Kathleen Kennedy became the voice of skepticism at the Runway AI Summit, against the prevailing hype

Hollywood resisted the temptation to admit defeat. At the Runway AI Summit, held in April 2026, producers, directors and technologists compared artificial intelligence to the invention of fire and the arrival of the printing press, barely a week after OpenAI effectively wound down Sora, one of the most anticipated AI tools for film. Runway, a New York company that specializes in generative video for professional production, gathers Hollywood's elite at its summit every year. This time the tone was set by technology evangelists: despite the industry's recent setbacks, the mood in the audience stayed almost religious. AI is not just a tool, the speakers insisted; it is a change of epochs, comparable to humanity's fundamental inventions.

Against this backdrop of optimism, Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and producer of the Star Wars franchise, stood out. According to Wired, she was one of the few participants who publicly voiced skepticism. Kennedy asked uncomfortable questions: about creative identity, about who owns content produced by an algorithm, and about what exactly is lost when creative work is automated. In an industry where most people prefer to stay silent or applaud, her position came across with unexpected clarity.

The context makes the situation even more telling. Sora, OpenAI's video generator, debuted in February 2024 with a promise to transform filmmaking. The company pitched the tool as a way to create realistic video scenes from a text description, with no film crew, no sets and no expensive pre-production. But in early April 2026 it emerged that the project had been shut down or frozen indefinitely. At the Runway summit, this fact was, by all appearances, not up for discussion.

Runway itself keeps positioning itself as a partner to Hollywood, not a replacement. The company is betting that generative AI expands the director's toolkit rather than shutting them out: it speeds up concept development, creates animatics and helps visualize ideas in the early stages. The summit featured case studies of studios that have already built generative tools into their production process, albeit for auxiliary tasks.

Still, unresolved tension lies behind the facade of optimism. The 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, driven in part by fear of AI, ended in agreements that limit how the technology can be used. The question of rights to training data, meaning who owns the texts, images and voices the models were trained on, remains unsettled. Every new tool reopens that dispute.

What happened at the Runway AI Summit reflects a broader pattern: tech companies keep courting Hollywood while the studios settle on a strategy. Some are accelerating their experiments, others are waiting. Runway is building a bridge between Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry, and as the big players wind down high-profile projects, smaller companies are moving into the vacated space, convincing the industry that the hype train has not yet left the tracks.