Imax is getting into the AI business.
The exhibition giant has pacted with Runway AI for a limited run of the latter’s film-festival offerings.
Imax will run the shorts from Runway’s 2025 AI Film Festival from August 17-August 20 at ten locations around the U.S., including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, Denver and Washington, D.C. The ten films that composed this year’s festival will be screened as a bloc, including More Tears than Harm, a painterly look at a difficult childhood in Madagascar and Jailbird, about a chicken rescued from a factory farm to serve as a companion to a prisoner in a real-life British program aimed at compassionate rehabilitation.
“The IMAX Experience has typically been reserved for the world’s most accomplished and visionary filmmakers and we’re excited to open our aperture and use our platform to experiment with a new kind of creator, as storytelling and technology converge in an entirely new way,” Imax’s chief content officer Jonathan Fischer said in a statement.
“The quality, variety and storytelling of these films deserves a premium viewing experience,” added Runway co-founder Cristobal Valenzuela.
The announcement shows how the new tech revolution could play out differently than the last one did in Hollywood. While streaming often put exhibitors at odds with the major new players, AI tools will, at least, not necessarily antagonize theater owners, who could see them as a way to create product that will attract fresh audiences to theaters, though AI’s personalization element could also potentially deepen at-home viewing.
Runway, a New York-based company producing a slew of AI filmmaking tools, holds an annual film festival in New York and Los Angeles. This year’s event, held last month at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York and the Broad Stage theater in Los Angeles, generated 6,000 submissions and drew crowds to both theaters.
“Three years ago, this was such a crazy idea,” Valenzuela said at the New York event. “Today, millions of people are making billions of videos using tools we only dreamed of.” The movies are still evolving as sound and photorealistic images remain iterative processes for AI companies (the work was often dreamlike) though few doubt they will reach those goals.
While many studios and distributors such as Netflix unofficially use AI tools, Runway in particular has been courting the industry, signing formal deals with the likes of AMC Networks and Lionsgate.
AI generally has both seized and terrified the imaginations of those work in film, with many worried it could replace humans and humanity and others arguing it could unlock a new golden age of cinema.