Disney sued Midjourney and licensed 200 characters to Sora, and the Sora deal lasted 103 days

On 11 December 2025 The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI announced a three-year agreement that made Disney the first major studio to license characters to Sora, OpenAI's video generation app. OpenAI's own announcement describes more than 200 characters drawn from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Iron Man and Darth Vader; a Disney equity investment of US$1 billion in OpenAI, with warrants to buy more; short fan prompted videos generated in Sora; images generated in ChatGPT using the same characters; and curated selections carried on Disney+. No talent likenesses or voices were included. Launch was expected in early 2026.

One hundred and three days later the app was gone. On 24 March 2026 OpenAI said it was closing Sora, with a farewell message thanking the people who created and shared work on it. TheWrap reported the same day that the Disney agreement ended alongside the shutdown, and quoted Disney's response: the company said it appreciated the collaboration and what it had learned, and that it would keep engaging with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans.

Between those two dates Disney was still describing the deal as a product roadmap. On the company's first quarter 2026 earnings call on 2 February 2026, chief executive Bob Iger said the arrangement would cover about 250 characters and videos of 30 seconds or less, with characters carrying human voices or faces excluded. Iger said the feature would jumpstart Disney's ability to have shortform video on Disney+ and would greatly enhance engagement, and indicated a rollout sometime in fiscal 2026. That is a company claim about its own product, and it was overtaken within seven weeks.

Why the app closed is contested. TheWrap's 25 March 2026 analysis reported that Sora 2 launched in late September 2025, briefly topped Apple's App Store, then lost engagement quickly; that the platform's opt out approach to intellectual property angered creators, with The Owl House creator Dana Terrace objecting that fan content made this way would not even belong to the fans who made it; and that OpenAI was redirecting computing capacity and staff towards enterprise products ahead of an anticipated fourth quarter listing, a rationale TheWrap attributed to Wall Street Journal reporting. The same analysis reported that Disney's new chief executive, Josh D'Amaro, abandoned the partnership to reduce friction with talent during union negotiations. Analyst Carolina Milanesi is quoted questioning whether falling engagement could ever justify the running costs.

The accounts also disagree on money. OpenAI's announcement page states that Disney invests US$1 billion in equity. TheWrap's analysis describes an investment Disney walked away from, calling it planned. Neither company has published a document showing whether the equity was actually transferred, and this masthead could not retrieve Disney's own press release, which returned a server refusal.

Running underneath all of this is the litigation, and it did not pause. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney on 11 June 2025 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleging the company trained its image models on their copyrighted work after cease and desist requests, and seeking damages and an injunction; the complaint used generated images of Homer Simpson and Darth Vader as exhibits. Warner Bros. Discovery filed its own suit on 4 September 2025, seeking US$150,000 per infringed work and comparing official artwork with generated versions of Bugs Bunny, Batman, Scooby-Doo and Rick and Morty. Warner Bros. said Midjourney thinks it is above the law. Midjourney's position, reported in the same coverage, is that copyright law does not confer absolute control over the use of copyrighted works, and that training is fair use.

On 4 July 2026 TechCrunch reported that Midjourney is now pushing to see how the studios themselves use generative AI, arguing that a limit on what it can obtain lets the studios cherry pick documents supporting their market harm claims. The studios' lawyer David Singer called it a fishing expedition and said the studios simply want Midjourney to stop copying their films and television shows.

Read together, the two tracks describe a policy rather than a contradiction. Disney will license characters to a generative model it is paid for and has approval over, and litigate against one it is not. What is not known is what the December agreement was worth in cash, whether any of it was paid, and whether Disney has signed a replacement with another video model. Neither company has said.