The content developed through these partnerships would presumably look better than the slop currently being churned out by models trained on ill-gotten source data, and having Google’s name and logos slapped all over official AI-generated Disney content would do wonders to legitimize this technology in people’s minds. But even if it didn’t, the partnership would still signal to the public that the entertainment industry sees generative AI as a tool worth embracing. It’s hard to quantify how valuable that framing would be to Google, whose DeepMind arm struck a $75 million investment deal with A24 earlier this summer：/entertainment/953596/google-deepmind-a24-studio-ai-partnership. But it’s very easy to imagine how taking Google’s AI cash could put studios on a path that ultimately alienates their workers and audiences.

Regardless of whether a studio were to incorporate AI tools into their production workflows or simply feature user-generated AI content on their platforms (which was Disney and OpenAI’s plan：/news/842348/disney-openai-sora-chatgpt-images before their partnership collapsed：/ai-artificial-intelligence/899850/openai-sora-ai-chatgpt), striking a licensing agreement with Google would be a watershed moment.

Lionsgate, a notable studio but not a major player, struck a licensing deal with Runway in 2024：/2024/9/18/24248115/lionsgate-runway-ai-deal. So far, nothing concrete has come out of that partnership, but the companies say they’re working on a plan：/entertainment/948609/lionsgate-runway-ai-shorts to release AI-generated shorts. Once any one of the big legacy studios hop on to the AI bandwagon and manage to actually make something they can show the world, more production houses have a reason to follow suit. AI’s potential to speed production timelines up while keeping costs down is one of the main things that has kept studios interested in utilizing the technology. Shareholders would absolutely love it if production houses could put out more movies while spending less money, but doing that by using AI tools would almost certainly put a significant portion of the entertainment workforce out of jobs：https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/22/the-hollywood-creatives-training-ai-to-do-their-jobs.

What may be keeping Disney and other studios from rushing to take Google up on its offers is the way that people have reacted to seeing AI used in the production of films like Spider-Man: Brand New Day . Fans were dismayed to find AI-generated images in Brand New Day ’s official artbook：https://kotaku.com/spider-man-brand-new-day-ai-concept-art-book-marvel-2000726642, and the negative reaction might have been even more intense had people known about the technology’s use before the film hit theaters. It’s impossible to know for sure whether awareness about AI’s presence in Brand New Day ’s production would have kept it from making $2 billion at the box office：https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/spider-man-brand-new-day-2-billion-worldwide-box-office-second-fastest-milestone-1236834058/. But it stands to reason that none of the studios is eager to be the first to learn what happens when they release a project that’s presented as being the product of Google’s AI tools.

Though Google has everything to gain from Hollywood embracing AI, the studios have to be mindful of how endorsing this technology could leave them out on a limb. And as much as Google might be presenting its products as the solution to all of the entertainment industry’s issues, the AI industry needs Hollywood more than Hollywood needs more slop.