Intro for December 12, 2025

Dear Gossips,  

It’s Friday and I’m back on my AI bullsh-t, mainly because Disney announced a huge deal to exclusively license Disney characters, including those of subsidiaries like Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, to Sora, Open AI’s video-based generative AI platform. This means users will be able to prompt Sora to make short-form videos out of Disney characters, and I’m sure absolutely nothing will go wrong there. The deal is for three years and includes Disney making a $1 billion equity investment into Open AI. Do you ever feel like all the corporations are just passing the same $5 back and forth, but at billion-dollar scale?

This is a hilarious deal coming from Disney, the company most protective of its IP and creative licensing, but at this point, it is not surprising. Everyone’s jumping on the AI train, no one wants to look like they’re being left behind, at least until this bubble blows up in everyone’s face. And then anyone not on the train will look like a f-cking genius. 

Disney says that eventually, we will be able to watch a “curated” selection of these Sora shorts on Disney+, which if I wanted to see someone’s demented Disney fan art, I’d go to Deviant Art or Tumblr. I watch Disney movies because they’re made by people who know what the f-ck they’re actually doing, or they were. 

It’s really hard not to see this as exactly what everyone, including me, was warning against during the labor strikes in 2023, that executives would inevitably try to use AI to replace human labor and industry in Hollywood. Oh no, surely not! Surely it’s just about “engagement”, as Bob Iger said during an earnings call recently! Now that they’ve got a century of creative endeavor under their belt, Hollywood studios cannot wait to strip mine those fruits of human labor with AI. It’s cheap and they don’t have to listen to temperamental creatives to make it, it’s the dream scenario. Who cares if it’s sh-tty? People will watch the slop!

I bet they won’t though. Oh, there might be a period of initial curiosity assuming this “curated” Sora content ever actually hits Disney+—which I do not assume, because none of this sh-t works as advertised—but I don’t think there will be any lasting appeal to this stuff, at least around previously existing characters. A number of good movies based on old IP have flopped recently, including The Fall Guy and The Running Man, a yellow warning light that people are not actually buying in the nostalgia market right now. There is no appeal to something just because it already exists, the movie itself has to be appealing. Letting people play around in Sora with Disney characters might sound fun on the surface, but I do not think there will be broad enough interest to support a billion-dollar investment. 

I MIGHT be convinced that an ORIGINAL idea generated out of an AI platform could catch on, but I can’t see long-term appeal to using Disney characters in this way. I think people will lose interest, because people always lose interest. Studios are panicking over the mere THOUGHT that people have lost interest in superheroes, what makes them think AI will be a bulletproof solution to the naturally cyclical nature of entertainment? 

The whole thing feels like a major miscalculation, but then, that’s everything about AI to me. At this point, I’m having full-on flashbacks to the Great Recession, when everyone insisted the economy was swell because line goes up but the housing market sucked, the job market sucked, and everything was f-cking expensive. But we were supposed to believe everything was golden because people kept buying houses. Now, we’re supposed to believe everything is golden because every corporation is buying AI.  

But Michael Burry isn’t. Burry, who shorted the housing market in the mid-2000s (and was played by Christian Bale in The Big Short), shorted Palantir and Nvidia last month and then closed his hedge fund. If ever there was an omen! 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah