Disney has somewhere between 16 and 30 hours of Robin Williams riffing as the Genie that never made it into Aladdin. His will keeps nearly all of it locked up until August 11, 2039.
And the reason goes back to the $75,000 Disney paid him for the part.
That's him in the booth in this clip, and you can see why the tapes piled up. He kept going off script, and the animators more or less had to animate whatever came out of him. Eric Goldberg ended up building the Genie around Robin's old standup bits, and a former Disney exec later said that when he was on, he was doing about 30 jokes a minute.
$75,000 was union scale. His normal rate back then was around $8 million a movie, so he took less than 1% of what he usually got. He said he did it to make something for his kids, and he asked for one thing in return. Disney couldn't use his voice to sell toys and fast food, and the Genie couldn't take up more than a quarter of the ads.
Aladdin made over $500 million. The Genie ended up in Burger King promotions and plastered across bus shelters all over LA. When Robin complained publicly, Disney sources told the LA Times it was sour grapes over the paycheck, and the studio's line was that he'd signed off on the marketing. At some point a Picasso showed up as a peace offering, reportedly worth around $1 million.
He still refused to do the sequel. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, played the Genie instead, and Robin only came back after Disney got a new studio chief in 1994 who apologized in public.
You'd think that was the end of it. Then his estate plan went public in 2015, a year after he died.
His trust gave his name, signature, photo and likeness to a charity and blocked anyone from using them commercially for 25 years. Lawyers back then wrote about it as a way to stop somebody from making a Robin Williams hologram or dropping him into a new movie with CGI, which sounded a little out there in 2015. A former Disney exec later said that clause is why all those Genie outtakes never got turned into another Aladdin movie. When Disney made a short for its 100th anniversary in 2023, the family okayed exactly one unheard Genie line.
Then Sora 2 came out in October 2025, and suddenly anybody could make a fake Robin Williams video in a few minutes. People flooded TikTok with them, fake ads, fake award show bits. It got bad enough that his daughter Zelda posted, "Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad."
Those Genie tapes are going to sit in Disney's vault for almost 13 more years, because a guy who got paid $75,000 in 1992 made sure of it.
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(video by thequantara)