Now That OpenAI Has Terminated Sora, How Will I Have This Blog Read To Me By An Uncanny Buxom Mike Wazowski?

I have bad news for anyone who was really into consuming or making videos of Charlie Kirk arresting Jeffrey Epstein, or SpongeBob SquarePants fighting Barack Obama in the format of a side-scrolling fighting game: OpenAI has suddenly and unceremoniously pulled the plug on Sora, its text-to-video generator app, after just four months and before a billion-dollar partnership with Disney ever really got underway. The long-prophesied supplication of all entertainment to uncanny, glitchy videos of Anthony Bourdain smoking weed with Mao Zedong will have to wait. OpenAI's first forays into video generation began in late 2024, though it was not until the release of Sora 2 in September 2025 that they wanted the world to take them seriously. More than a million people downloaded the app on Sept. 30, the day of its release; three months later, Disney announced that it had reached a landmark agreement to license its famously copyright-protected cast of animated characters for use in the app. This was a big enough deal that Disney CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the rounds together, to boast of the transformative potential of allowing people to generate videos of Nemo the clownfish performing oral sex on Goofy. As part of the agreement, Disney was set to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. In addition, Disney announced a suite of integrations it planned to shoehorn into its Disney+ streaming app. "Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+," the press release boasted, "and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI's models to power new experiences for Disney + subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney's stories and characters."