Midjourney just flipped the script. In a copyright battle that could reshape entertainment, the AI company now insists Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. open their books on how they deploy artificial intelligence behind studio walls.
The demand lands as part of discovery in a lawsuit filed last year. Studios accused Midjourney of letting users generate images of protected characters. Think Darth Vader, Elsa, Superman. Midjourney says its training on public images counts as fair use. Now it wants proof the studios do the same thing.
Discovery Clash Exposes Industry Hypocrisy Claims
A magistrate judge limited what the studios must hand over. Only consumer-facing AI projects made the cut. Midjourney calls that restriction unfair. It filed a motion to overturn the order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Richlin, according to Variety. The company seeks business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights and board presentations on AI. Anything that shows how studios use these tools for storyboarding, ideation or marketing films and TV shows.
Why does this matter? Because if the studios train their own models on unlicensed material, it undercuts their claims of market harm. It also bolsters Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands arguments. “If Plaintiffs are developing image-generating AI models — trained on unlicensed, third-party copyrighted data — for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content,” the filing states, per TechCrunch.
The motion argues the current limits let studios “cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.” Documents they withhold, the company says, are “precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing.”
Short answer. The studios hate it. Their lead attorney David Singer dismissed the push as a “fishing expedition.” He told the court Midjourney simply needs to stop copying movies and TV shows without permission. “Plaintiffs do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business, but rather simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] famous characters without authorization,” Singer said.
But the case runs deeper than one motion. Disney and NBCUniversal filed suit against Midjourney in June 2025. Warner Bros. joined later that September with its own claims over characters like Superman and Batman. The complaints paint Midjourney as an “endless pit of plagiarism.” Users type simple prompts and get near-perfect replicas of iconic figures. Studios want an injunction that could force major changes to how Midjourney operates.
Midjourney counters that its models learn from vast internet scrapes much like any search engine or human artist studies existing work. Fair use, it insists, covers the training phase. Outputs that copy specific characters? The company has added guardrails over time. Yet the legal fight continues.
Recent coverage shows the tension spreading. Hollywood assistants turn to AI tools despite reservations as workloads grow and staff shrinks, The Hollywood Reporter reported just yesterday. Conferences like AI on the Lot draw thousands who see both promise and peril in the technology. Some studios invest quietly in AI startups. Others license characters for tools like OpenAI’s Sora.
And the discovery fight isn’t abstract. If Midjourney wins broader access, it could force uncomfortable disclosures. Did studios scrape their own libraries? License third-party datasets? Build private models that mimic public ones? Those answers might sway a jury on whether Midjourney caused real harm or simply accelerated a shift already underway.
Bobby Ghajar, representing Midjourney, put it plainly in the motion. Evidence of studios doing “the very thing they seek to punish” goes “to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses.”
Studios built empires on controlling their intellectual property. Now that control faces disruption from tools anyone can access. Midjourney’s latest move doesn’t just defend its own practices. It spotlights how deeply AI already embeds in Hollywood workflows. From concept art to marketing visuals, the technology appears everywhere.
Recent X discussions echo this reversal. Users call it the “uno reverse” on Hollywood. One post noted studios can’t claim AI poses existential risk while running their own experiments. Another highlighted that every major player experiments with the tech. Disney invested in OpenAI. Lionsgate took stakes in video generation firms.
The case sits before U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt. He will decide whether to expand discovery. A broader ruling might encourage similar demands in other AI copyright suits. Narrower one keeps the focus on Midjourney’s outputs.
Either way, the battle signals a larger reckoning. Copyright law strains under generative systems that remix existing work at scale. Courts wrestle with training data, output similarity and market effects. Hollywood wants protection for its characters. AI firms want room to innovate. The public gets tools that blur lines between inspiration and infringement.
Midjourney itself keeps evolving. The company reports strong revenue and eyes video generation. Yet the lawsuit hangs over its future. A loss could mean licensing deals or fundamental changes to its model. A win might validate fair use for training and pressure studios to disclose more of their own AI adoption.
So the motion represents more than legal tactics. It forces a conversation studios preferred to avoid. How much AI do they actually use? Where does their data come from? And can they credibly attack a tool they quietly rely upon?
Answers won’t come quickly. The case remains in early stages with no trial date set. But this discovery dispute already reveals fault lines. Hypocrisy claims fly both ways. Studios call Midjourney a piracy machine. Midjourney calls studios selective enforcers who benefit from the same techniques.
Industry watchers note the shift. After years of resistance during labor strikes, Hollywood now integrates AI with caution. Tools assist animation pipelines. Writers use them for brainstorming. Visual effects teams experiment with generation. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in entertainment. It’s who controls it and who pays when it copies too closely.
Midjourney’s push for transparency might not win the full war. But it ensures studios can’t hide their own experiments while attacking others. That alone changes the power dynamic. And in Hollywood, where image matters as much as substance, the optics sting.
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