The Walt Disney Studios entrance in Burbank. Photo by Coolcaesar, cropped (CC BY-SA)
The House of Mouse is leaning harder into AI. Disney and Adobe announced a multi-year strategic alliance at Adobe MAX on Monday, naming Adobe an “Official AI Innovation Partner” of the company, according to Adobe’s announcement. It comes less than a week after Disney revealed it’s testing AI-made lyric videos, starting with Hercules.
Key Takeaways
- Adobe will give Disney early access to Firefly, Firefly Foundry, Premiere and Photoshop, plus dedicated engineering and research help.
- Through Firefly Foundry, the two will build generative AI models tailored to Disney’s properties, which Adobe describes as “human-centered and artist-led.”
- The work covers Disney’s innovation labs plus parks and cruise development.
- Separately, Disney is piloting AI lyric-video concepts with startup OpenArt, beginning with “Go the Distance.”
The Full Story
Per Adobe, the custom models will be trained on “unique world knowledge” like character attributes, environments and visual styles, with the goal of “commercially safe and production-ready outputs.” The deal also includes marketing tie-ins with Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge and StudioLAB.
The Adobe news follows a smaller experiment. The Los Angeles Times reports Disney struck a commercial deal with Bay Area startup OpenArt, unveiled at the Disney Accelerator Demo Day on Nov. 3. Disney can feed songs into OpenArt’s platform, which generates a storyboard preview of a lyric video based on the words, mood and emotional tone, which Disney’s teams can then change and fine-tune.
The first test subject is “Go the Distance” from 1997’s Hercules. Disney said in a blog post that creative teams can now generate and evaluate “multiple concepts in hours rather than weeks,” opening up “new fan experiences around Disney music between major releases.”
The irony isn’t lost on anyone: as the LA Times notes, Disney has also fought AI companies in court over copyright. The difference, at least in Disney’s framing, is control. These tools run on its own properties, with its own teams signing off.
The Social Conversation
Disney fans tend to be protective of hand-drawn classics, so expect any AI-assisted Hercules video to get picked apart frame by frame. Neither Disney nor Adobe has said when the first public results will appear.
