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A.I.’s ‘Lazy Sunday’ Moment

OpenAI’s new video generator, Sora 2, trained on copyrighted material and celebrity likenesses, has thrust Hollywood into uncharted legal territory and put Sam Altman on a collision course with studios like Netflix and Disney.

Sam Altman
Perhaps most offensive, studios that don’t want to help fuel OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman’s trillion-dollar dream of exponential growth and supplanting Google must opt out, which companies like Netflix and Disney are furiously attempting to do. Photo: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images
Matthew Belloni
October 2, 2025

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I’m old enough to remember the early days of YouTube, when its growth was fueled by permission-free clips from The Daily Show and SNL’s “Lazy Sunday.” The Hollywood studios didn’t quite know what to do with this new, unapologetically infringing platform: sue, as Viacom did, or try to police and eventually make deals to promote and monetize the content. Two decades later, Google-owned YouTube is now the biggest media business in the world, and those once-dominant Hollywood studios are… not.