The cult-favorite image platform enters the AI video race—offering animation for the masses, but legal landmines may slow the sprint.

Midjourney, the image-generation darling of the generative AI boom, just crossed a major creative threshold. The company has officially released its first-ever AI video generation tool—marking a shift from static art to motion content as it joins the fray of startups and tech titans chasing the holy grail of synthetic video.

Dubbed “V1,” the new video model enables Midjourney’s nearly 20 million users to transform still images into short 5-to-20 second clips, guided by text prompts and stylized movement settings. The move signals Midjourney’s leap into multimedia creation—while simultaneously throwing it into the deep end of a fierce content-tech arms race.

“It’s surpassing all my expectations,” wrote Perplexity AI designer Phi Hoang in a post on X, echoing the buzz among creators who have long hailed Midjourney’s image quality as best-in-class.

But as the company celebrates the rollout of its video product—available immediately through its standard $10/month subscription tier—it’s also facing a lawsuit that could redefine the legal limits of AI content creation.

Two Clicks to Motion

The tool allows users to generate a still using Midjourney’s existing image models (including the latest v7), or upload an external image, then select an “Animate” option. Each job outputs four five-second clips with optional extensions up to 20 seconds. Motion can be fine-tuned via text prompts and toggles for low- or high-movement modes.

Initial impressions from users: smooth, intuitive, and visually rich—though limited. The clips are short, there’s no audio, and editing is minimal. But for Midjourney’s loyal base, it’s a natural evolution and a surprisingly affordable one: each video generation costs roughly 8x that of a still image, which breaks down to a comparable cost per second.

A new “relax mode” for video—offering delayed delivery at lower compute cost—is also in testing for Pro users, a nod to Midjourney’s strategy of balancing affordability with scalability.

A Crowded, Cutthroat Market

Midjourney now enters an increasingly congested AI video landscape—where names like OpenAI (Sora), Google (Veo), Luma (Dream Machine), Runway (Gen‑4), and Pika Labs are already battling for market share, features, and fidelity. Several competitors already offer longer clips, audio generation, re-stylization tools, or even rudimentary spatial controls.

While Midjourney leans into simplicity, rivals like Luma’s Dream Machine and Runway’s Gen‑4 are pushing boundaries with co-generated sound and AI camera systems. Veo’s cinematic physics and OpenAI’s anticipated multimodal synthesis with Sora promise to further raise the stakes.

Midjourney’s value proposition? Creative quality at scale—delivered through a frictionless UX and aggressively priced plans.

The IP Storm Overhead

But Midjourney’s moment arrives under a darkening legal cloud. Just days before launch, Disney and Universal filed a sweeping lawsuit against the company, accusing it of infringing on their intellectual property by training on—and enabling users to generate—characters like Darth Vader, Iron Man, Bart Simpson, and Shrek.

“Piracy is piracy. And the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing,” said Disney General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez in a statement.

The suit names Midjourney’s new video tool explicitly, alleging the company began training the system on copyrighted characters prior to release, with the intent to replicate them in motion. The complaint details the platform’s $300 million revenue in 2024 and its global user base, framing Midjourney as a commercial operation built on unauthorized creative labor.

The case could become a bellwether for how U.S. copyright law applies to AI training data, outputs, and user-generated content. For enterprise users—especially in entertainment and advertising—the platform’s legal exposure may prompt caution despite its price and ease of use.

The Bigger Play: A “World Model”

Despite the scrutiny, Midjourney’s ambitions remain bold. The company has described its video tool as just one piece of a much larger puzzle: building a full “world model” system—AI capable of rendering real-time, interactive 3D environments from scratch.

The goal? A user could one day issue a command like “walk through a Moroccan marketplace at sunset,” and be placed inside an evolving, explorable digital world—complete with responsive visuals and (eventually) generative sound.

This puts Midjourney on a collision course with other ambitious players. Startups like Odyssey are developing systems that predict “the next state of the world” and render video at 30 fps with camera controls. Runway’s Gen‑4 already supports dynamic zooms, arcs, and subject tracking—blurred lines between filmmaking and simulation.

The Bottom Line

Midjourney’s video debut is a logical and compelling extension of its already beloved image-generation platform. It democratizes motion design, offers a low-cost entry point, and signals the platform’s intent to evolve into a comprehensive creative system.

But between its missing features and mounting legal risks, the tool also highlights the tension at the heart of the generative video boom: dazzling possibilities clouded by unanswered questions of ownership, authorship, and accountability.

Midjourney’s challenge now? Continue innovating—without crossing the line.