Google Is Offering Hollywood Hundreds of Millions to Train Its AI on Movies and TV Shows

Key points

• Google has approached Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal about licensing deals to train its AI models on copyrighted film and TV content, according to The Verge.
• Google could pay a single studio around $40 million for the rights to generate AI images of one copyrighted character, with total deals potentially reaching into the billions.
• No major studio has signed an agreement yet, though Google's DeepMind research division struck a $75 million investment deal with film studio A24 earlier in 2025.
• Lionsgate signed a licensing deal with AI video company Runway in 2024, but no finished AI-generated content has been released publicly.
• Fans reacted negatively when AI-generated images appeared in the official artbook for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a film that still earned $2 billion at the box office.

Google is quietly knocking on Hollywood's door, chequebook in hand. The company has been pitching major film and television studios on licensing agreements that would let it train its AI systems on their vast back-catalogues of copyrighted movies, shows, and characters, in exchange for enormous sums of money.

No deal has been signed. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal have not yet agreed to anything, according to unnamed industry sources cited by The Los Angeles Times.

What is Google actually offering?

The numbers are striking. Google could pay a studio roughly $40 million for the rights to generate AI images of a single copyrighted character. The more characters a deal covers, the higher the total climbs, potentially into the billions. Studios might also receive a cut of any advertising revenue Google earns from AI-created content featuring their intellectual property on platforms like YouTube.

The goal, from Google's side, is straightforward. If its Gemini AI system, the technology that generates images and text the way ChatGPT does, can produce officially licensed images of beloved characters, ordinary people start seeing AI as something fun and familiar rather than something threatening. That kind of goodwill is hard to buy any other way.

Google's DeepMind division, its main AI research arm, already took a step in this direction earlier in 2025, putting $75 million into A24, the studio behind films like Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Why haven't the studios said yes yet?

The risks for studios are real, even if the paycheques are tempting.

Fans were genuinely upset when AI-generated images turned up in the artbook tied to Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The backlash arrived after the film was already in cinemas. Nobody knows whether earlier disclosure would have dented its $2 billion box office total, but studios are clearly watching the reaction carefully.

There is also the workforce question. AI's appeal to studios is partly that it could speed up production and cut costs. Shareholders would welcome that. But making more films more cheaply with AI tools would likely cost a significant number of industry workers their jobs, from artists and animators to editors and set builders. That tension does not disappear just because a licensing deal is framed as a creative partnership.

Lionsgate signed a licensing agreement with AI video company Runway in 2024. So far, the two companies say they are working on AI-generated short films, but nothing has been released publicly.

What does this mean for audiences?

If one big legacy studio signs with Google and releases something, others will feel pressure to follow. The first studio to go public with a major AI-made project will find out quickly how audiences actually respond when the AI involvement is disclosed upfront rather than discovered later.

For now, the studios appear to be waiting to see who blinks first. Google, by contrast, has every reason to keep pushing. Access to decades of beloved film and television content would give its AI a quality and cultural legitimacy that no amount of unlicensed training data can match.

The money on the table is real. So is the risk of audiences feeling that the entertainment industry sold something they loved to the highest bidder.

Common questions

Does this affect films I watch right now?

Not yet. No major studio has signed a deal, so no AI trained on licensed Hollywood content has produced anything you would see in a cinema today.

Would studios have to label AI-generated content?

No legal rule currently forces studios to disclose AI use in most markets, though the negative reaction to the Spider-Man artbook suggests audiences will notice and react when they find out.