Hollywood’s ongoing battle with artificial intelligence ramped up this week as Warner Bros. Discovery filed a sweeping copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the world’s most popular AI image and video generators. The move, announced on September 4, 2025, in federal court in Los Angeles, marks the third major studio—after Disney and Universal—to take legal action against the San Francisco-based tech company. This development signals a growing sense of urgency and unity among entertainment giants determined to protect their iconic intellectual property from what they describe as unchecked digital exploitation.
According to Variety, Warner Bros. Discovery’s complaint accuses Midjourney of willfully creating and distributing images and videos that feature beloved characters such as Superman, Batman, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry, all without studio authorization. The lawsuit alleges that Midjourney’s technology enables millions of users to generate hyper-realistic content starring these figures, blurring the line between homage and outright piracy. The studio is seeking statutory damages—potentially up to $150,000 for each infringed work—and an injunction to halt further infringement.
“Midjourney thinks it is above the law,” Warner Bros. asserts in its complaint. “Without any consent or authorization by Warner Bros. Discovery, Midjourney brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property as if it were its own.” The filing further claims that Midjourney made a “calculated and profit-driven” choice to remove guardrails that once prevented users from creating infringing video content, even as lawsuits from Disney and Universal were already underway.
The stakes are high for Warner Bros., which points to the massive value of its creative assets. The studio notes that its DC Extended Universe films alone—released between 2018 and 2023—generated more than $7 billion in global ticket sales, averaging $479 million per film. This, Warner Bros. argues, only underscores the harm posed by AI-generated works that can instantly replicate or remix its characters into new cartoons, trailers, or even fake movie episodes, all without oversight, licensing, or compensation.
The complaint doesn’t pull punches about the scope of the alleged infringement. Warner Bros. claims Midjourney built its AI model using “illegal copies” of studio material and actively encouraged users to produce and download images and videos of its characters “in every imaginable scene.” The studio’s legal team, which also represents Disney and Universal, maintains that Midjourney’s approach confuses customers about what is legal, misleading subscribers into thinking the platform’s outputs are authorized by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Disney and Universal’s earlier lawsuits—filed in June 2025 and also pending in federal court in Los Angeles—echo many of the same grievances. According to filings cited by The Associated Press, the studios describe Midjourney’s service as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that feeds off some of the most treasured characters in modern entertainment. Examples listed in their complaints include Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me.
Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, put it bluntly: “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.” NBCUniversal’s executive vice president and general counsel Kim Harris echoed this sentiment, stating the case was brought to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
Midjourney, for its part, has pushed back against the studios’ accusations. In a recent court filing, the company argued that its AI system “had to be trained on billions of publicly available images” to learn visual concepts and link them to language. “Training a generative AI model to understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use, a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have considered the issue,” Midjourney wrote, referencing recent rulings in lawsuits brought by published authors against Anthropic and Meta.
Midjourney has also emphasized that its customers are responsible for following the platform’s terms of use, which prohibit infringing on others’ intellectual property rights. In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz compared the service to a search engine, arguing, “Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture? Obviously, it’s allowed for people… To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”
This defense—rooted in the legal doctrine of “transformative fair use”—has become a flashpoint in the broader debate over AI and copyright. While some courts have shown support for the idea that AI training on publicly available data can constitute fair use, the entertainment industry’s lawsuits suggest that the boundaries remain far from settled. The studios argue that Midjourney’s outputs are not transformative enough to escape infringement claims, especially when the AI can generate images that closely mimic or directly copy protected characters.
What’s clear is that Midjourney’s rapid evolution—from image generation to video creation and even a 24/7 streaming channel—has raised the stakes for Hollywood. The more that AI platforms behave like content studios, the more legal scrutiny and pressure they can expect. For Warner Bros., Disney, and Universal, the fight is not just about protecting iconic characters; it’s about setting ground rules for a future in which artificial intelligence could upend traditional notions of creativity, licensing, and compensation.
As the legal battle unfolds, both sides are digging in for what could be a landmark confrontation. Hollywood’s united front sends a clear message: the days of AI companies operating in a legal gray zone are coming to an end. Meanwhile, Midjourney and its supporters insist that innovation and fair use must be protected if AI is to fulfill its promise as a new tool for creative expression.
Where this clash of titans will end remains uncertain, but one thing is for sure—Hollywood’s copyright wars over AI-generated content are only just beginning, and the outcome will shape the future of entertainment for years to come.
