Disney to get its own AI models built on Adobe Firefly Foundry

Adobe and The Walt Disney Company announced a multi-year strategic alliance on November 9, 2026, at the Adobe MAX conference. The key part of it for production is that Disney, together with Adobe, will build its own generative models on the Firefly Foundry platform. They will be trained on Disney's “world knowledge”: character attributes, environments and visual styles. According to the companies, such models should deliver a commercially safe result that is ready for use in production.

Part of this work is already under way. The Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development division, which develops theme parks, is using Firefly Foundry in its pipeline. It has a model that turns a hand-drawn sketch into two-dimensional concept art, and a custom model for image generation.

What Disney gets from Adobe

Adobe has received the status of Disney's official partner for AI innovation. Under the terms of the alliance, the studio will get early access to Adobe's newest technologies, including four products:

• Adobe Firefly, generative AI for creative tasks;
• Adobe Firefly Foundry, a service for private models built for a specific customer;
• Adobe Premiere for editing;
• Adobe Photoshop for working with images.

In addition, Adobe will dedicate separate engineering and research resources to Disney's production pipeline.

Adobe's technologies and the custom models will be used for concepting in Disney's innovation labs and in the pipelines for park and cruise ship development. The companies call the Foundry models “human-centered and artist-directed.” The press release makes a separate promise to protect creators and their work.

The companies do not specify exactly which types of models Disney will get. The platform allows for various options: at its launch in October 2025, Adobe described Firefly Foundry as a private model service for images, video, audio, vector graphics and 3D. Such models are trained on a customer's intellectual property catalogs and can be built on top of the base Firefly models. They are connected in Creative Cloud, the Firefly app, Express and GenStudio. Whether Disney's data stays exclusively inside its own models is not stated directly in the announcement.

Parks, the studio and sports

Divisions from all three of Disney's business segments are involved in the alliance: Entertainment, Sports and Experiences.

• Parks and cruises. Imagineering already uses Foundry for sketches and concepts. Adobe talked about its collaboration with this division back in June 2026.
• Film. Adobe has joined the StudioLAB program as an innovation partner of The Walt Disney Studios. Its specialists will work with the studio's artists and technologists to explore and expand internal creative processes. StudioLAB opened in 2018 as the studio's technology hub; its first partners included Accenture Interactive and Cisco.
• Sports. ESPN and Adobe will look for ways AI can help with fan engagement and content delivery, and for new ways to use the ESPN archive. Joint projects with StudioLAB and ESPN Edge are already in progress.

The second part of the agreement is about marketing. Adobe will promote its technology together with Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge and StudioLAB, and will expand its presence on Disney's media platforms. The companies plan to show joint projects at Adobe Summit, Adobe MAX and other industry conferences. New activities will appear throughout the term of the alliance. Financial terms are not named in the announcement.

Hannah Elsakr, Adobe's vice president of new business ventures in generative AI, describes the agreement as a continuation of the companies' many years of work:

“Today's announcement opens the next chapter in our relationship: two companies will build a new creative foundation in which AI is thoughtfully used as an accelerator of artistic intent, creativity and guest engagement.”

Disney's two AI strategies

Comparing this agreement with last year's suggests that Disney is pursuing AI along two different tracks. In December 2025, the studio reached a deal with OpenAI on a three-year license. Under it, Sora generates short clips from user prompts featuring more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, and Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI. That agreement faces the fans: generation is handled by an external platform, and the characters leave the studio. The alliance with Adobe points inward: the models are built on Disney's own property and are intended for its creative teams, who work in Photoshop and Premiere.

For concept artists and environment designers this apparently means a new stage of pre-production. A model that knows what the studio's characters and locations look like can deliver options in the required style on the first iteration, with the artist picking and refining them. It will probably be most noticeable for teams that produce concepts in large volumes, such as Imagineering and StudioLAB.

For ordinary Creative Cloud subscribers the alliance offers nothing directly: Disney's models are private. But Adobe now has a showcase customer for Foundry. In spring 2026, the company reached an agreement with NVIDIA on a new generation of Firefly models, and Foundry is set to get NVIDIA's compute technologies. If the collaboration with Disney delivers, other studios with large character catalogs will probably start considering the same route. Open questions remain about whose work exactly goes into the training data, how artists' contributions are accounted for and what part of the work will stay manual. The announcement has no answers to them.

What is pushing Disney toward private models based on its own characters: control over its property, savings in pre-production, legal risks?