Disney and Adobe have signed a multi-year alliance that puts Adobe’s generative AI at the heart of Disney’s creative work. Announced on Monday at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach, the deal names Adobe an Official AI Innovation Partner of The Walt Disney Company and gives Disney’s teams early access to Adobe Firefly, Firefly Foundry, Premiere and Photoshop, along with dedicated engineering and research support. The centerpiece is Firefly Foundry, through which the two companies will build private generative models trained on Disney’s own characters, settings and visual styles.
What the alliance covers
The agreement reaches across Disney’s whole business. Adobe will support concept work in Disney’s innovation labs and development pipelines for its theme parks and cruise line, and it will work with Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLAB and the ESPN Edge innovation center on new ways to tell stories and bring ESPN’s archive to life.
Adobe will also amplify the work through its own channels. The alliance covers global marketing activations, industry events, thought leadership and customer storytelling tied to Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge and StudioLAB, with more activations rolling out over the multi-year term. Neither company disclosed what the deal is worth or how many years it runs.
The deal caps a busy stretch for Adobe’s AI business. Days earlier, Adobe put its marketing agent inside rival assistants, and the Disney alliance now gives its generative tools their most high-profile customer yet. Adobe’s Hannah Elsakr, who leads its generative AI ventures, called the agreement the next chapter of a decades-long relationship between the two companies.
Foundry does the heavy lifting
Firefly Foundry is Adobe’s service for building private models for a single company, trained on that company’s own material and kept proprietary to it. Disney will work directly with Adobe on models tailored to its properties, which Adobe describes as human-centered and artist-led, trained on character attributes, environments and visual styles to produce commercially safe, production-ready output.
The work is already under way inside Disney’s parks business. Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development is using Firefly Foundry to move ideas into the theme park development pipeline faster, including a sketch-to-image model that turns hand-drawn concepts into fully rendered two-dimensional concept art, and a custom image model that generates on-brand, franchise-accurate creative assets.
Kyle Laughlin, Disney’s senior vice president of research and development technology and engineering, said the tools compress a creative process that would have taken months into hours and days, letting teams run through multiple iterations quickly and cut costly changes once construction begins. He added that the tools are in no way meant to replace roles at Imagineering.
StudioLAB and ESPN
The alliance also reaches Disney’s studios and its sports business. Adobe joins The Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLAB as an innovation partner, where creative and technical teams prototype internal tools and turn experiments into production workflows. At ESPN Edge, the two companies will look for ways AI can deepen fan engagement and bring ESPN’s archive to life.
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The telling choice here is what Disney did not do. It did not hand its characters to a public image generator, and it did not announce a consumer app that lets anyone conjure its heroes. Instead it bought a private workshop: models trained only on Disney material, used only by Disney people, with Adobe’s engineers on call.
In a year when public tools have churned out unauthorized versions of famous characters, that control is the product. Disney gets speed in its own pipelines without giving up the keys to its catalogue, and Adobe gets the most prestigious reference customer its Foundry service could ask for.
The practical output so far is modest, and that is worth saying plainly. Imagineers are testing a sketch-to-image model and a custom image model, while the studio and ESPN projects are only starting. The alliance is a bet that private models beat public ones for a studio whose assets are its characters.
The rest of the industry is moving the other way, packing rival video models into single tools and cutting prices. Disney is betting that control matters more than choice, and the next test is whether the work stays in the concept stage or reaches finished films and broadcasts.
Why It Matters
This is the clearest signal yet that the biggest studios want their AI kept behind closed doors. Disney is the most protective owner of characters in entertainment, and its answer to generative AI is not to ban it or to open it up, but to license a private version of it.
If the model works, every other studio with a valuable catalogue will want the same arrangement, and Adobe will be the company that built the template. The tension is jobs: Bloomberg reported this month that Disney is weighing thousands of cuts and has asked managers for 20 percent in annual savings, even as Disney says the tools replace no one.
Background
The alliance builds on work that began in June, when Walt Disney Imagineering and Adobe announced a narrower collaboration on design and pre-production visualization for the parks. It also follows a year in which Disney has defended its characters in court against AI companies it says used them without permission. Adobe introduced Firefly Foundry in October 2025.
Source: joint Adobe–Disney announcement and Reuters report
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