Activist Investor Tells Lionsgate: Go Hard on AI or Sell the Studio
Lionsgate shares closed at $11.73 on Wednesday, down 1%, their lowest level since April 2026 — the second straight day of declines after an activist investor demanded the studio either reinvent itself around artificial intelligence or put itself up for sale.
The investor is Anson Funds, which has been one of the five largest independent shareholders in Lionsgate since 2024. In a letter to the board sent in July 2026, first reported by Semafor and confirmed to Deadline by multiple people with knowledge of its contents, Anson Funds argued that generative AI has led the market to sort companies into "AI winners" and "AI losers." It said Lionsgate is being filed under losers — and that every time a new AI video model like OpenAI's Sora or ByteDance's Seedance lands, the studio's stock drops because investors assume a film and television company is more likely to be an AI casualty than a beneficiary Deadline.
The stock fell 4% on Tuesday — closing at $11.87, down 49 cents — when news of Anson Funds' AI agenda first surfaced, after wild swings in early-morning trading The Hollywood Reporter. Wednesday's further dip to $11.73 marked the lowest close in four months.
Anson Funds' argument, in essence, is that AI filmmaking tools are becoming commodities with professional benefits akin to a corporate worker asking ChatGPT to proofread a memo — useful, but not a competitive moat. The firm wants Lionsgate to prove it can be an "AI winner" or sell itself Deadline.
Lionsgate, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker LION, has not sat idle on AI. The studio partnered with AI startup Runway in 2024 and recently renewed that agreement. Vice Chairman Michael Burns said in June 2026 that AI would save the company "tens and tens of millions of dollars a year" in production costs. Earlier in 2026, Lionsgate hired former YouTube executive Kathleen Grace as its first Chief AI Officer Deadline.
In an apparent response to Anson Funds' letter, Lionsgate updated a slide deck of the company's "core tenets" on Wednesday. The contents of that update have not been publicly detailed.
The pressure arrives amid a moment of both strong performance and structural uncertainty. Lionsgate's quarterly earnings report the prior week was highlighted by Michael, the company's first billion-dollar-grossing film. The studio's library of 20,000 film and TV titles topped $1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year. But executives told analysts on a conference call that they have not held "substantive discussions" about strategic possibilities including being acquired Deadline.
Lionsgate finalised its split from the cable network Starz last year, leaving it as a standalone content company with a deep library and no captive distribution platform. That combination — a valuable catalogue but no guaranteed route to audiences — is the terrain Anson Funds is working on.
What gives the standoff its edge is that both sides are talking past each other. Anson Funds says the market has already decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty; the studio is pointing to its Runway partnership, its new Chief AI Officer, and tens of millions in projected savings as evidence it is moving The Next Web. Whether that gap narrows may depend on what Lionsgate can show at its next earnings call — and on whether Anson Funds escalates from a letter to something louder.
