Pixar Eaten by Mickey Mouse

The rumors went flying this weekend, but Dekortage writes "It is official: Pixar has been sold to Disney. Steve Jobs will join the Disney board, and John Lasseter is now Disney's Chief Creative Officer. So, dear Slashdot, does this mean that Disney's movies will improve, or that Pixar's will become worse?" Also the price of Pixar was $7.4 billion with a b dollars.

In the best of all worlds,

[ameline]

This will be similar to Apple buying Next. In the end, all the senior people of Next wound up running Apple -- Apple adopted NextStep as their OS, and called it OSX.

With any luck, Jobs, Lasseter, and other senior Pixar people will wind up running Disney. It would be a substantial improvement.

Now is the time

[aiabx]

It's hard to judge a movie by it's trailers, but if Cars turns out to be as awful as it looks, Pixar is going to crash and burn when it's released. Best to sell now while Pixar's reputation is still riding high.
        -aiabx

does this mean we'll see Pixar's TRON 2?

[boxlight]

I wonder if this means we'll see that remake of (Disney's) TRON that John Lasseter wanted to make?

Cool!

boxlight

Pixar trailers

[xusr]

Pixar trailers have never been very good, at least not in the 'traditional' way. Some movies (star wars ep. i-iii, matrix rev and reloaded...) pack every decent shot into a 59 second trailer. Pixar actually concentrates more on the movie than the trailer. That says something about them as a company.

p.s. the Incredibles? Incredible.

Becuse Disney buys laws

[backslashdot]

Disney bought a law extending copyrights for 25 more years so they can hold on to Mickey Mouse until 2020. I don't care about a stupid mouse .. but it's unacceptible to have perpetually lasting copyrights. Disney made money from stories like Snow White and Beauty and the Beast without having to py the original authors .. and now they are trying to make perpetual copyrights for themselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extens ion_Act [wikipedia.org]

Hope this clears things up?

The way I saw it

[MickDownUnder]

Well.... Steve Jobs is not just on the board of Disney... he's now the largest stock holder. I saw a TV interview with disney's CEO Robert Iger and Steve Jobs, if that interview is anything to go by Jobs is going to have a major input on how Disney is going to be run from this day forward, Mr Iger actually looked quite uncomfortable in the interview when jobs began to speak... and speak.... and then speak some more.

It's about time..

[seven of five]

... Steve Jobs finally 'made it'. After all that hard work and risk taking... I sincerely hope he kicks ass and offends people in the Disney board room, and has not mellowed out overmuch the past few years...

Re:Don't kid yourselves

[node 3]

In the early 80's, Disney was severely in danger of fading away. Eisner not only saved Disney financially, but built it into the huge, powerful media corporation it is today. However, it's not all roses. As you noted, "Disney is a supertanker of a company" that "exploit[s] its brand[s] on ... third-rate tat."

Disney's new CEO, Robert Iger, has impressed Steve Jobs enough to make this deal possible. Jobs is the type of person who wants to make [insanely] great things, and he wouldn't send one of his greatest creations into the maws of mediocrity. If you recall, it was recent that Jobs was ready to leave Disney in a very public row between Jobs and Eisner.

I fully expect the Pixar acquisition will make Disney better far more than it will make Pixar worse. I also suspect that under Iger, Disney will be vastly different from the Disney your post describes. How Disney's new CEO fares has yet to be decided, but the prognosis is positive, especially if Steve is willing to trust one of his three greatest creations to him.

The Real Story

[Bill Hayden]

More like "Pixar buys Disney with Disney's money". This is very similar to how Steve Jobs got Apple to buy Next, and the Next people took over.

Re:Isn't it the other way around?

[ZaMoose]

Two repsonses:

1. There's only so much of Lasseter's time to go around. I think one of the big benefits of him being restricted to Pixar was precisely that he didn't have to worry about all manner of marketing, distribution and theme park crap. If he has to pay attention to all those extra facets, something has to suffer (at least until we figure out how to switch to a 36 hour standard day...).

2. As long as he manages to help Disney avoid atrocities such as Bambi freakin' II ("The Love of a Father, the Courage of a Son". Shoot me now.), it'll be a net positive, IMNSHO.

Re:Becuse Disney buys laws

[10Ghz]

Disney is horribly evil because it has manipulated copyright law that is just plain "wrong" (even though the American courts don't seem to think so)

Just because something is legal does not mean that it's right. There is a loophole in copyrights, namely: they only last for a "limited time". If you keep on extending the time those copyrights last, it's still "limited time", when in reality it's something different. It might be legal and OK according to the letter of the law, but it's still morally wrong and it goes against the spirit of the law.

and they have used older material, writen by others, which is also "wrong" (though they have never been successfully prosecuted for such a thing?)

The problem is that they took content that was in public domain for free, and used them to earn big bucks. Now that they were about to face a situation where THEIR content was about to enter public domain, they started to whine and got copyrights extended. They want to take advantage of content created by others, but they refuse to return the favour.

There is a case of Disney using content which copyright was not in public domain: Winnie the Pooh for example. The copyright belongs to heirs of A. A. Milne. Of course Disney owns the rights to their version of Pooh, but not to Pooh itself or the original stories. As it happened, A. A. Milne's hometown wanted to erect a statue honoring Milne. The statue would have had Pooh in it (the original, not the Disney-version). Disney sued, claiming that Pooh is their property. IIRC, the town capitulated when faced with Disney's army of lawyers.

I think that Disney was at it's worst during the Eisner-era. I have hopes that post-Eisner Disney will be "better".

Re:Disney has no influence over Pixar?

[Anim8me2]

SO, you are right in the abstract but you are missing the details.

Disney makes most of that money in marketing and licensing. NOT from box office.

in this case Disney has final say like a hen-pecked husband has final say in his house... "Yes dear, whatever you say." The fact that Jobs has no creative input is moot, what he does have is a seat on the board and controlling interest. As such if Lasseter and Catmull call him up and say they need his backing on an issue, he will do it. He is very aware of what makes Pixar great.

You seem to think that Disney just snapped their fingers and created a CG division. Actually what they did was consolidate their assets from several location (Orlando, LA, New York). Remember there were at the very least 400 animators/modelers/TDs working on "Dinosaur" and many of them remained or were hired back over the years. 2 years is about right for a studio to produce a CG feature. Pixar has that number cut down and Animal Logic are trying to do it in 9 months for "Happy Feet", but the idea is the same. The pipelines have been in place for a while so this is no great feat.

Will we see more marketing of Pixar movies (toys, games, etc.)... sure. That is one of Disney's strengths right now. That doesn't make them bad. THey are just leveraging their content in the only way they know. That will even out over time as the Pixar mentality spreads to the right people at Disney.

Lasseter is in charge of story, so don't expect a slew of sequels. DO watch for a live action feature written and directed by Brad Bird. And ya know what... it will kick ass!

Cross Marketing

[tm2b]

I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing Disney character themed iPods for kids.

Re:Not hard to see why....

[david.given]

The Emperor's New Groove (2000) $89

Damn. There's no justice. That film is great, and completely blows away most of their other recent films for sheer style, verve and originality --- I reckon it's better than The Lion King, which suffered rather from the Disney over-earnestness.

Treasure Planet (2002) $38

That one's a real pity. Everything about it was so good --- the animation, the concept, the style, the characterisation, the acting --- except for the actual plot. If only they'd stuck to the original Stephenson novel instead of going off into la-la land with space portals and huge explosions and crap like that, this could have been good. The first half --- up until whatshisname gets pushed overboard by Silver --- is well worth watching.

Home on the Range (2004) $50

I've never even heard of this one. That's how much Disney's impacted me recently...

Re:Well I am happy about this!

[btpier]

From what I see, you're not really getting much of a deal on your shares though. At the start of the year your shares of Pixar were worth $53.11 (assuming here that the run-up over this month is due to the buyout rumors), now you're going to get 2.3 Disney shares for each, which today are worth 26, so you're getting a total value of $59.8 for you Pixar shares but not in cash, in Disney stock. Now in the last 2 years Disney stock has gone absolutely no where whereas Pixar has increased 100%. Sounds like a raw deal for the shareholders to me.

Re:Don't kid yourselves

[solios]

I'm pretty sure people said the same of Apple before the NeXT people took over (that was carefully worded and I'm still sure someone's going to point out Apple bought NeXT - yes, they did, but NeXT's people took over Apple, I mean, they became the senior people and stuff.)

Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental. :P

Re:Don't kid yourselves

[rjung2k]

Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental.

Speaking as a Mac user for over a decade, I have to say that you make this sound like a bad thing.

Re:Nice deal

[C0rinthian]

Well, because of these extensions being possible, no new material is entering the public domain. Hence Disney is running out of material to use without paying royalties. Ironic how they've undermined their own business model...

Re:Price

[Guspaz]

I think that this may be more about gaining leverage in pushing content to iTunes. Steve Jobs is now the single largest Disney shareholder. That gives him a LOT of swing in the company. Disney also owns ABC, if I'm not mistaken. Now, if Jobs says to the board that he wants all of Disney's movies and all of ABC's shows on iTunes, he's got a lot of pull. While he might have been able to convince them before when he didn't own a huge chunk of Disney, now that he does own a hefty chunk of the company any such move is almost certain to succeed.

Hrmm..

[Lithos]

Maybe I'm reading a little too far into this here.. but wasn't there speculation a while back that Steve Jobs wanted to get in on the cell phone industry? ESPN (owned by Disney) just started its own cell phone company with mobile video (sports highlights) and whatnot.. I don't know, but it seems to me like this is as much a play for Steve Jobs to get his hands into areas he's wanted to get into but hasn't had the appropriate gateway. If you look here at the list of companies Disney actually owns, Steve has access to more than you'd initially think: http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/disney.asp [cjr.org]

Bye bye Pixar

[Avatar8]

I think Pixar content will suffer greatly. I believe that Disney will censor all of the films so we won't end up with the cheekiness that makes it enjoyable for children and adults.

"The Incredibles" was, well, incredible. The colors, action and story keep my girls interested. The inuendo and high-level humor keep my wife and I interested. There are very few Disney films that can hold my attention after the first viewing.

My major problem with Disney is their hypocrisy.

I remember the stink they raised in the 90's about their gay employees. I think it had something to do with the Southern Baptist convention choosing Disneyworld as their meeting site numerous times. So Disney goes through a "purification" phase where everything they touch will be pure and family oriented. Shortly afterwards they purchased ABC. For perhaps nine months, it could have been the Family channel. Then the numbers dropped and they resort to typical shock TV. "The Shield." Now ABC and Disney is anything but pure. Maybe that's why their animators slip almost invisible sexual graphics into their cartoons and movies.

What someone just posted here makes me think even less of Disney. It never occured to me that all those fairy tales they turned into movies were public domain. I always wondered who they paid to get the legal rights to all that material. Obviously, no one. Mouse ear wearing bastards.