Google Veo 3 and Flow

Google's Veo 3 generates video with dialogue, sound effects and camera control. According to Google, more than 275 million videos had been generated in its Flow film tool by October 2025. Veo 3.1 added new audio controls, and Google DeepMind keeps sample clips on the Veo page.

Sora: rise and fall

The Sora app was downloaded a million times in five days, as reported at the time. Then, as Engadget reported, OpenAI announced it was shutting down the app in a pivot away from consumer AI. In its own post the company said "We're saying goodbye to Sora". On my slide I note the shutdown in March 2026 and that this was because of compute costs, and that a planned $1 billion Disney deal unravelled. The lesson is blunt: hype is not a business model. Video generation is expensive to run.

Kling: the race is global

The South China Morning Post reported in May 2026 that Kuaishou, the Chinese company behind the Kling video generator, beat estimates, with Kling's revenue up about 300% and an annual run rate of roughly $500 million. Anyone who thinks this is only an American contest has not looked at the numbers.

Tilly Norwood, the AI actress

In September 2025 a studio introduced an AI-generated "actress" named Tilly Norwood. TechCrunch reported that Hollywood did not take it kindly. The actors' union SAG-AFTRA said she is "not an actor", and the actress Emily Blunt reacted with "Good Lord, we're screwed."

The lawsuits

Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025, and on 4 September Warner Bros. Discovery units filed a very similar complaint. They argue that Midjourney let subscribers generate their copyrighted characters. Disney's complaint, as quoted on my slide, called Midjourney "a bottomless pit of plagiarism". Copyright is the battlefield of creative AI, and the courts have a lot left to decide.

And the partnerships

Lionsgate took an equity stake in the AI video company Runway to co-develop a series. The industry is both fighting and embracing the technology at the same time.

If you want to work in media

Learn the tools, but also learn rights, licensing and consent. They decide who can use what.
Storytelling, taste and direction are the skills that survive a world with cheap pixels.

Sources

Part of the talk "The AI Era" by Faisal Adnan, Riphah International University, 6 November 2026.

Hollywood's Love-Hate Year: Veo, the End of Sora, Kling and the Lawsuits