Walt Disney Company announced on Thursday that it has signed a three-year strategic agreement with OpenAI, becoming the first "main content licensing partner" for the Sora short video generation platform. According to the agreement, Sora and the ChatGPT image tool can access more than 200 animated, mask, and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and "Star Wars," including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic scenes, to generate short videos and static images based on user prompts; rights to real-life portraits and voices are not included, and all characters will appear only in animated or illustrative forms.
As consideration for the deal, Disney will inject $1 billion in cash into OpenAI and obtain additional equity subscription rights; at the same time, it will become a "major client" of OpenAI, planning to integrate the ChatGPT API into its streaming service Disney+ and internal employee tools, developing next-generation interactive content and production processes.
Both parties expect the first features to launch in early 2026: Disney+ subscribers will be able to watch official curated Sora fan-generated videos, and the platform will also provide a "text-to-short film" one-click entry point, lowering the barrier to secondary creation. CEO Robert Iger said the collaboration aims to "expand narrative boundaries in a responsible way," while OpenAI has promised to establish a strict content filtering mechanism to prevent unauthorized derivatives and harmful outputs.
The current agreement still requires final legal documents and approval from both boards, but it marks the first time a traditional entertainment giant has integrated its core IP pool into generative AI. For OpenAI, Disney's investment both alleviates the capital needs for model training and provides a rare "copyright-safe" content library; for Disney, it is a low-cost experiment to leverage algorithms to amplify the long-tail value of its IP and attract younger audiences in reverse. The streaming era has entered the "user-generated content" stage, and the old stories of Hollywood are being rewritten in AI scripts.
