Disney tests AI lyric videos with OpenArt on Hercules

Walt Disney Co. is testing AI-generated lyric video concepts with OpenArt, a Bay Area startup, under a deal announced November 3 at the Disney Accelerator Demo Day in Burbank, beginning with "Go the Distance" from the 1997 film Hercules.

The Los Angeles Times reported the arrangement as "a commercial deal," while Disney's own newsroom post describes a "collaboration" between OpenArt and Disney Music Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Per the LA Times, Disney can feed its songs into OpenArt's platform, which storyboards a preview of a lyric video from the song's words, mood and emotional tone, and Disney can revise and fine-tune the result.

OpenArt CEO Coco Mao told the LA Times that Disney was "very excited to bring some of the older catalogs of the music and create visual lyrics videos for those songs." She called the work "early exploration" of how AI could assist Disney's creative workflow, and Disney said in a blog post that the collaboration could let its teams evaluate concepts in hours rather than weeks.

David Min, Disney's vice president of innovation, said the studio is "looking at how we can fit these companies into our existing workflows and help expedite that," according to the LA Times.

OpenArt was founded in 2022 by former Google engineers Mao and John Qiao, Dataconomy reported. It is one of five companies in this year's Accelerator cohort, alongside Promise, FieldAI, Physical Intelligence and Simile, and the LA Times reported the entire cohort is made up of AI companies. Its platform runs third-party models that include Kling, Google Veo and Seedream, and it offers a tool that flags potential intellectual property infringement, the LA Times reported. OpenArt calls itself on its own site an all-in-one platform for image, video and audio generation.

The deal lands as Disney challenges other AI companies over the use of its intellectual property. Disney and other studios have sued Midjourney and MiniMax, and in February Disney sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter over its Seedance 2.0 video generator, per the LA Times. SLOP TV has covered Disney's $20 million bid for Character.ai assets in the chatbot's Chapter 11 bankruptcy and OpenArt's growth toward $200 million in annual revenue.

A "Go the Distance" video posted six years ago, with the song in different languages over a scene from Hercules, had drawn 280,000 views on YouTube as of the LA Times report.

The work is concept and storyboard testing rather than a released feature, so it gives creators no product to use yet.

Disney has not said when, or whether, any of the lyric video concepts will reach fans.