TikTok creators can now legally use Disney characters 🐭

Good morning. Disney is handing TikTok creators the keys to Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, and putting the results on Disney+ itself. ElevenLabs locked in a giant enterprise deal that shows just how much money is piling into AI voice. And an AI video of Tom Holland and Zendaya having a South Indian wedding is all over your feed, sarees, jasmine garlands, banana leaves and all. Which of these would you actually make something with? Hit reply and tell me. We cover all three below.

Disney and TikTok announced a first-of-its-kind deal on August 5 that lets creators legally make short-form videos using characters and scenes from Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and FX. You opt into the program, you get sanctioned access to the IP, and a curated pick of those videos runs on both TikTok and inside Verts, the vertical video feed on Disney+. That last part is the twist, it's the first time TikTok content will play on another platform.

For years, making anything with Disney characters was a fast way to get a video pulled and a copyright strike on your account. This flips that into a green light, at least for creators inside the program. Disney tried the AI route first with a billion-dollar Sora deal last year, and it fell apart when Sora shut down in March. They came back to human creators.

Here’s the pattern: Legacy media companies now treat creator short-form as a real distribution channel, one worth licensing their crown jewels for. Netflix and HBO Max are racing to fill the same kind of vertical feeds. These programs all court the same profile: creators who post consistent, on-brand short-form across every platform without missing a beat. Building that habit now is what gets you picked for the next one of these deals, even if you sit this round out.

ElevenLabs, the AI voice company most creators know for cloning and text-to-speech, just landed a partnership with enterprise giant DXC that puts its voice tech inside a company operating in dozens of countries. It also revealed it put money into the round that values ElevenLabs at around 11 billion dollars, roughly triple what the company was worth a year ago.

When a voice company hits an 11 billion dollar valuation and starts getting embedded into giant enterprises, the message is that AI voice has graduated from creator toy to core infrastructure. That means the tool you use for video voiceovers is being funded and improved at scale, which is good news for the quality and language coverage creators get downstream.

AI voices are about to be genuinely everywhere, which raises the bar on creators. When every brand and every hold line sounds polished and synthetic, a generic AI voiceover stops feeling like a creative choice and starts feeling like the default. The way you stand out shifts to writing, timing, and personality, the stuff a voice model still can't hand you.

A hyper-realistic AI video of Tom Holland's Peter Parker and Zendaya's MJ getting married in a traditional South Indian ceremony took over Instagram and X this week, now with over 4 million likes. No tuxedos or white dresses. The couple exchanges vows in silk sarees and jasmine garlands, eats off banana leaves, and the whole thing is styled like a real wedding video down to the lighting and the guests.

This is fan fiction leveling up in real time. Fans have always imagined their favorite characters in new settings, but it used to live in written stories and still-image edits. Now one person with a prompt can produce a wedding video realistic enough that people double-take. The reason this one hit is cultural specificity, it's not a generic AI wedding, it's a lovingly detailed South Indian one, which made a huge audience feel seen by a scene Hollywood would never actually film.

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-Kevin