Adobe and The Walt Disney Company announced a multi-year strategic alliance on 9 November 2026, unveiled at the Adobe MAX conference in Miami Beach. Under it Adobe becomes an Official AI Innovation Partner of Disney. The agreement has two strands: Disney's creative teams get early access to Adobe's AI and creative software, along with dedicated engineering and research support, while Adobe gets marketing and promotional presence across several Disney businesses. The terms were set out in a blog post by Hannah Elsakr, Adobe's vice president of GenAI New Business Ventures.
On the marketing side, Adobe's reach covers Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge and the Walt Disney Studios' StudioLAB. That will come through activations, events, thought-leadership pieces and customer stories, and Adobe also plans a bigger presence across Disney's media platforms to reach entertainment and sports audiences. The partnership is expected to show up at Adobe MAX, Adobe Summit and other industry conferences, with more experiences rolling out over the multi-year term. Whether Adobe's presence on Disney's platforms means paid media, sponsored content or something else is not described.
The technology at the centre is Adobe Firefly and Firefly Foundry, Adobe's service for building private models for a single customer, with Premiere and Photoshop also named among the tools. Adobe introduced Foundry at MAX in Los Angeles in October 2025 as a way to tailor generative models on a company's whole catalogue of intellectual property, layered on top of its base Firefly models, which Adobe says are trained on Adobe Stock, openly licensed material and public domain content. The models made for Disney add Disney's own character attributes, environments and visual styles, and are billed as commercially safe and ready for production. Adobe's product page says customers keep ownership of their IP and exclusive usage rights, but it makes no promise to indemnify them, and nothing published defines "commercially safe" in legal terms. Adobe has not said how the Disney models were trained, how much of the catalogue went in, or whether the film, sports and park models share a base.
Part of this is already running, in an experimental form. Walt Disney Imagineering's research and development group is testing Foundry for a sketch-to-image model that turns rough hand-drawn concepts into rendered two-dimensional concept art, and for a custom model that makes on-brand, franchise-accurate assets for the theme park pipeline. Adobe's post illustrates it with a screen pairing a pencil sketch of a teacup with a prompt for a Mad Tea Party ride vehicle inspired by Through the Looking-Glass, in ice blue, silver, lavender and white. Kyle Laughlin of Imagineering R&D said the best technology amplifies human creativity and lets Imagineers spend more time on the details. The post's own verb is "experimenting", and it adds that the work speeds new ideas into the park development pipeline. It gives no count of users, images or hours saved, and it does not say the model is deployed across Imagineering.
“Today’s announcement marks the next chapter of the relationship, where the two companies will build a new creative foundation that thoughtfully deploys AI as an accelerant for artistic vision, creativity and guest engagement.”
Hannah Elsakr, vice president, GenAI New Business Ventures, Adobe, in Adobe's announcement · news.adobe.com ↗
None of this began on the day. An earlier Adobe post from 16 June 2026, also by Elsakr, described a collaboration between Imagineering R&D and Adobe to speed up design and pre-production visualisation for Disney Parks and Experiences. It named the franchises the models were meant to stay faithful to: Frozen, Cars, Moana, Lilo & Stitch and Mickey & Friends. The new announcement turns that project into a company-wide partner title and extends it to film and sports.
At the film studio, Adobe joins StudioLAB as an Innovation Partner, and the first projects are custom models for post-production and visual effects that preserve creative vision. Which films and which stage of post-production are not specified. At the ESPN Edge Innovation Center, which exists to test emerging technology for sports storytelling, the aim is AI that deepens fan engagement, shapes how ESPN delivers highlights and documentaries, and finds new ways to bring ESPN's archive to life. Co-innovation projects with StudioLAB and ESPN Edge are described as already underway. Sonia Doshi of StudioLAB and Kevin Lopes of ESPN both welcomed a wider toolbox for their storytellers, and ESPN has run other AI experiments in parallel, including limited tests of AI search on ESPN and Disney+ disclosed in August.
The two companies describe the deal in similar terms. Adobe frames it as a new creative foundation in which AI serves artistic vision, with tools that are human-centred and led by artists, and says it wants to protect and celebrate artists and their work. Disney's Becca Vodnoy, a senior vice president of corporate alliances, says it builds on a long relationship between two companies that share a commitment to creativity. Adobe has worked alongside Disney for decades on content pipelines, personalised marketing and park experiences. Mediaweek reads the arrangement as AI on Disney's terms: trained on Disney's IP and kept inside Disney's walls.
What is not public is the commercial side. No price, contract length or exclusivity has been disclosed, nor who pays whom, and The Next Web likewise reported no financial terms. Adobe supplies software, engineers and researchers, while Disney supplies a partner title, marketing access and a showcase customer, which makes the arrangement a sales argument for Foundry as well. Adobe signed a similar deal on 28 September 2026 as the NHL's Official Creative, Marketing and AI Partner, built around a claimed reach of more than 200 million supporters in 147 countries, also without published terms.
The alliance lands amid Disney's other dealings with AI companies. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025, and on 16 September 2025 Disney, Universal and Warner Bros Discovery filed a 119-page copyright complaint against MiniMax over its Hailuo video service, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work. In December 2025 Disney signed a three-year licensing deal with OpenAI, covering its characters for Sora and tied to a planned $1 billion investment. The outlets disagree on what followed: Mediaweek describes the investment as made, while PPC Land says OpenAI discontinued the Sora app in March 2026 and the investment did not go ahead.
Stylised editorial illustration of a sketch of a carousel passing through a press and coming out as a finished print
Image: PPC Land
Disney is also the stalking-horse bidder in the Chapter 11 sale of Character.ai, which filed on 12 October 2026. It offered $20 million for a non-exclusive licence to the company's IP and budgeted about $180 million over three years for roughly 65 of its staff. Bids are due on 20 November and an auction is set for 23 November. Against those routes, the Adobe deal is the one where private models are built by a vendor, customised on Disney's catalogue and used by Disney's own teams, a contrast with the lawsuits over outputs that show Disney characters.
Elsakr's post makes the business case from Adobe's side: it says the company has won several Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievement and that its technology has underpinned Disney's content production and personalised marketing for much of Adobe's history. She also invites other companies to learn how Foundry could build models around their own brand and IP. Foundry outputs are designed to flow into Adobe's GenStudio marketing tools.
Disney is building its own advertising tools too. In July it opened a closed beta of its Disney Ad Creative Studio, inside Disney Campaign Manager, which turns logos, product images and brand guidelines into connected-TV video ads, mostly for small and mid-sized businesses, and it cited 122 million ad-supported subscribers as of early 2026. On its May earnings call its finance chief said Disney was putting AI to work across advertising, content operations and park management.
For Adobe the deal arrives during a leadership change: in March 2026 it said chief executive Shantanu Narayen would step down once a successor is named, after 18 years. Its product strategy has pulled two ways. It has opened its apps to other companies' models, adding Runway's Gen-4.5 to the Firefly app in December 2025 and placing Photoshop and Firefly tools inside Google's Gemini in September 2026, while also pushing enterprise products where its own models and data controls are the selling point. It agreed to buy Semrush for about $1.9 billion in November 2025. The Disney alliance belongs to the second group, a showcase customer whose IP is among the most heavily protected in entertainment.
About Adobe
Adobe, a software company based in San Jose, California and listed on Nasdaq, makes creative and document tools including Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and Acrobat. It was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who left Xerox PARC to develop and sell the PostScript page description language.
This is not the first time Adobe's AI plans have drawn scrutiny. In June 2024 users objected to terms that seemed to let the company use their work to train generative AI; it clarified that it would not train on customer data and later wrote that pledge into its terms. In November 2025 it agreed to buy the marketing platform Semrush for $1.9 billion, and in March 2026 it announced a partnership with Nvidia on next-generation Firefly models for enterprise customers through Firefly Foundry.
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PPC Land raises two questions the announcement leaves open. One is how the artists whose drawings and designs make up Disney's catalogue are credited or paid when that work customises a model. The other is evidence: no figure on speed, cost or output appears in either Adobe post, so for now the alliance is a statement of direction and a marketing agreement. The next checkpoints are the activations the post promises and any results from the StudioLAB and ESPN Edge projects.
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