Disney+ users will be able to make clips of Mickey Mouse do assorted… things via an AI Sora tool coming to the platform this year. Yay. Late last year, Disney announced its $1bn deal with OpenAI, which will see a number of famous characters under the former company’s banner legally appear in the latter’s generative ... AI slop generator coming to Disney+ in 2026 to “enhance engagement” says CEO Bob Iger
Disney+ users will be able to make clips of Mickey Mouse do assorted… things via an AI Sora tool coming to the platform this year. Yay.
Late last year, Disney announced its $1bn deal with OpenAI, which will see a number of famous characters under the former company’s banner legally appear in the latter’s generative AI platforms. But that deal will also see OpenAI’s video-generation app, Sora, embedded in Disney+, meaning users will be able to create ‘shortform content’ on the platform with a text prompt.
Since then, Disney CEO Bob Iger has made this year’s first quarterly earnings call with investors, in which he’s talked a bit more about his hopes for the Sora function.
“It jumpstarts our ability to have shortform video on Disney+,” Iger said, as quoted by MSN. “Additionally, it’s our hope that we will use the Sora tools to enable subscribers of Disney+ to create shortform videos on our platform.”
Iger also added that he thought the slop-generating option would appear on Disney+ “sometime in fiscal 2026,” which to the rest of us means at some point between now and the 30th June.
Why is Disney doing this? Iger reckons it will “greatly enhance engagement” in the company’s Netflix rival, and because generated clips will be 30 seconds long or less, they shouldn’t – he says – distract from the other stuff available on the platform.
From a CEO’s perspective, embedding Sora into Disney+ probably solves a few problems. YouTube is awash with terrible AI clips that get millions of views, so it’s a means of showing investors that Disney is serious about competing with its rival on that front. Keeping subscribers interested with new shows and films like Wandavision or Andor is also enormously expensive, so getting customers to essentially generate content for themselves is a relatively cheap workaround.
To date, nobody’s said a great deal about what guardrails will be in place to protect users or even Disney’s own characters. MSN’s piece states that the 250 familiar names users will be able to manipulate “won’t have a human voice or face,” probably due to avoid provoking the fury of SAG-AFTRA. But that still leaves the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the non-human cast of Star Wars, and so on.
When Sora 2 launched in 2025, the TikTok-esque interface filled up almost immediately with videos which depicted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman grilling a dead Pikachu, Mario evading police in his crimson kart, and Ronald the McDonald’s clown appearing on Love Island.
OpenAI later introduced copyright guardrails, but only after hundreds of these videos went viral on social media. Reddit is also filled with users sharing tips on how to bypass those guardrails.
Disney and OpenAI may have all kinds of systems in place to prevent users from generating anything too controversial, but the companies may still be about to open themselves up to a tidal wave of clips that they hadn’t anticipated.
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More on slopageddon as we get it.
