Sora closed after 4 months: collapse of OpenAI and Disney's $1 billion video generator

Sora, a video generation model from OpenAI announced in partnership with Disney and valued at $1 billion in the context of a deal in December 2025, was officially shut down on March 24, 2026 — that is, just over four months after its announcement. According to Habr citing the official Sora account, the project spent billions of dollars while generating almost zero revenue in return.

Chronology of Sora's rise and fall

Sora's history fit into just a few months — from a high-profile partnership announcement with one of the world's largest media companies to a quiet service shutdown. Habr describes what happened not as a routine failure of another AI startup, but as an event capable of having serious consequences for OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, the company itself, and the perception of the AI industry as a whole — against a backdrop of already growing discussions about an overheated AI investment market.

Key facts about the project:

• Sora was announced by OpenAI in partnership with Disney in December 2025.
• The Disney deal was valued at $1 billion.
• The service was officially shut down on March 24, 2026.
• The project existed for approximately four months from announcement to closure.
• Billions of dollars were spent on development and launch with almost zero revenue.

Why the project shut down so quickly

AI-generated video creation is one of the most computationally demanding tasks in modern machine learning: unlike text models, each generated video clip requires significantly more computations on the output, making such services expensive to operate at any notable scale. When infrastructure costs grow faster than revenue from subscriptions or content licensing, a company has few options: either sharply raise prices and narrow the audience, or shut down the product before losses spiral out of control. Based on Habr's account, exactly this scenario played out with Sora — billions in spending failed to convert into comparable revenue, and the partnership with Disney, despite its prestige, did not change this economics.

What this means for OpenAI and the entire industry

Shutting down a project of such magnitude with such a high-profile media partner as Disney is a significant reputational hit: deals at this level are usually announced as strategic, long-term partnerships, not short-lived experiments. Habr directly states that the consequences may affect not only OpenAI but Sam Altman personally as the public face of the company, as well as the perception of the AI bubble as a whole: a swift and costly failure of one of the most high-profile product announcements in recent years becomes a convenient argument for skeptics who have long pointed to the gap between colossal investments in generative AI and the real ability of such products to generate profit. For other players in the video generation market, Sora's story is a warning signal that even a prestigious partnership with a major media brand does not guarantee economic sustainability of a project if computing costs do not align with users' willingness to pay.

The AI video generation market in recent years has become one of the most competitive areas of generative AI: in addition to Sora from OpenAI, other major players in the industry are developing their own models for creating videos from text or visual prompts. Against this backdrop, the swift shutdown of precisely OpenAI's project, backed by a partnership with a major content rights holder, raises questions for the entire industry about whether the same scenario applies to competitors: if even a combination of a recognizable brand, access to premium content, and multibillion-dollar funding did not ensure Sora's sustainable business model, then the problem goes deeper — to the fundamental economics of AI-generated video creation rather than specific management decisions of a single company.

It is also telling how quickly the entire story unfolded: from the announcement of the Disney partnership in December 2025, presented as a landmark event for the entertainment industry, to a quiet service shutdown less than half a year later. Such a speed of course correction is unusual even by the standards of the rapidly changing generative AI market and suggests that actual usage and monetization metrics diverged from the deal's expectations significantly faster than typically happens with major corporate partnerships of this scale.