As AI Turns Media on Its Head, the Curators Win
On Dec. 11, 2025, Disney (NYSE:DIS) agreed to license more than 200 characters to Sora, OpenAI's AI video app, for three years and to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. On the evening of March 23, 2026, roughly 30 minutes after the two teams finished a working meeting, OpenAI told Disney it was shutting Sora down entirely. It announced the shutdown publicly the next day. Disney walked away, and no money ever changed hands. We keep coming back to that half-hour because it shows how quickly a big artificial intelligence (AI) partnership can vanish. AI is already cutting production costs. Big-budget productions often spend 20% to 40% of their budgets on visual effects and post-production, and that's the first cost AI cuts. If you've built a career in visual effects, that line item is your paycheck. Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) has already used generative AI to make 17 minutes of its docuseries The American Experiment "twice as fast and at half the cost." Continue reading