Recently I looked up the earliest surviving motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene, which dates back to 1888. Four figures, two men and two women, walk around a yard with quick, jerky steps. It lasts about two seconds.
I also recently watched some clips made in 2016 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland that are among the first fully artificial-intelligence-generated videos. Each is about a second long. In one, a blurry figure stands on a golf green, bent at the waist to putt. No one would confuse these videos or Roundhay Garden Scene for the slick realism of contemporary cinema. And just as skeptics often deride AI video as wasteful, 19th-century critics dismissed early cinema as a โfoolish curiosity.โ
Yet a recent agreement between Disney and OpenAI offers a glimpse of a different future. Starting in early 2026, the tech companyโs video generator Sora will be able to create videos featuring more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and the Star Wars franchise. And Disney+ will stream a selection of user-made clips.
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Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI and use its tools to build โnew experiences for Disney+ subscribers,โ according to a Disney and OpenAI joint press release. In announcing the partnership, Disney CEO Robert Iger said that the company would โthoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI.โ He also said in a recent earnings conference call that he intends for subscribers to create content within Disney+ itself. If you want to watch Elsa and Cinderella take down Maleficent, youโll be able to ask for the sceneโthough it may last only 20 seconds.
If this is the…