The Garden Harvest: Sora x Disney Implications, and an Open Verse Expands
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
What does the Disney x Open AI partnership mean for the future of fandom?
As you probably heard this week, Disney made a $1 billion deal with Open AI in which they will be handing over characters from the likes of Frozen and Star Wars to their gen-AI video app Sora.
This marks the most significant collaboration between a studio and an AI company, but the topic that’s more interesting here is not about AI, it’s about fandom… and data.
Because as a result of this collaboration, fans will now be able to participate in some of the best Disney IP.
As David Freeman says, Disney just validated the next era.
What does he mean? With fans now co-producers of content, their behavior turns into valuable data for a company like Disney that can learn from that data and, in turn, build even more valuable IP.
In other words: hits don’t get greenlit by gut instinct, they are discovered through what the fans are creating at scale. It becomes an IP-discovery machine.
The wall that used to separate audiences from characters, the one that kept them as passive viewers, is long, long gone.
A blueprint for the future of film?
Over the summer, we wrote about Teton Ridge and how they organized Western culture into one ecosystem.
Well, just this week, they pacted with John Wayne Enterprises for the exclusive life rights of the Oscar-winning Hollywood star across film and TV, scripted and unscripted.
This is exactly the kind of thing our post focused on:
Teton Ridge didn’t start with a pitch deck for a Western series. It started with people—boots, barns, and arenas—then layered distribution, then story. By the time scripted projects roll, they’re not Hail Marys; they’re logical outputs of a system that already works where you know there is a hungry community (think of the leverage you have negotiating licensing deals with platforms with the data YOU control).
We’re here. We’re in the “story” phase. And what comes out of this might provide the strongest path yet to create sustainable movies and TV shows for years to come.
The [insert legacy name] of the digital era
I keep seeing all this chatter of people doing the “something” of the digital era. The latest one is L.A. publisher Gungnir launching an animation studio that will feed an in-house YouTube channel. They call it, wait for it… “the Cartoon Network of the digital era.”
The animation studio will develop and create series and films for the Gungnir Animation Network, which will effectively be a YouTube-first channel built to be the cultural heartbeat of animation and nerd culture.
This is so important, and it’s worth drawing it back to the famous quote by Sir John Hegarty, the co-founder of the advertising agency BBH.
“Principles remain, practices change”.
The principle hasn’t shifted. Audiences still love stories. They still love animation.
The practice has. Discovery no longer happens through cable or linear schedules, it happens online.
That’s what Gungnir gets right. They’re building IP with an audience-first mindset, not a buyer-first one.
It’s increasingly looking like the new way of building next generation animation brands (and pretty much all other content as well).
GARDEN VIEW
A great analysis from Adam Ivy on why the creator middle class is disappearing.
HARVEST QUOTE
“Fandom is now global yet the rights model is still regional.”
— Michael Cohen, Founder of sports media business Disruptive Play.
Even though Michael is talking about sports, this applies to pretty much anything. Independent movies, for example, are still sold to individual territories (and, believe me, that’s not going well for most) like it has for decades.
The real question he’s asking is: What happens when the audience behaves globally but the business still treats them like a regional product?
It’s worth reading his full post.
Have a great weekend…