Disney CEO Bob Iger said videos created with OpenAI‘s Sora will soon start to appear on Disney+, but he doesn’t see the move affecting the rest of the company’s film and TV pipeline.
Speaking on the company’s quarterly earnings call Monday, Iger told Wall Street analysts that the company’s three-year deal with OpenAI, announced last December, will start to bear fruit in the next few months. Under the pact, Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and the AI start-up is paying an unspecified amount to license 250 Disney characters.
Vertical videos produced by users of Sora, whose rollout last fall created a storm of controversy, will be added to Disney+ later this year, the company revealed last month at CES. Iger said Monday they will initially be capped at 30 seconds apiece, allowing Disney to benefit from the “huge growth in short-form and user-generated content on other platforms, such as YouTube.”
The agreement “jump-starts our ability to have short-form video on Disney+,” Iger said. “Additionally, it’s our hope that we will use the Sora tools to enable subscribers of Disney+ to create short-form videos on our platform, through Sora. It’s all, I think, a positive step in terms of adding a feature that we believe will greatly enhance engagement.”
Asked about potential impact on Disney’s other programming, Iger replied, “I don’t really see that it will have any impact at all.”
Hollywood studios are under scrutiny for their handling of AI as above-the-line guilds prepare to start negotiations for new contracts later this year. The rise of AI became a contentious element n the previous round of talks, helping to cause a months-long dual strike by the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA. Rapid technological advances and uncertainty around copyright implications have only added to the industry fears about job losses and weakened copyright protection.
As workers get restless, major media companies (including Disney) have also filed lawsuits over AI firms training their models on protected work. As it was reaching accord with OpenAI, Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, claiming its Gemini platform and other AI tools infringe on copyrights on a “massive scale.”
Expanding his commentary on the earnings call to the larger arena of AI, Iger did say that Disney sees the technology bringing a number of “possible advantages or opportunities for the company. One is as a tool to help the creative process and creativity. Another is productivity, which is simply being more efficient. And the third, I’ll call connectivity, which is creating, basically, a more intimate relationship with the consumer, enabling the consumer and enabling us with the consumer, just to have a more engaged, more effective relationship.”
Asked about when the Sora videos will appear, Iger hedged, saying the company is “not being specific” given it is “working through all the technical details.” The debut will be sometime in fiscal 2026, he added. Disney’s fiscal year ends in September.
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