The Truth About the Disney/Pixar partnership... MANY ANSWERS

[CGI_Clownfish]

sigh Okay… I didn’t want to worry too much, but I recently got the book To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios by Karen Paik, and I looked at a couple of the little articles in there about sequels and the truth about the Disney/Pixar tie. It’s beginning to look like it really wasn’t what Pixar wanted.

Some of this may be long to read, but it holds a whole lot of answers to what’s going on, and I just felt like I should show you guys exactly what they said… The stuff in bold letters are the things that stuck out the most to me personally.

Pixar had the right of first refusal in the production of any sequel to its movies, but it could not block Disney from making a sequel if Disney wanted to do so.

-Excerpt from the book To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios by Karen Paik

“We did it (Toy Story 2) because we’d started it and we were going to follow through with it,” said (Ed) Catmull. Any future sequels, though — including Toy Story 3, which Pixar had a great idea for and which both Disney and Pixar wanted to see made—would only be feasible for Pixar if they counted toward the five films they owed Disney. Otherwise, every time Pixar made a film featuring characters it didn’t own, and that it would have to split profits on, it was forgoing the opportunity to make a film that they would own, and that they would keep full profits on.

As Catmull said, "We were a public company, and our investors on the outside had built into their plans the fact that we were going to come to the end of the five films for Disney and start making films we owned outright. And we really didn’t have the leeway to just throw in another film and not have it count. So we felt that Toy Story 3 should count, especially since it would clearly be a good deal for both parties.

Executives at Disney, however, felt otherwise, informing Pixar that they would not accept Toy Story 3 as one of the five movies it owed. In time, they made it clear to Pixar that Disney would eventually make sequels to all of the Pixar films, with or without Pixar’s participation. As painful as it was to contemplate someone else making Toy Story 3, Pixar decided it could not back down from on the issue. “They wanted a sequel to every film at a film a year,” said Catmull. “That was more than we could handle even if we wanted to do some.” If they gave in and made the projects simply to protect their characters, they would be compromising their creative future—they’d either have to fill their plate with sequels, or resort to the “A team/B team” caste system they had repudiated in Toy Story 2.

-Excerpt from the book To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios by Karen Paik

In January 2004, Pixar announced that it was breaking off talks with Disney and that it would begin to explore distribution options with other studios. John Lasseter described the day of the announcement as one of the worst in his life. “Steve Jobs stayed at the negotiating table with Disney about two to three years longer because of me. Because I wanted our characters. These characters are like our children, and it just killed me to think of the people who forced Cinderella II into existence making sequels to our films, running our characters into the ground. I fought and fought and fought, but finally got to the point where I realized, we can’t do a deal with them.” As saddened as Lasseter was at the prospect of leaving the studio’s characters behind at Disney, he realized, he said, that to continue in the relationship under the existing circumstances would have compromised the studio’s future.

-Excerpt from the book To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios by Karen Paik

But it was this quote from John Lasseter that put everything in perspective for me… I understand now why the partnership had to take place.

“We were going to go off and and create great new characters in the future; it was going to be fine, but it was still really hard. Creating the characters for our films took thirteen years out of our lives. We’re not like the guys doing the deals; they can close the deal, congratulate each other, and then—they’re done. They walk away. We were going to be starting all over again. You reboot the computer and your hard drive’s empty. But what else were we going to do? We had no choice—we could not have made a deal with Disney as it was.”

-John Lasseter, quote from the book To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios by Karen Paik

The book also says that some of those at the studios are optimistic about “a new era” for Disney and Pixar… I can only hope they’re right.

[lennonluvr9]

Yeah that book answered a lot of my questions about that as well. I’ll say that I initially had the same reaction as some of the animators, I wanted to see what Pixar could do on their own too. But I do understand what Disney can bring to the table.

[CGI_Clownfish]

But the thing about Disney eventually making sequels to all the Pixar films with or without Pixar - how can they do that I mean, the people who created those characters are employed at Pixar, not Disney.

[uruseiranma]

I think it’s because while PIXAR did create the characters, they were mainly involved in a deal with Disney where Disney had a greater amount of leverage in control. Though they both have a yes/no take on the material, Disney being the larger company had more control.

If you may recall, when Eisner and his cronies decided to make Toy Story 3 without PIXAR, they started ‘Circle 7 Animation,’ which was basically an off-the-lot facility that would create TS3. From what I understand, TS3 would have it’s models created from scratch-they never said if PIXAR was ever forced to hand over character models, concept art, item textures, etc.

[CanDo_1]

Well some of this to me is hard to grasp because I never thought of Disney being that way and I did see an article on TV that said that the whole reason Pixar was in existist was because of Disney paying so much money to them.