Disney pulls out of $1 billion deal with OpenAI after Sora shuts down
Disney will not continue its agreement with OpenAI, which included an investment of $1 billion and the use of some of the studio’s characters in the Sora product.
Disney will not continue its agreement with OpenAI, which included an investment of $1 billion and the use of some of the studio’s characters in the Sora product.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, following the news of Sora’s closure, Disney has decided to withdraw from its agreement with OpenAI. According to the publication, last year’s agreement included not only an investment from the media giant, but also the licensing of some of the characters for use in generative AI.
In fact, the closure of Sora destroyed the basis of this collaboration. It was around this product that the logic of the partnership was built: OpenAI received money and access to famous franchises, and Disney — a platform for experiments with generative video and the potential integration of such tools into its own ecosystem. The agreement also included the use of more than 200 licensed characters, and the deal itself was never finally closed — the money did not have time to transfer.
Disney confirmed the change in plans and said it respected OpenAI’s decision to reconsider its priorities. At the same time, the company made it clear that it is not abandoning work with generative tools in general and will continue to look for other platforms for audience engagement, but taking into account the protection of intellectual property and the rights of creators.
For OpenAI, this story does not mean an exit from video generation as a direction, but rather an abandonment of Sora as a separate application. The company is reallocating resources to other products — including enterprise services, coding tools, and the broader ecosystem around ChatGPT. Against this background, the breakup with Disney looks not just the end of one partnership deal, but an indicator of how quickly even high-profile alliances can crumble if an AI company changes product strategy.
Sora was one of OpenAI’s most notable products in the field of generative video, and the partnership with Disney was supposed to be one of the most high-profile cases of cooperation between big Hollywood and an AI company. Now, with the service being discontinued, Disney is leaving the deal, and OpenAI is losing not only a potential investor, but also an important rights holder who could have legalized the use of a large library of famous characters in AI videos.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that OpenAI is preparing a new extension for ChatGPT: the company wants to integrate its tool for creating videos using artificial intelligence into the Sora chatbot.
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