treasure trove of movies — which include everything from the “Hunger Games” films to “American Psycho” — to train the AI model.

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