This week The Walt Disney Company announced it’s making a roughly $1 billion investment in OpenAI and signing a three-year character licensing deal that lets OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool use more than 200 beloved characters from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars.

Marvel’s lone new release to come close, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, has earned a respectable $521.8 million globally — $274.3 million domestic, $247.6 million foreign. Those numbers would’ve been top-ten locks through most of the MCU’s peak years. Now they barely clear the top twelve.

A $1 billion, three year deal between Disney and Open AI means consumers can use the Sora video maker to create videos starring Disney characters.

Disney and OpenAI have announced a $1 billion deal that will allow users to create videos and images of Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars characters, with over 200 characters confirmed.

The deal allows users to create social videos with Disney characters, excluding talent likenesses. Disney aims to responsibly extend storytelling through AI, while OpenAI seeks Hollywood acceptance after copyright controversies.

Disney has invested $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed its characters for the AI video tool Sora. The move highlights a new era in entertainment while Disney battles Google over copyright issues.

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models,