Toys ‘R’ Us revives its brand with OpenAI’s Sora

Toys “R” Us went bankrupt in 2018 and shuttered its final 800 stores, basically fading into a ghost brand kept alive by licensing deals. Now, it is trying to crawl back into the cultural conversation using the hottest tech tool on the planet.

Brand management firm WHP Global, which owns the toy chain, just premiered what it calls the first-ever brand film made with OpenAI's unreleased Sora. The short, recounting the origin of founder Charles Lazarus and Geoffrey the Giraffe, debuted in front of advertising executives at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival and is currently streaming on toysrus.com.

The humans behind the prompt box

While early headlines hailed the video as a fully AI-generated commercial, the production reality looks much more conventional. Creative agency Native Foreign put about a dozen people on the project to shepherd the footage across the finish line.

Director Nik Kleverov briefly revealed on X that Sora got them roughly 80% to 85% of the way there, with human editors applying corrective VFX on top to fix flaws. Curiously, Kleverov wiped those behind-the-scenes posts shortly after journalists began asking questions.

Viewers also caught the agency recycling an older Sora clip of a bicycle repair shop that it had already showcased back in March, simply grading and editing it into the new narrative. It turns out even frontier video models still need a human cleanup crew.

A legacy brand chasing new shiny objects

Turning to hyped tech is an old playbook for Toys “R” Us. Right around its 2017 bankruptcy filing, the company rolled out an augmented reality app in a desperate attempt to lure kids back to physical aisles, only to shutter everything months later.

Today, WHP Global has toy counters inside Macy’s stores and wants to open up to 24 standalone flagship stores, alongside locations in airports and cruise ships. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been aggressively pitching Sora to Hollywood studios, but while film executives remain hesitant over training data transparency, desperate brand marketers are jumping at the bait.

Why it matters

For video creators, this debut grounds the wild expectations surrounding generative video. An AI model that gets you 85% of the way there is incredible for concepting, but commercial work lives and dies in that remaining 15%. You still need seasoned VFX artists to paint out hallucinations, fix continuity, and grade the final cut. Do not expect to fire your production team just yet.

For the AI landscape, we think this shows where the real early money is. While OpenAI courts movie studios that are terrified of copyright backlash, corporate advertising has a much higher tolerance for AI experimentation. High-end video models will likely conquer 30-second agency spots long before they ever touch feature films.

WHP Global played this smartly from a pure PR perspective, capturing global headlines at Cannes with minimal production spend. But the risk is confusing viral novelty with turnaround strategy. In 2017, AR could not save declining foot traffic, and in 2024, a Sora-generated nostalgic clip will not magically make warehouse toy retail viable again.