Disney announced a partnership with OpenAI today, and it lands with the kind of thud that tells you something irreversible just happened. The deal is simple on paper: Sora gets access to more than 200 characters across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Fans (like you and me) will be able to generate short videos inside those worlds. ChatGPT Images gets the same access for stills. Disney invests a billion dollars into OpenAI. And all of this eventually shows up on Disney+ as curated content made by regular people with a text box.
You can feel half the internet cheering and the other half losing their fucking mind.
People have been arguing for years about whether AI belongs in creative work, whether tools like Sora “count” as art, whether this whole wave is just a fad (or worse, a bubble.)
Disney ending that debate with a licensing deal isn’t subtle.
They didn’t pilot something small here. They opened their vault and said, "here, go make things."
This is going to incense the anti-AI movement for obvious reasons. If you already believe AI is an existential threat to you as an artist, this feels like the literal end of the world. Your childhood characters are now officially living inside a generative model. Your memories are being turned into prompt-ready assets. And instead of threatening lawsuits or issuing takedowns, Disney is nodding and saying, yes, that’s the plan.
But outrage alone doesn’t erase what this actually signals.
The biggest storytelling company on the planet is putting real money, real IP, and real distribution behind the idea that AI is not only part of creative work but a core part of where things are going. You don’t pour a billion dollars into a technology you think is a side project. And you certainly don’t license The Avengers unless you’ve decided the medium is legitimate.
People will complain, loudly.
The cynic will say Disney is doing this to for money. The optimist will say it’s a new era of fan storytelling. The truth sits somewhere in the middle. This isn’t about replacing creators or empowering them. It’s about control. If AI is going to remix everything anyway, Disney would rather be the one handing out the brushes. Better to define the sandbox than to chase everyone around with cease-and-desist letters.
And it’s not like Disney is the first one through the door. We’ve already seen Shaq, Jake Paul, Mark Cuban, and Snoop work with Sora to license their likeness and build new forms of expression. Those deals looked experimental. This one looks structural. When individuals do it, it’s curiosity. When Disney does it, it’s a signal.
Hollywood has been dragging its feet on AI, so this might be the watershed moment that forces the industry to say out loud what’s been obvious for a while: the tools aren’t going away, and pretending they might isn’t a strategy. Disney stepping into the arena makes it legitimate in a way no press release ever could.
You don’t have to love this. You don’t have to use the tools. But the future isn’t waiting for everyone to feel comfortable first. Disney just handed the prompt box to the world. Now we get to see what people actually do with it.