“In a town that often makes a bundle from fantasy, perhaps no bit of yarn-weaving is as hot these days as the buzz among Hollywood moguls that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will soon be chairman of Walt Disney Co.,” Ronald Grover writes for BusinessWeek. “Sure, it could happen. Talks between Disney and Jobs’s other company, Pixar Animation Studios, have been dragging on for months, and at least one iteration of the deal has Disney buying some or all of Pixar and making Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder. From there, he could get a board seat and potentially be put at the head of the table.”
“Don’t bet on it. Buying Pixar would cost Disney a bundle, maybe $8 billion or $9 billion and could send Disney’s stock into a tailspin. When the rumor first surfaced on Jan. 4, the share price promptly dropped 1.5% in the 45 minutes before the market closed that day,” Grover writes. “”It’s a near absurdity that Disney will buy Pixar out,” says David Harris, an analyst with Sanders Morris Harris, who believes it will opt instead for a deal that would extend the two companies’ 14-year deal for Disney to distribute Pixar’s films — although with the economics shifted heavily in favor of Pixar. Keeping Pixar in the Disney fold is likely crucial to Disney. The six films that Jobs & Co. have produced and Disney has distributed, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles, have all been blockbusters, and came at a time when Disney’s own fabled animation studio was struggling to find a hit. Disney had a good-size success, but far from a blockbuster, in Chicken Little.”
Grover writes, “Disney’s new CEO Bob Iger gets on well with Jobs [and] Iger is in something of a tight spot. His stock, which has started to rise during his three months on the job, is still underperforming and could use the pop he would get from an extension of the Pixar deal, which expires this summer when it delivers its last film, Cars. Still, he doesn’t want to give away the store to Jobs, and an agreement with Pixar would have two downsides for Disney: It would have to give up a huge piece of the action, and it would be ceding a prime slot in its summer lineup where it could be making far more money on one its own films.”
“Jobs owns 50.6% of Pixar and can do pretty much what he wants. He doesn’t want to sell the company he has nurtured from the struggling outfit he bought from George Lucas in 1986,” Grover writes. “On top of all that, it would be difficult to see Jobs sitting through hours of meetings over which new theme park ride to put in Disneyland or how to improve sales of Mickey Mouse dolls in Germany. And while Disney has an opening for chairman of the board — it recently extended outgoing Chairman George Mitchell’s tenure through yearend despite his retirement announcement — Jobs is a mercurial guy who doesn’t always play well with others. [Still,] stranger things have happened, although not that many. Who knows — maybe Jobs secretly wants to the Lion King.”
Full article here.
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Same old story rehashed again….
zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Pixar is not Steve Jobs, Pixar is John Lasseter. Without the creative genius of John Lasseter, Pixar would be nothing.
Straw man. Create a fictituous scenario and then debunk it. Headline still sounds sensational enough to draw readership. Example:
“Bush eats babies?
Blah blah blah blah de blah Cannot be true for the following reasons… Blah blah blah blah de blah…Still, stranger things have happened…remains to be seen.”
Real news, please.
Interesting times for Tinsel-Town. With Steven Soderbergh’s announcement that his upcoming movie “Bubble” will be released for multiple outlets (direct to DVD and theater) at the same time, traditional distribution looks like an uncertain road ahead. The industry is going to experience the same thing that traditional music distribution has, which is still evolving. Somehow though, I can’t see SJ taking the helm from Steamboat Willie, but I can see Apple leading online distribution.
“Pixar is not Steve Jobs”
50.6% ownership= Pixar IS Steve Jobs
It takes a visionary genius to hire a creative genius.
“It takes a visionary genius to hire a creative genius.”
Thank you. Could not have said it better myself.
My eyes would fall out of my head with the incrediby taky properties that Disney built it’s reputation on. To make it better, I’d bankrupt the company in about a week trying to make it have some taste and class.
Disney doesn’t want me. I’d make it a quality organization. And you can’t make the obscene profits they do and have quality at the same time.
The only Bozos who think I’d ever let myself work with Disney are idiots who have no clue what I or Pixar or Apple are about.
What are you talking about? Hiring me? I WAS Pixar when Lucas sold Pixar to Jobs!
“Those we can’t remember history are condemned to repeat it.”
Disney is a Mickey Mouse organization.
50.6%: Lasseter already worked at/started at Pixar before Steve bought into it.
Learn the history of Pixar.
The roots of Pixar was started by the Star Wars guy – George Lucas – in 1984. John Lasseter worked for Disney then was hired by George Lucas as part of his special-effects group which later became Pixar.
In 1986 Steve Jobs bought the computer effects dept. from George Lucas for $10 million…which included John Lasseter and other brilliant talents.
(George Lucas made an error in selling…)
John Lassetter is the creative genius behind Pixar. You think Steve Jobs is writing the scripts and doing the character animation and coming up with all the 3D animation???
And don´t forget Ed Catmull who in 1986 was named co-founder and technical director of Pixar. He´s the genius tech wizard that made all the 3D animation so great looking and ahead of its peers.
http://www.pixar.com/companyinfo/history/1984.html
“It takes a visionary genius to hire a creative genius.”
John Lasseter was there before Jobs bought the company. Jobs pretty much let’s Lasseter run the company for the most part (no one person has enough hours in a day to run two companies, let alone one). It takes a good leader to know their limits. Jobs money helped Pixar get through the lean times before Toy Story came out.
“What are you talking about? Hiring me? I WAS Pixar when Lucas sold Pixar to Jobs”
And someone decided to keep you there… Why didn’t you preempt the sale-purchase?
It’s all up to John Lasseter, he runs Pixar’s creatives and without him…
I don’t think Pixar employees would like the corporate duldrums that Disney has become.
Disney has become stale as old bread, run by a bunch of Farmer types who only see numbers and don’t have a creative bone in their body.
Lets face it, Disney is dead, their name is used up and they are slowly dying, it even happened to Woolworth.
I don’t think anything can save Disney because they are burnt in the public mind.
Sure parents will bring their kids once to Disney World and all that, but the rides are old, the hotels STINK and the cafeterias are like feeding troughts of pigs.
There is no Pepsi products at Disney and other things, you eat and buy what they give you.
Disney under Eisner got into the real estate buisness, developing housing communites with a Disney theme and strict controls. (certain paint colors, no working on vehicles, they tell you what to plant in your yard etc.)
It’s quite sick.
If it wasn´t for the creative and technical geniuses already working at Pixar who had their brilliant visions of what Pixar could be what would Steve have bought?
Answer: Nothing. Honor the creative and technical geniuses at Pixar. Thank Steve for having the wallet to support their visions. He got rich and added Hollywood clout with his investment.
(By the way, Back in the early days and still today they don´t use many Apple computers at Pixar…)
John Lasseter is the driving creative force behind Pixar. To his credit, Jobs recognizes this, and has said publicly that his job at Pixar is to give Lasseter what he wants and stay the hell out of his way.
50.6% – “And someone decided to keep you there… Why didn’t you preempt the sale-purchase?”
Spoken like a true low-level, back office, paper-pushing, bureaucrat who does not understand the creative genius mind and what a creative visionary can mean to a company.
And you own an Apple computer? Shoot – you have PC office worker written all over you.
Picks R is right on
You other smucks don’t knpw crap.
John is the man there, read the damn doom
the second coming of Steve Jobs, you illiterate slobs.
Steve is not the man at Pixar like he is at Apple.
John is pixar, since the beginning.
Hey, 50.6% – you don´t get it. If there was no John Lasseter (and others) around when the George Lucas 4Sale FX dept. caught Steve´s eye he would have never bought into it.
Get it? No John Lassseter (and others) = No Steve Jobs’ investment = No 50.6% Steve Jobs´ owned Pixar.
Surely all of Pixar would have been looking for jobs…without Jobs’ 10 mill purchase..
Macaday – surely you would be looking for a job if you weren´t in high school.
What a dweeb. You don´t deserve to own a Mac – Macs are for creative people. A creative person knows which is more important – the creative person or the person that writes the check.
As my old boss at an ad agency used to tell people when asked how much his agency was worth, “I don´t really know, every day my assets walk out the door and I don´t know if they will come back.”
Assets, Macaday, as in the creative people that work at the ad agency.
Actually, if SJ had had his way, Pixar would never have gotten into the movie business. When he bought the company, they were making hardware and software. He allowed shorts to be made only as demos for what the equipment could do. Ed Catmull, John Lassiter, and Alvy Ray had secret ambitions to make feature length movies and they basically had to sneak around behind Steve’s back because both Pixar and NeXT were hemorrhaging money and Steve was paying everyone’s salary out of his own pocket. If I remember the story correctly, they more or less started the deal with Disney without Steve’s knowledge, and until Toy Story became a huge success, Steve was very unsure about the whole thing.
As much of a genius as Steve is, Pixar’s early success, at least, was in spite of him, not necessarily because of him. Of course, you must consider the source. Most of the info I’ve read on Pixar is from the book “iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act In The History Of Business”, which seemed to put a bit of a negative spin on many of the events, so take it with a grain of salt.
ndelc, you will pay for your insolence.
Remember Steve´s NeXT was basically a flop. Steve was the driving genius force there.
Pixar had Renderman – great technology for 3D rendering. Steve drooled.
Renderman: Leading digital effects houses and computer graphics specialists use Pixar’s RenderMan® because it is the highest quality renderer available anywhere and has been production tested through successful use in feature films for over ten years.
The smartest things Steve ever did with Pixar is stay out of the way of the creative geniuses there.
Saying that Steve is the creative genius of Pixar is like saying the CEO of a music company is the genius behind the creative talents of the Beatles, U2, Madonna, of whoever is your favorite.
@’Jan and Dean’ Just to put you right I am in creative and I have a daughter in college and I couldn’t possibly be accepted in High School at my age.
The facts are that Pixar desparately needed cash if it was to survive. That cash proved hard to find, and it took Jobs to see there was a chance the money would not be pissed in the wind…
I totally agree that Lasseter and the Pixar team are geniuses. What you have to accept is that Jobs was a genius too – for seeing the possibilies when others didn’t AND that he was able to let them get on without interference.
Steve’s Evil Twin is right, ndelc, I think there’s a chip in every iPod and Macintosh that makes them self destruct if they detect the book iCon within 200 yards of their location…
be careful, I’ve already lost three iPods to my local Barnes & Noble…