Studios v. MiniMax

Three studios, one Chinese defendant

Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery compete for the same audiences and the same box-office weekends. They do not typically file the same lawsuit. In September 2025 they did, jointly suing MiniMax, the company behind the Hailuo AI image and video generator, in the Central District of California.

The joint filing came ten days after Warner Bros. Discovery sued Midjourney alone, suggesting a coordinated studio strategy against video-generation tools rather than a one-off dispute. MiniMax is the first primarily China-based developer to draw that coordinated fire.

What the studios allege

The complaint alleges Hailuo was built on the studios' copyrighted works, described in the filing as "pirated and plundered" at massive scale, and that even simple prompts return recognizable, downloadable images and videos of Darth Vader, the Minions, Wonder Woman and other studio characters, watermarked with MiniMax's Hailuo branding.

The studios also single out MiniMax’s own marketing, which pitched Hailuo as a "Hollywood studio in your pocket." Using famous characters to sell a product, the studios argue, compounds the underlying training-data claim rather than existing separately from it.

“A "Hollywood studio in your pocket."”— MiniMax marketing copy, cited in the studios’ complaint, C.D. Cal.

The jurisdiction question

The harder legal question sits underneath the copyright claims: can a US court reach a Chinese AI company at all? MiniMax has no obvious US headquarters, but it markets Hailuo directly to US consumers and processes their prompts and payments. That commercial contact is the studios' hook for personal jurisdiction.

If the court accepts jurisdiction and lets the case proceed, offshore training stops functioning as a jurisdictional shield for any AI company selling into the US market. If it does not, plaintiffs may need a different theory entirely — going after US-based distributors, payment processors or app stores instead of the model developer.

The dismissal fight, unresolved

MiniMax has asked the court to throw out the case; the studios have urged the judge to keep it alive. As of July 2026, no ruling on that motion has been reported. That leaves the jurisdictional and merits questions both open, with nothing yet decided about whether Hailuo's outputs or training data constitute infringement under US law.

What offshore training means for data provenance

For data buyers, this case is a preview of a harder diligence problem: a vendor whose training corpus and development happened entirely outside US courts’ easy reach. Domestic chain-of-title questions — who licensed what, when — get murkier when the entity that assembled the dataset sits in a jurisdiction with different discovery rules and no guarantee of enforcement even after a US judgment.

Anyone licensing or integrating a foreign-built video or image model should ask not just what the training data was, but whether a US court could ever actually test that answer. Studios v. MiniMax is the live test case for that question.