Disney

Disney has invested more than 5.7 billion euros in Disneyland Paris. He still hasn’t recovered even half of that amount.

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On March 29, 2026, Josh D’Amaro inaugurated World of Frozen before Emmanuel Macron, Penélope Cruz and Naomi Campbell. It was his first major public act as CEO of Disneyeleven days after taking office. However, he did not do it in the now classic Disneyland in Orlando, but in Paris. A park that, according to French commercial recordsaccumulates a deficit of 4.2 billion dollars after more than three decades open. Disneyland Paris is Disney’s most profitable international subsidiary and even so, it still You have not recovered your initial investment. So…why is it still open? On paper, all good. When Disney makes public the financial results of your parksit doesn’t break it down by installation. But since Euro Disney Associés (EDA), the company that manages the complex, is obliged to publish detailed accounts in France, we can know the Parisian figures: in the year ending in September 2025, EDA’s income reached a record of 4 billion dollars, 8.4% more than the previous year, driven in part by the implementation of the controversial dynamic prices. Net profit reached 304.2 million, also the highest in its history. For its part, the results of Disney’s international parks segment They rose 25% in the last quarter of fiscal year 2025and the company explicitly attributed that improvement to the pull of Disneyland Paris. Do the math. However, since opening in 1992, what was initially known as Euro Disney has only made a net profit in 13 years. Accumulated losses total 3.7 billion dollars. In other words: Disney has invested a total of 6.8 billion dollars (5.7 billion euros) in the complex and has not yet recovered that figure. With 304 million annual profits, it is difficult to think of it being recovered. The French trap. EDA operates within particular financial parameters. France gave up the coveted 2,230 hectare land in Chessy (almost a fifth of the area of ​​Paris) in exchange for the complex being organized as a public-private collaboration. Disney started as a minority shareholder with 49% and since it was not the main shareholder, Disney did not capitalize the company as it would have done in its American parks. It only contributed 132.1 million of the 4.9 billion that the construction cost. The remaining 59.8% was covered by a bank loan assumed by the Euro Disney joint venture. EDA was listed on the Euronext, which on the one hand forced accounting transparency, and on the other hand chained the company to a very fragile capital structure just before the first great recession of the time hit. A year after the opening, Philippe Bourguignon, president of Euro Disney, recognized that the company’s financial imbalance was so severe that its very existence was at risk. Crisis after crisis. In reality, the history of Disneyland Paris is a summary of the great economic crises that the sector and, specifically, France has experienced. The park opened during a recession that affected all of Europe, but especially the country (with a drop in GDP of 1.5% in 1993). French tourists rejected the prices of tickets, the absence of alcohol in restaurants and English as the dominant language. Disneyland Paris’ second park, Walt Disney Studios (renamed Disney Adventure World in 2026), opened in 2002 just as global tourism was suffering after 9/11. The worst year came in 2016: Disneyland Paris posted a record net loss of $961.8 million after the November 2015 attacks plunged attendance at the park. Disney’s reaction in 2017 was to buy the remaining 51% of shares for 250.8 million and pay another 1,700 to eliminate all the accumulated debt. But the misfortunes did not end: the 2020 pandemic cut off the recovery that this sanitation had started. And things are not over: the war in the Middle East affects energy and flights, and it remains to be seen how it will impact the business in the medium term. The clear accounts. For 34 years, the royalties and other management expenses that EDA has paid to the American parent company total 2.4 billion dollars: fees for attraction design, licensed characters, costumes, show production… But Disneyland Paris receives 16 million visitors a year, it is the most frequented tourist destination in Europe and, according to the study itself contributes 6.1% of France’s total tourist income. In 2025, the parks and experiences divisions generated the 57% of Disney’s consolidated operating profiton total revenues of $94.4 billion. It is the weight of that segment that took D’Amaro from parks management to CEO. But one thing is clear: EDA cannot distribute dividends until its accumulated losses are fully compensated. At 304 million in annual net profit and with the historic hole unclosed, that moment is not around the corner: it seems that we are not talking about short-term compensation. Header | Pablo Monteagudo In Xataka | Abu Dhabi Disney Park will be like no other. For a hot reason

The production of this Disney movie was so chaotic that a documentary detailing how it was made disappeared

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In 1994, the director of ‘The Lion King’ had his next big movie ready: a musical epic about the Inca Empire, with Sting composing the songs and Owen Wilson in the cast. Six years later, what ended up hitting theaters was ‘The Emperor and His Follies’, something radically different: an emperor turned into a llama, a good-natured peasant and meta jokes that broke the fourth wall. Animated on the fly from an unfinished script, all to meet the release deadlines promised to McDonald’s. A real debacle recorded in a completely inaccessible documentary. The successor to ‘The Lion King’. Development of the film began in 1994 under the title ‘Kingdom of the Sun‘ (The Kingdom of the Sun), as an epic and dramatic adventure loosely inspired by ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ by Mark Twain. Its director was Roger Allers, who was coming off the biggest hit in the studio’s recent history, ‘The Lion King’. Allers introduced then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, a story set at the height of the Inca civilization. What was it about? The premise was ambitious: an arrogant emperor swaps places with a peasant who physically resembles him, while the villainous Yzma wants to destroy the sun to obtain eternal youth. For the soundtrack, following the model of Elton John’s success in ‘The Lion King’Allers signed Sting, who had already written several songs linked to the original plot. The team traveled to Machu Picchu in 1996 to learn about Inca architecture and Andean landscapes. It was exactly the type of production that Disney had been making since ‘The Little Mermaid’: epic, musical and very, very expensive. So much for Disney. After the disappointing box office results of ‘Pocahontas’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, two films loaded with dramatic elements, studio executives believed that the project was too ambitious and serious, and that it needed more comedy. The solution was to hire Mark Dindal as co-director, and he was tasked with lightening the tone. Allers continued working on his dramatic epic while Dindal pushed toward the absurd. A test screening in 1998 revealed that schizophrenic tone, in two mutually incompatible directions. One of Disney’s executives threatened producer Randy Fullmer with canceling the project. The McDonald’s problem. Added to all this was an extra problem: the film had to be finished in time to be released in the summer of 2000, since the promotional agreements with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other companies had already been signed and depended on that date being met. Allers acknowledged that production was delayed, but asked for between six months and a year of extension to solve the problems. It was denied. The director resigned, leaving Disney with at least $20 or $30 million already spent on animation. And no movie for the summer of 2000. Eisner gave Fullmer two weeks to prove the movie was salvageable. If not, the project was closed. Dindal took control alone. He completed ‘The Emperor and His Follies’ in a year and a half, a record for a Disney production, and with an unusual need in the world of animation: it was produced without a finished script. Also in this process the cast changed: Owen Wilson was replaced by John Goodman, because the character of Pacha stopped being a double of the emperor to become a burly family man from the countryside. The hilarious character of Kronk, one of the film’s great discoveries, did not exist until the end: he was added during emergency rewrites. The documentary that Disney doesn’t want you to see. Sting had agreed to compose the songs on one condition: that his wife, documentary filmmaker Trudie Styler, could film the production process. The resulting documentary‘The Sweatbox’, covers the long and troubled production. The title comes from the screening rooms at Disney studios, known for lacking air conditioning. ‘The Sweatbox’ premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 and quickly disappeared from circulation: Disney has never released it on DVD or streaming. The documentary includes, among other moments, the call in which Fullmer tells Sting that his eight songs have been eliminated. Only two Sting songs survived on the final soundtrack. The documentary has been compared to ‘Hearts in Darkness’, the making-of of ‘Apocalypse Now’, for its portrait of the human cost in a decaying creative process. And of course, there is a copy of ‘The Sweatbox’ circulating unofficially on the internet. Poor results. The film ended up grossing $169 million worldwide on a budget of $100 million, a disappointing figure compared to Disney’s other hits during the 1990s. The film found some success in the domestic market and became the best-selling DVD of 2001, which would spawn a television series (‘Kuzco: An Emperor in School’) and a direct-to-video sequel (‘The Emperor’s Crazy 2: Kronk’s Big Adventure’). The footprint. Curiously, the influence of ‘The Emperor and His Follies’ is deeper than it seems. The film’s non-stop parody humor anticipated ‘Shrek’, released just a year later, and other animated films with which DreamWorks Animation would find success in subsequent years. This film is quite a visionary and remains one of the most unclassifiable films of modern Disney. In Xataka | The first cartoons were flat and unappealing, until Walt Disney invented something: the multiplane camera.

Marvel just gave 48 minutes of unfiltered violence to its most extreme character and you can watch it today on Disney+

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Frank Castle, better known as the Punisher (or The Punisher if you’re an old-school comic reader), hasn’t had his own series for seven years. Since Netflix canceled ‘The Punisher’ in 2019, the character has survived on the margins of the MCU until ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ rescued him in 2025. Now Marvel has opted for a different format with him in ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’. It is not a series or a movie, but 48 minutes of a borderline antihero, co-directed by Jon Bernthal himself and with a level of violence that Disney+ never allowed before. ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’ comes with the “Marvel Television Special Presentation” label, a format that the studio premiered in October 2022 with ‘The curse of the werewolf‘. The format is a kind of laboratory: projects of between 45 and 60 minutes that function as self-contained stories without the pressure of sustaining a series for several weeks. Both ‘The Curse of the Werewolf’ and the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special worked as cult pieces, and with Punisher, Marvel has taken the experiment to the extreme, because its adult rating is the first on the platform for a Marvel Studios project. Here we will see how an unexpected force drags Frank Castle back into battle. The Punisher believes he has eliminated the Gnucci crime family, the last link to his family’s murderers, and the surviving matriarch, Ma Gnucci, comes to him not to negotiate but to settle scores. The first half of the episode focuses on visions that haunt Castle; the second is a real-time action sequence inside an apartment building reminiscent of ‘The Raid’. The idea for the series arose during the filming of the first season of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’. Bernthal asked the director for permission to develop something centered on Frank Castle. The two had previously collaborated, and that gave Disney confidence to have Bernthal co-write the script and serve as executive producer. Shot on real locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the photography is by Robert Elswit (Oscar winner for ‘Wells of Ambition’), a firm that visually elevates this bet far above a typical television film. In Xataka | 12 premieres this week on Netflix, including the return of one of the platform’s most successful franchises

Today the latest from a master of horror arrives on Disney+, a survival show that was about to end up in a drawer

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The last time before this year that Sam Raimi directed a horror film was in 2009, with ‘Drag Me to Hell’, a return to his roots after the ‘Spider-Man’ trilogy and which remains, perhaps, his best film along with ‘Darkman’ and the ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy. After extensive work in the ‘Oz’ franchises and Marvel, he returns to the humor, suspense and violence of that marvel with this fantastic ‘Send Help‘you just landed on Disney+. In it we will meet a shy and lonely woman (Rachel McAdams) who travels with her arrogant and insufferable boss on a flight that ends up having an accident and leaving them on a desert island in the Pacific. What begins as a survival story becomes an inversion of the work hierarchy: the person who knows how to survive in nature is not the same person who rules in the office. From there, a strange and hilarious mix of ‘Cast Away’ and ‘Misery’ that doesn’t cut corners either in the intensity of its most violent scenes or in the grotesque humor with which it portrays its protagonists. The original idea for the film dates back to before the pandemic, when Raimi came across this script from the authors of ‘Freddy vs. Jason’. When COVID happened, cuts came to the industry, and the studio tried convince the director to reduce the budget and release it on platforms. Raimi wanted the production to reach theaters, so the project was presented to the former Fox, now owned by Disney. In an especially profitable year for traditional horror films like ‘Sinners’ or ‘Weapons’, and for thrillers with a twist like the hit ‘The assistant‘, ‘Send Help’ is placed, as is usual for Raimi, in an intermediate and unclassifiable terrain. Extremely dark humor, a description of characters between social caricature and classic horror comics and a load of impossible plot twists for the enjoyment of those who think that plot coherence is for the weak when there is emotion and narrative pulse. In Xataka | Netflix premieres today the dystopian series that has risen to the throne of the best in history in six seasons

In 1957, Walt Disney was concerned that his cartoons lacked depth. So he invented the multiplane camera

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In 1957 Walt Disney was fed up with his animated films being so flat. He needed to make his characters go from 2D to 3D, and he and his engineers created something prodigious: the multiplane camera. The system. Its operation went beyond traditional method of animated film productionand divided each frame into several planes so that landscapes and characters gave the sensation of being represented in three dimensions. The result, as you can see in this video, is amazing. Walt Disney himself explained in a masterful way how an invention worked that solved a fundamental problem: cartoons had no depth, and they needed to evolve to have it. The difficulty. That was not easy in the 50s, of course. Today’s technology has made 3D movies almost child’s play for an industry that embraced them as the next big revolution and then killed them. defenestration of these contents almost in its entirety. The animation process they followed at Disney made it completely handmade, and each second of animation involved enormous work that required each of the 24 frames to be photographed (the number varied depending on the formats) manually with cameras that would then produce those frames to join them into the final footage. Solving. The problem was that this made it almost impossible to add that depth effect: if you zoomed in on a landscape, everything increased at the same time wherever you were. That was unreal, and for example it caused the moon to increase in size in a night landscape scene at the same time and in the same proportion as a tree close to the viewer’s position. In order to correct this and other problems and produce those 3D frames, Disney and its engineers came up with the idea of ​​creating a multiplane camera that was used in certain scenes by dividing the planes of the scene. In the case of zoom, some shots approached faster than others, which gave this global zoom an amazing realism for the time. and the solution. The same thing happened when this technique was used when creating characters for these films that suddenly gained that depth that made them able to rotate, move forward or backward in the shot and all of this was reflected in the perspective. In the first video it is Mickey who demonstrates it, but this second video with Bambi as the protagonist also reveals the wonderful operation of a simply brilliant technique. In Xataka | The new sequel to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ exists, but it is not from Disney: this is how the legal ecosystem of fan films works In Xataka | There is an open dispute over the meaning of “the stork” from ‘The Lion King’. One worth 27 million dollars

Disney scraps Marvel creative team and loses many of the artists who gave visual shape to the MCU

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The character and setting designers who built the visual identity of the Marvel Universefrom the first Iron Man suit to the looks of recent villains like Killmonger, have in some cases been in the studio for more than ten years. On April 14, many of them received their dismissal letters: these tasks will be outsourced. What has happened? This April 14, in the middle of CinemaCon (a paradoxical moment, with the industry in full swing to announce films for the next two years), The Walt Disney Company executed the first big snip of the Josh D’Amaro era, your new CEO: about a thousand layoffs throughout the company. Marvel has been one of the company’s worst-hit factions: around 8% of the combined workforce of Marvel Entertainment in New York and Marvel Studios in Burbank. have suffered cuts in almost every department: film and TV production, comics, franchises, finance, legal and visual development. What the CEO says. D’Amaro, in an internal communication to those affectedacknowledges that the decision is “harsh” but clarifies that it does not reflect “his contributions or the overall strength of the company.” That is, he suggests that it is a restructuring designed before he stepped foot in the CEO’s office, inherited from the roadmap that Bob Iger left ready before leaving. It makes sense: a layoff of a thousand people is not decided overnight. Goodbye Marvel. The most symbolic blow has been suffered by the Visual Development department of Marvel Studios. Virtually all equipment has been dismantled: Only a small group of permanent employees remain to coordinate the hiring of external artists per project. This team was responsible for aspects as essential to the MCU as the costume and character design of the franchise’s films, since one of the most significant features of the MCU is the visual coherence they have maintained in thirty productions. Radical change. Now all that work is outsourced. From now on, Marvel Studios will retain a minimal team that will be responsible for hiring external artists based on each project. It is a common practice in the video game industry and in the production of visual effects (in the latter field, in fact, it had been done this way at Marvel, not without its corresponding controversies), but it represents a substantial change in model for a department that had always been integrated into the foundations of the studio. Is Marvel going bad? Not quite. It is a logical step after the latest movements that the company has made. After recognizing that under the command of Bob Chapek quantity had prevailed over qualitywhich had given rise to a certain exhaustion, after Iger’s return as CEO in 2022 there was a turnaround in the opposite direction. In 2025 there was only one MCU premiere, in 2026 we will only have ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday‘ in theaters and ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ and ‘VisionQuest’ on Disney+. This reduction in scale is what has made it evident that the staff was oversized. Layoffs in film and television production are the direct consequence of the reduction of the calendar. The numbers, in proportion. Between 2023 and 2025, the Iger era has already eliminated around 8,000 positions at Disney and generated a savings of 7.5 billion dollars. The current 1,000 layoffs represent less than 1% of the company’s 231,000 global employees, a number that in absolute terms may not seem very large. But the truth is that in the specific case of the Marvel Visual Development team it amounts to a certain erasure of the department at a critical moment: when we have to start preparing the continuation of ‘Doomsday’: ‘Secret Wars’, scheduled for release in December 2027. Other changes. Many of the layoffs affect the marketing department, unified under the sole command of the newly appointed head of that area of ​​the business, Asad Ayaz. As has been knownthe cuts reach marketing, advertising, production and corporate functions teams at ESPN, the studios and the product and technology area, in addition to the aforementioned cuts at Marvel. The decision fits the profile of D’Amaro, who has spent almost three decades at Disney, but his career is unrelated to the audiovisual content business. He was the architect of the largest theme park expansion in the company’s history, and the Experiences division he led generated, in the first quarter of 2026, about 75% of Disney’s total operating profit. In Xataka | ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, everything we know about Marvel’s next big event

‘Avatar’ is one of the most profitable films in history. And yet Disney is considering killing the saga

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James Cameron’s trilogy has generated 6.7 billion dollars at the box office. Despite this, the future of the two remaining sequels is up in the air, Disney is considering making the following films cheaper, and the theme park attraction that was announced with all honors a few months ago may never be built. The numbers. The figures for ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’, the third installment of the franchise, are objectively colossal: 404 million grosses in the domestic market, 1,085 million in the rest of the world, third highest-grossing title of 2025. A success for any current Hollywood franchise, but at this point we are all clear that James Cameron’s saga is not a typical product. The low. The first way of reduce enthusiasm is by comparing the collection with its precedents. The first installment, from 2009, is still the highest grossing film in history, with 2,920 million dollars. The second, ‘The Sense of Water’, is the third with 2,340 million. Compared to those figures, ‘Fire and Ashes’ is no less than a billion short. It remains a good business (350 million, plus 150 in marketing), but It’s not even the highest-grossing movie of 2025since it was beaten by ‘Zootopia 2’, also from Disney, and by ‘Ne Zha 2‘. The Wrap has made an in-depth analysis of the topic and highlights the opinion of Paul Dergarabedian, head of market trends at Comscore. The analyst states that “‘Fire and Ashes’ grossed half that of the first film. And the ticket prices in 2009 were not those of 2025.” In March, during the Saturn Awards, Cameron collected trophies for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Science Fiction Film for the third ‘Avatar’ and recognized that “To be perfectly clear, we have not even made a decision to move forward at this time.” Short and cheap. The Wrap is also the medium that I spoke with insiders from Disney who confirm that internal conversations are being held to make the next deliveries “shorter and cheaper.” The release dates of the fourth and fifth films (December 2029 and December 2031), and the answer to how to reduce costs without extirpating the identity of ‘Avatar’ is not easy to elucidate. Why are they so expensive? Some details of the process that illustrate why “cheaper” can be a complication: for example, the production involves at least two complete shoots: one motion capture with actors and another, mostly digital, to define the staging, the camera movements and all the elements of the computer-generated universe. According to Cameron acknowledged.making the fourth and fifth deliveries together (as he did with the second and third) would mean an investment of around 800 million without changes in the method. More expenses: Costume designer Deborah Scott, Oscar-nominated for her work on the third installment, illustrates the scale of the problem. Each suit is designed, manufactured in the physical world, and then digitally “translated” with the help of animators and technicians. This process is multiplied in each film by hundreds of characters, creatures and environments. Cameron has publicly committed to do not use AI and always support the human work behind the film, which also prevents lowering prices in this way. What has gone wrong? Why hasn’t the third ‘Avatar’ reached the 2 billion of the previous installments? Cameron’s team affirms, according to the same medium, that Disney launched the film in a very similar way to ‘The Sense of Water’, three years earlier, but with more margin: there was more time between the trailers and the premiere, which allowed some expectation to be generated. Added to this are commercial obstacles such as the fact that it is the longest film in the saga (197 minutes) and that there has been a certain lack of merchandising and other parallel actions. It all adds up to making it a film that could have performed better. California über alles. The uncertainty extends beyond the movies: Disney had announced the construction of an ‘Avatar’ themed area at Disney California Adventure, designed to complement the popular Pandora land that has existed since 2017 in Animal Kingdom (Florida). Construction was scheduled to begin in 2026 but the scheduled closure of the ‘Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue’ attraction, necessary to begin work, has been postponed until 2027. One year late, for now. Disney parks expert Jim Shull told The Wrap that the franchise “as a cultural force is exhausted. No one is demanding to see more. If ‘Avatar 3’ had been a massive hit and people were clamoring for the fourth and fifth installments, that would change the equation. But there’s not much demand.” And he proposes a much more obvious alternative: expanding the ‘Zootopia’ areas, in line with the success of the ‘Zootopia: Hot Pursuit’ attraction at Shanghai Disneyland. In addition, there are logistical issues: the ‘Avatar’ water attraction required a complicated and expensive water treatment plant of its own. In Xataka | China saves ‘Avatar 3’: a good part of its billion in revenue comes from the only market that still goes to the movies

YouTube has already eaten Disney

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In 2025, YouTube generated about $62 billion in revenue and surpassed Disney as the world’s largest entertainment company by revenue. It did so without a single film studio, without decades-old franchises behind it, and without making contracts with any of its main content creators. The model that made it possible has been being built in silence for twenty years. The figures. These 62 billion dollars exceed for the first time the media segment of The Walt Disney Company, which generated 60.9 billion excluding its theme parks and experiences, that is, we are talking strictly about the audiovisual sector (Disney parks and resorts contributed around 9 billion additional dollars to the group). The comparison measures the content and media distribution business, where it competes with YouTube. And in that area there is no longer any doubt who is in charge. Advertising, first notice. It was clear that the surprise. YouTube earned $40.4 billion in advertising alone during 2025, more than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combined, whose combined advertising revenue amounted to 37.8 billion. A year earlier, in 2024, that same combination of studios still surpassed YouTube in advertising: 41.8 billion compared to 36.1 billion. The rest of YouTube’s income comes from subscriptions: YouTube TV has around 10 million subscribers, YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have approximately 107 million according to the studies cited. These are lines of business that did not exist before or were marginal, and that now represent about 22 billion dollars annually. The secret of low risk. The important question is not how much YouTube earns but how it earns it. Disney maintains studios, pays salaries to directors, actors and scriptwriters, finances productions with budgets that in franchises such as Marvel or ‘Avatar’ frequently exceed $200 million in revenue per film, but assumes the risk that this investment will not be recovered at the box office. YouTube doesn’t do any of that. Not even hiring its creators. Although that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deliver. The YouTube Partner Program, launched in 2007, established that the platform shares 55% of the advertising revenue generated by each video with the creator who produces it. The creator provides the content, the risk and the work. YouTube provides the infrastructure, distribution and monetization system. In total, the platform has paid more than $100 billion to creators, record labels and media partners throughout its history, according to YouTube itself. It is, in terms of costs, a structure that traditional studies can hardly replicate. Hearing, second notice. The 2025 revenue is not the first time YouTube has surpassed Disney in something relevant. On the audience front, the gap opened earlier. YouTube, according to the studies cited, captured 12.5% ​​of the total television consumption time in the United States, overtaking Disney, Fox and Netflix. The figure includes consumption on connected televisions, a rapidly growing segment and that has transformed YouTube from a mobile platform to a regular presence in the living room. The great risk. The great creators of the platform are those who have their own studios, production teams and budgets that rival those of conventional television. They have been, in practice, media companies for years. The externalization of risk that has put YouTube in first position has a reverse: the platform’s income depends on millions of people who, at any time, can migrate to another environment or stop producing, without contractual obligations. Disney can lose money due to a movie’s failure at the box office. YouTube, in theory, can take a significant blow to its ecosystem. Disadvantages of outsourcing everything. Featured image | Xataka In Xataka | YouTube’s lawyers are clear that “YouTube is not a social network.” The future of the platform depends on it

China has managed to create an AI that has made Hollywood tremble. Disney has not been amused at all

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The phenomenon of the month in AI is Seedance 2.0. To date, the most amazing text-to-video creation model and theard a dart at the same industry from Hollywood. So much so that Disney itself has legally warned Bytedance, the Chinese giant behind this model. The notice. Sources of Reuters They claim that Disney has sent a cease and desist letter to Bytedance, accusing the Chinese company of having used company characters to train its Seedance 2.0 model. According to statements, Bytedance would have created a package of copyrighted characters to feed this artificial intelligence, the main reason why it is so accurate at recreating them. Bytedance’s response. The Chinese company has not acknowledged having used copyrighted characters to train its model, but it has reacted to Disney’s notice. “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users.” Beyond the statement, the company has not detailed what measures it is taking to prevent users from distributing copyrighted content, such as the one we have been seeing flooding the network for two weeks. They are not the first. Disney has already taken similar measures against Character.AIan AI specialized in creating animated characters capable of perfectly emulating Disney characters. The company It only has an alliance with OpenAIwith whom he signed an agreement so that Sora could generate more than 200 characters thanks to a three-year license. The operation included a $1 billion investment by Disney in OpenAI. Doors to the countryside. “Creative prompt engineering” and code modifications to make AI bypass the very limitations for which it is programmed are inevitable, in addition to all the derived Open-Source models that can be trained outside the jurisdiction. The key here is not in the dispute between Disney and Bytedance, it is that China has created the first model that directly threatens the creation of cinematographic content. Join the enemy. For some time now, the film industry has been clear that the coming years they will be cuts and embrace of AI. CEOs like Sony have already spoken out and positioned themselves as “very focused on AI”, making it clear that the current problem for movies is expense. Models like Seedance now allow us to generate in minutes what previously required entire teams and million-dollar budgets. In the coming years, video generation models will force the industry to rethink its cost structure. In Xataka | We are entering a new era of robotics driven by AI and Disney is its perfect showcase

Disney+ has discovered that Generation Z does not want to watch its two-hour movies. So he’s going to give them vertical microdramas

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Disney+ has decided to join the battle for the viewer’s thumb. The company announced this week at CES that will incorporate vertical videos to its platform during 2026, a commitment to the format that dominates TikTok and Instagram. The news marks a strategic shift for a giant traditionally associated with the traditional (and horizontal) cinematographic experience. What does it consist of? If Disney previously sold large screens in dark rooms, now it is not exactly seeking to replace them, but rather to create a new habit: that opening Disney+ is a gesture as automatic as doing so with any social network. Netflix measures its impact in monthly viewing hours, but Disney wants what YouTube and TikTok already have: compulsive daily views. In an industry where engagement Everyday life has become the battlefield, Mickey and Spider-Man will learn to do choreography in vertical format. What will it include? Now, as explained by Erin Teagueexecutive vice president of product management, the plan aims for a feed personalized with algorithms that will mix news and entertainment. The raw material will be varied: from original productions designed for vertical format to recycled material from social networks and scenes from series or movies reformatted for mobile screens. Teague acknowledges that what they intend is to turn Disney+ into “a must-visit destination every day.” It is no longer enough to be the service where you can watch the latest season of something, but to be the one that you open without thinking, several times a day, just like you do with other apps that don’t even charge a subscription. where does it come from. The strategy does not come from nowhere. Disney had already tested the waters with the so-called “Verts” in the renewed ESPN application, launched in August 2025. Those vertical sports clips (highlights, quick analyzes, statements) functioned as a laboratory before escalating the bet to the rest of the Disney+ ecosystem. Rita Ferro, global head of advertising at Disney, commented in the presentation that ESPN had captured 33% of all live sports audiences during 2025 in the United States, leaving its closest competitor at 20%. The evolution of the vertical format. The vertical format has been redefining how we consume audiovisual content for years. Teague herself, before signing for Disney, worked for years on YouTube and witnessed from the inside how Google initially underestimated TikTok’s push. The answer (YouTube Shorts) was a long time coming, but when it did it changed many preconceptions: most of these short videos they end up consuming themselves on televisionsnot on mobile phones. The vertical conquered the living room, and that’s where Disney+ wants to be. Aside from this, Netflix tried publishing vertical anime videos in 2021, but never took the proposal beyond limited experiments. No competitor has yet found the formula, and Disney wants to be the first to get it right. Who has already done it. None other than Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer products companyreinvent the soap opera and launch this January ‘The Golden Pear Affair‘, a “micro soap opera” of 50 episodes designed specifically for consumption on social networks, since its distribution will start on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok before migrating to its own mobile application. This is not advertising disguised as content: it is content designed from scratch to sell products: if the product placement classic interrupted the narrative, here the narrative is born to serve the product. Meanwhile, the fever of microdramas that conquered Asia a few years agoreaches other continents with production companies like TelevisaUnivision making compressed soap operas. The Spanish-speaking network has been exploring the “microdramas”ultra-brief versions of the soap opera format. and disney you know this works: Apps like ReelShort and Crazy Maple Studio have been dominating niche markets with sixty-second vertical dramas for years. Its model (free hook episodes, payment to unlock more chapters) has shown that addictive narrative works even atomized. These Asian platforms generate tens of millions annually with content that Hollywood would have considered impossible to make profitable a few years ago. Advertising implications. The vertical format is not just an aesthetic or generational issue. It is, above all, a new advertising space: Disney announced a metric that merges Disney’s own data with information from external providers, saying that the format was a very attractive space for advertisers. And it also introduced an artificial intelligence-powered video generation tool that allows advertisers to convert existing materials into renewed ads. It is no longer necessary to produce spots from scratch; just feed the machine with assets priors and brand guidelines. So now Disney’s recent deal with OpenAI does. acquires a renewed meaning. Transformation or concession. Teague openly acknowledged that “Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren’t necessarily thinking about sitting through two-and-a-half-hour long content on their phones.” Disney does not want to attract new generations to its classic catalog, but rather to speak in the same language as these young people who have always been its potential audience. For millions of users, cinema is no longer the basic unit of entertainment, and Disney has decided that, rather than compete with Netflix, it has to do so with WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok. In Xataka | “I cried 152 times in 2025”: Generation Z lists their emotional crises and turns them into infographics

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