Katzenberg plans an AI animation studio for film and TV

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder and former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said he is launching an animation studio that will make features and television with AI, telling TheWrap in an interview published September 25 that he wants to "do something that actually shows what's possible here."

Katzenberg said the venture will be either a digital platform or a studio, and that it will make animated features and series. No name, funding, backers or release date have been announced.

"For me, it is time for artists, creatives, storytellers, to actually seize the day," he told TheWrap. "These new AI tools are about innovation and opportunity. If barriers and cost come down, more films will get made, there will be more jobs, new forms of storytelling will emerge."

The timing follows an essay Katzenberg published on X this week arguing that Hollywood should stop fighting generative AI and start negotiating the terms of its use. In that piece he wrote that the right path forward includes artists "with credit, with consent, and with compensation," a line Animation Magazine singled out, and he told TheWrap that the tools had changed his own view. "Up until recently it was slop," he said. "It didn't hold any interest for me. That has changed only in the last couple of months."

The plan is not the first sign of it. The Information reported on September 9, according to Seoul Economic Daily, that Katzenberg was pursuing an AI video startup aimed at professional filmmakers with Bill Peebles, who led OpenAI's Sora video model, and Sujay Jaswa, the former chief financial officer of Dropbox, and that the unnamed company was in talks with investors including Andreessen Horowitz. Variety likewise says only that he has reportedly discussed creating that startup, and TheWrap's account of the interview does not mention it. His investment firm WndrCo has separately backed Reactor, a startup that says its platform can produce generative video in real time; Katzenberg told Variety he was "incredibly impressed, if not astounded, by just how innovative their approach is to storytelling tools."

The track record on new video formats is the open question. Katzenberg launched Quibi in 2020 with $1.75 billion in capital, and the short-form service closed about six months later, a history TheWrap raised in the interview. He said the barrier he expects is talent. "That's the hard part," he said, adding that he wants to "show at the top of the waterfall what is aspirationally possible with the best tools in the hands of the best talent."

TheWrap noted that Disney is making technology its concerted focus under new chief executive Josh D'Amaro, and Katzenberg praised him: "I love what Josh is doing. He is making all the right ambitious moves." He argued that a studio built inside an incumbent animation operation would struggle. "Pixar could never have been created inside Disney animation," he said.

No production, slate or launch date has been announced; TheWrap says details will follow.