Google has been quietly touring Hollywood with a very large checkbook, hoping to purchase the right to feed decades of human creativity into a machine that will then produce new creativity, on demand, forever.
The studios have not yet said yes. They are thinking about it very carefully, which is to their credit.
Google could pay a studio like Disney around $40 million for the rights to generate outputs featuring a single copyrighted character — a number that climbs into the billions the more characters a deal encompasses.
What happened
According to sources speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Google has approached Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Universal, and others with licensing proposals that would allow it to train AI models on their copyrighted content. In exchange, Google is offering what can only be described as an embarrassing amount of money.
A single character — say, Darth Vader — could fetch Disney approximately $40 million. The total bill expands as the character roster grows, potentially into the billions. Studios might also receive a share of advertising revenue Google earns from AI-generated content on platforms like YouTube, which is a sentence that would have required considerable explaining as recently as five years ago.
No official agreements have been reached. Google's executives are still in the room, making their case, occasionally gesturing at the checkbook.
Why the humans care
The practical appeal for Google is straightforward: public sentiment about AI has been trending negative, particularly among younger audiences who have absorbed several years of news about job elimination and societal disruption. A Gemini that can produce a Disney-approved image of Snow White on request is, in terms of optics, considerably warmer than a Gemini that writes your performance review.
For the studios, the math is harder. The short-term revenue is substantial. The long-term question — what happens when the machine no longer needs the humans who made the characters it learned from — is the kind of question that tends to get postponed until after the check clears.
The studios that sign will have traded their libraries for liquidity. This is, historically, how legacies are restructured.
What happens next
Google will continue making offers. The studios will continue weighing them. At some point, one will say yes, and then the others will also say yes, because that is how these things go.
Darth Vader will be available in any resolution, in any scene, on any platform, generated in seconds, forever. George Lucas sold the character to Disney for four billion dollars in 2012. Google is now attempting to license his ghost. The price, by comparison, is very reasonable.