August 5, 2026
Last year’s $1 billion deal between Disney and OpenAI that would have added Sora AI-generated Disney characters to the Disney Plus app was quietly killed as Sam Altman decided to refocus on enterprise customers rather than mainstream consumers. In the wake of that surprise turn, many wondered what would happen to Disney’s plans for the Disney Plus app without Sora, and now we know. Disney has just launched a new deal with TikTok that will allow users who opt into the program to also push their viral videos featuring select Disney characters to the Disney Plus app.
And just to make sure hardcore Disney fans don’t feel any disturbance in The Force due to potential incoming TikTok viral slop, Disney is framing the arrangement as “thoughtfully curated Disney-centric fan-created content.” That content will live in the Verts section of the app, which is geared more toward mobile users interested in short videos rather than viewers sitting back watching the Disney Plus app on their big-screen TVs.
“The best storytellers are fans first,” Asad Ayaz, Disney’s chief marketing and brand officer, said in a statement. “This collaboration creates a new bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire, giving creators a bigger stage to share what they’ve made, and audiences more to discover on Disney Plus every day.”
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What this deal highlights is that Disney’s interest in the OpenAI Sora deal was always primarily about viral videos that use Disney characters and only secondarily focused on the AI aspect of the app. When Sora 2 launched in 2025, the app was immediately flooded with AI-generated videos featuring some of the most famous characters from film and television. Of course, those videos violated the IP rights of a handful of major studios, so the ability to generate those characters was soon disabled. But the formula seemed to point to something interesting—a new way to garner audience attention. For Disney, the apparent conceit of the failed OpenAI deal was: Maybe if users had the legal right to use Disney characters on the Sora AI app, we could benefit from the virality while also owning (via the $1 billion investment) a part of the platform using our IP.
The new TikTok deal with Disney doesn’t contain any of the AI components mentioned in the OpenAI/Sora deal, but make no mistake, AI is still lurking in the background. Although the new U.S. arm of TikTok (aka TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC) is majority-owned by U.S. companies, including Oracle, this deal appears to fall under the umbrella of the Chinese arm of TikTok (aka Douyin in China), which is owned by ByteDance.
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“Together with Disney, we’re bringing the authentic creator expression of the TikTok community to Disney Plus, inviting audiences to experience the shared creativity that makes fandom so powerful,” said TikTok’s global head of entertainment, Dawn Yang, who joined the ByteDance-owned company back in 2020.
And in case you haven’t been keeping up, ByteDance also owns one of the most popular and powerful AI video models on the market called Seedance. Earlier this year, Seedance 2.0 users unleashed a flurry of hyper-realistic AI videos featuring well-known movie and TV stars until Hollywood studios shut them down via legal threats aimed at ByteDance. Now that Disney is officially in bed with TikTok, it seems only a matter of time before the two companies introduce Seedance 2.5-powered fan-created AI videos, featuring approved Disney characters, for the Disney Plus app.
Depending on how this goes, we might see this kind of studio-meets-AI-app deal become the norm as major studios look to hook more eyeballs and subscribers by any means necessary. For now, the Disney/TikTok deal is only for U.S. users, but the companies have confirmed that the partnership will roll out to Disney Plus app users in other countries soon. ✍︎
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