Excerpts from an MSNBC article:
“Ants,” the story of an insect’s struggle to break out of
its daily drudgery, is a joint-venture project of DreamWorks
and computer animator Pacific Data Images. “Bugs,”
co-produced and distributed by Disney, will be Pixar
Animation’s follow-up to last year’s blockbuster, “Toy
Story.” (The “Bugs” plot is being kept under wraps.)
“We’ve grown up in this industry together,” says PDI
President Carl Rosendahl, referring to Pixar. Despite its close ties with, and heavy reliance on, Disney, Pixar steadfastly insists it will remain independent. “We intend to be the second great animation studio
that’s ever been built,” says Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs, the
Apple Computer inventor. PDI, by contrast, sold a 40 percent stake to
DreamWorks this spring in an arrangement that binds it to
DreamWorks for any computer-animation feature film it
works on. Ultimately, Rosendahl says, PDI would like to
follow Pixar and go public within the next few years, but
even so, the company appears indelibly linked to
DreamWorks.
As Jobs tells it, Pixar relies on Disney not so much for
story development as for fine tuning. “They are the world’s
best critics,” he says, explaining that Disney executives
typically identify weaknesses in Pixar stories, but leave them
up to Pixar to correct. “They won’t tell us how to fix it,”
Jobs says.
One thing Jobs may want to fix before long is the
company’s contract with Disney, which runs through two
more films. Currently, Disney bears most of the cost of
movie development and marketing, but it reaps the lion’s
share of rewards in return. “Toy Story,” a movie that cost
$40 million to $50 million to make, has raked in about $350
million at domestic and foreign box offices. Pixar’s take:
about $40 million.
Neither Jobs nor Disney is willing to comment on a
possible renegotiation of terms. But as one analyst notes,
“Disney is going to have to give something up to keep that
relationship going.” |
