30 Mar Death Of Disney’s OpenAI Deal Exposes Hollywood’s Vulnerability To The Capriciousness Of Big Tech [Deadline]
By Jake Kanter
March 25, 2026| The old Silicon Valley cliché, coined by Mark Zuckerberg, is that you move fast and break things. OpenAI sure did that with Sora. In six short months, Sora 2 broke the internet with its startling virality. It broke copyright protections. And now, the app is just broken after Sam Altman’s tech titan dramatically beat a retreat from generative video.
Along the way, OpenAI did try to fix at least one thing: Its relationship with Hollywood. The company signed a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney, which smoothed out content theft disputes by allowing Sora access to the Mouse House’s iconic characters, including those from Frozen and Beauty and the Beast. But now even that’s broken.
“The deal is not moving forward,” a Disney insider bluntly told my colleague Dominic Patten. So, one of the final acts of Bob Iger’s tenure is dead on arrival, leaving new CEO Josh D’Amaro to pick up the pieces. In a statement, Disney said it respected OpenAI’s decision (what choice did it have?) and learned from the “constructive collaboration,” even if it was short-lived.
Read more on Deadline.