Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery, formed in the 2022 merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, controls a century of pop culture: the Warner Bros. film library, DC Comics, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, and Cartoon Network. On September 5, 2025, it became the third Hollywood major to sue AI image generator Midjourney in Los Angeles federal court, following the joint June suit by The Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal.

Superman v. Midjourney

The 87-page complaint alleged “systematic, ongoing, and willful” infringement, showing that even oblique prompts like “classic comic book superhero battle” yielded recognizable Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, and Rick and Morty imagery. It accused Midjourney of “brazenly” dispensing the company’s intellectual property, and noted pointedly that Midjourney had once restricted such generations, then lifted the protections — evidence, the studio argued, of a calculated decision to offer copyright owners nothing. The suit seeks damages, disgorged profits, and an injunction.

Less than two weeks later WBD joined Disney and NBCUniversal in suing Chinese AI firm MiniMax over its Hailuo video generator. Midjourney’s defense across the cases leans on rulings in authors’ suits against Anthropic and Meta, arguing that training on copyrighted works is transformative fair use — an argument that does not obviously cover verbatim character outputs, which is where the studios have aimed.

As with its co-plaintiffs, WBD’s quarrel is with unlicensed use rather than the technology: the company has publicly explored AI tools in production and streaming. But with DC superheroes among the most-prompted characters in generative AI, it had perhaps more direct exposure than any studio except Disney.