Hollywood
Disney’s film studios clock over $6.5 billion at the global box office: Q3 results
CALIFORNIA: The Walt Disney Company posted a robust start to fiscal 2026, with chief executive Bob Iger and chief financial officer Hugh Johnston pointing to blockbuster films, accelerating streaming momentum and record sports viewership as key drivers of first-quarter performance.
In an executive commentary on Monday, the duo said recent achievements reflected “tremendous progress” in strengthening the company and positioning its businesses for long-term growth.
Disney’s film studios delivered more than $6.5 billion at the global box office in calendar year 2025, marking its third biggest year ever and its ninth time as the world’s top studio in a decade. Two recent releases: Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash, each crossed the $1 billion mark globally.
The company said 37 of the 60 films worldwide to surpass $1 billion in box-office takings have come from Disney studios, four times more than any rival. The success of branded franchises also lifted viewership on Disney plus and drove footfall at theme parks.
Zootopia 2 emerged as the highest-grossing Hollywood film ever in China, earning over $630 million to date, while boosting attendance at the Zootopia-themed land at Shanghai Disneyland.
Across television and streaming, Disney dominated audience charts. Seven of the ten most-watched shows of 2025 streamed on Disney plus or Hulu, according to Nielsen, with Bluey retaining its crown as the most-streamed series in the US for a second year, clocking 45 billion minutes viewed. ABC led US broadcast television among adults aged 18–49, with hits including High Potential, Abbott Elementary and Dancing with the Stars.
Streaming remained a strategic growth engine, with Disney highlighting international expansion, investment in local content and a wave of product enhancements on Disney plus. The company is rolling out new advertising technology, including AI-powered planning tools, and plans to introduce a curated slate of Sora-generated content following a licensing agreement with OpenAI.
In sports, ESPN tightened its grip as the industry leader, capturing more than 30 per cent of total sports viewership across networks. The quarter saw ESPN’s strongest college football regular season since 2011, while ABC delivered its best season since 2006. The College Football National Championship drew 30.1 million viewers, becoming the second most-watched cable event ever.
Monday Night Football recorded its second-highest audience in two decades, with Disney’s NFL divisional game attracting 38 million viewers, the most watched event in the company’s history.
Disney also expanded ESPN’s rights portfolio, signing a new three-year Major League Baseball deal that makes ESPN the exclusive distributor of MLB.TV. In January, the company closed its acquisition of NFL Network and associated media assets, including linear rights to NFL RedZone.
The launch of ESPN Unlimited marked a further push into direct-to-consumer sports streaming, with the company reporting strong early adoption and engagement.
Meanwhile, Disney’s Experiences division continued to ramp up expansion. Next month will see the opening of World of Frozen at the revamped Disney Adventure World in Disneyland Paris, nearly doubling the size of the resort’s second park.
New attractions tied to Bluey, Toy Story 5 and The Mandalorian and Grogu are also in development across Disney’s parks.
In cruise tourism, Disney recently launched the Disney Destiny, while the Disney Adventure: its first ship based in Asia, is set for its maiden voyage from Singapore on 10 March. The fleet will rise to eight ships, with five more planned beyond fiscal 2026.
Iger and Johnston said the quarter reflected disciplined execution and strategic investment across Disney’s core growth pillars, setting the company on a clear path for sustained expansion.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
