Ben Fritz

It's been a very mixed year at the box office so far in 2025.

The total numbers are basically flat with 2024, up just a bit, but still well below where we were

in 2019, before the pandemic, we've had a few surprising smash hits like Weapons and the latest Conjuring and F1, Sinners, Minecraft, Lilo and Stitch, Zootopia 2, as well as plenty of disappointments like the live-action version of Snow White, Marvel's Captain America Brave New World, and Thunderbolts.

This gives Disney a financial stake in the hottest AI company in the world.

Disney has concluded that they need to partner with AI companies, that they can't just fight them in court.

The legal situation has been mixed for entertainment companies so far in terms of what they can prevent AI companies from doing with their copyrighted material.

We've seen this in the past, that when entertainment tries to fight tech, it's a very hard battle.

I think they've concluded there has to be some legal way

and some way that makes money for the entertainment companies to start putting their content into AI, especially into image and video generators, rather than trying to play whack-a-mole and stop it.

AI is very unpredictable.

You can't just easily program it and say, never show a Disney character using drugs or smoking or in a sexually inappropriate situation or cursing.

So it's inevitable that no matter how many guardrails they try to put in, you're going to start seeing some weird, funny, probably inappropriate and offensive stuff done with Disney characters in Sora.

And I think Disney is signaling that they're willing to accept that risk.

They probably know some of that's going to happen and they're trusting that open AI is

We'll be a good partner to try to improve and change the app when these kind of embarrassing videos end up getting generated.

But it's not likely to bring food prices down.

Pretty much every piece of capital that is necessary to get food from the fields to the supermarket is incredibly steel intensive.

Coming up.

He is one of the most in-demand people in Hollywood these days.

Yeah, well, the IMAX screens are bigger.