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Welcome To Planet Pixar
gambit3 writes "Wired Magazine has an in-depth article on the growth of Pixar examining how it compares to, and how it became the new Disney: 'Pixar hasn't just turned into the new Disney. It has out-Disneyed Disney, becoming the apprentice that schooled the sorcerer.' Its films have grossed $2.5 billion, making it the most successful film studio, picture for picture, of all time."
I mean, what do you think he was thinking? He is taking over the world with the one thing that will always have human value.... Entertainment... WoooooooHooooooo!!!
Pixar's statistics movie-for-movie are so cool right now because they've yet to release a dud.
Give them time... the law of large numbers will catch up with them eventually.
it puts the creative minds first and in control, not the big wigs...I mean when Roy Disney gets kicked out of Disney itself, you know you have a problem.
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I, for one, welcome our new 3D rendered...cuddly...uh... oh forget it.
$8.95/mo web hosting
...is moving to Mac.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
I wonder if the plussing model of development could/has been applied to software development. Perhaps this is a case of featuristis applied to movies
It has out-Disneyed Disney
What I love with English is the ability to turn nouns into verbs and vice-versa without shocking anybody (and without even needing to be in Soviet Russia).
I think Pixar will be the new Disney. Not that it will be an outright replacement for them, because you will always have Mickey, DOnald, etc... But with the advent of all of this newer technology to create more in-depth animation films, I don't think Disney can catch up to them. The article also states that Disney is now done creating 2D films and everything else from them will now be 3D. But I think Pixar is just too far ahead for Disney to catch up. Thoughts?
Hmmm.
RDF, as in his infamous Reality Distortion Field.
turn it into movies.
oh by the way, his other company happens to have invented the most wanted consumer electronic toy since the Playstation.
for being a horrible manager, he is still pretty effective.
to not be so quick to bust up the partnership between them and Pixar.
Just one of a long string of poor moves by Eisner. No wonder the shareholders are so pissed at him.
bash: rtfm: command not found
What is really amazing is the fact that Pixar used x86 computers running Linux to render all the movies. Linux killed both SGI and Sun.
Long live the queen: Linux!
Hmmm... That could be the title of an upcoming movie...
http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?st
Down with Michael Dell!= TX&last=Dell&first=Michael
http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?st
I'm glad to see a company like Pixar succeeding. It goes to show that fundamentally, success lies strongly in the structure of the story rather than the images. Pixar succeeds because they take the time to hammer out their scripts rather than retrofitting stories on top of eye candy. Lucky for us, their eye candy is also some of the best out there. Hope they can keep it up.
Gross income is a good indicator of box office success, but I would be interested to see how the net income and the profit margins for Pixar movies compare against traditionally shot movies. Are the server farms and custom renderers burying them in expenses, or are they saving a ton by not having to pay top-notch actors (other than voices)? Also how about comparing profit margin to traditional animation (Snow White style disney) and modern animation (cel shaded Disney) movies?
The Lion King has been toppled by Finding Nemo as the highest grossing animation ever. Links go to box office statistics.
The Lion King was lauded for it's return to traditional hand-drawn animation techniques. In the past Disney has created some of the most stunning and timeless visual effects without the use of computers, and it's use of CGI was critised as they tentatively tried this new technology (most notably the flying carpet in Alladin). It seemed Disney was turning back to it's roots.
But they weren't. Instead, they turned 180 degrees, and their next movie would be 100% CGI.
Disney's early attempts at CGI belied the problems inherent in training their artists to drop the pencil and grab the mouse. The decision to hire Pixar Studios to take over their CGI efforts was made, and will go down in history as a Damn Good Move.
Toy Story was a groundbreaking film. Nothing like it had ever been tried before. Pixar were the pioneers of feature length 3d animated films. Toy Story set a precedent that would be surpassed by each subsequent film from Pixar Studios, and a precedent for others to aspire to.
Almost ten years since Toy Story, Pixar are now in direct competition with Disney. Disney's The Lion King, praised for it's hand-drawn animations, has been knocked off the box-office podium by Pixar's Finding Nemo, 100% computer-generated.
Both companies now make CGI films exclusively.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
This is not intended to be a flame... but this is not really surprising. Pixar makes better moves than Disney/non-Pixar related movies. It's all about quality.
Take a look at Finding Nemo. First off, an interesting tidbit: My atmospheric dynamics professor knows another fluid dynamics professor that was working on fluid dynamics in the college setting but has since switched to films to employ Navier-Stokes equations in movies...
Look at Nemo, those shallow waves (found near-shore) are actual mathematical simulations based on nondispersive wave equations. Pixar employs scientific concepts to its movies. I have not heard of Disney/non-Pixar movies doing this. This minor tidbit adds to the quality of Pixar films versus Disney/non-Pixar films.
Pixar uses the best voice actors (and comedians), mathematical/real-time physics, and, most importantly... a well developed plot that is interesting. This is why I think it has been so successful versus others.
Go Pixar!
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Pixar is doing extremely well thus far because they've released hits, some of these were hits due in no small part to the Disney marketing machine. While I don't think Pixar's exactly on the losing end of the breakup a lot of their success has been tied to their partnership with Disney.
Disney's power comes from its ability to milk their franchises dry. They've got the Disney channel, their retail chain, third party retailers, and their theme parks to generate cash. They can start a media and retail blitz to hype their movies. A movie that doesn't do well at the box office might end up being a DVD darling or have a successful line of toys or collectibles. They've also got the media channel to do animated series or sequels based on their feature films.
Aladdin is an excellent example of their franchise machine. The movie was very successful in the box office and probably one of the better movies they had done in a long time. The movie was supported by a blitz of toys, video games, and collectibles. Following the success of the movie they made a rather popular television series based on the first film. The series was capped with two straight to video sequels, one featuring the return of Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie. Their one movie that might have made a few hundred million in the box office worldwide ended up making them tons more money as a franchise.
Toy Story has turned into the same sort of franchise. There's an animated series based around Buzz Lightyear, a huge line of toys and collectibles, and then a second movie that was more popular even than the first. Pixar sees only a small fraction of the TS franchise revenue.
Because Disney designs all their films to be franchise darlings is not necessarily a good thing. Pixar's strength lies in its ability to make good movies. Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists. Pixar's films are entertaining to people of various ages and rarely give you the feeling you're being hypnotized into buying licensed products at your earliest convenience.
I think Pixar and the other non-Disney studios stand a pretty good chance of ending Disney's media reign in the near (10 yrs) future. Dreamwrosk in particular has been honing their art of sniping away at Disney's core audience. Shrek is friendly enough for the Disney core audience yet enticing enough to keep their parents interested. I don't have any doubt Pixar will be able to pull the same stunt once they're out from the Disney mantle. Neither has the marketing machine of Disney but they are both giving the artistic aspects of their companies more creative control than the suited bean counters. There's a huge market of people yearning for some entertainment that isn't the watered down uncreative crapfest that Disney's films have become.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Be mindful of something. Disney in their earlier days enjoyed something that Pixar enjoys now: the way in which their movies are made is in of itself of entertainment value. People, to some degree, are as entertained by the sophistication of the CG animation as they are by the plot, characters, and so on. This will not go on forever, just as cartoon animation became ordinary in time. Not to say that Pixar doesn't rock, but still, their sales are helped by the novelty factor.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If you are going to start going off on how the dragon flight physics are ultra realistic, how the movement of the ogre is so lifelike, etc., I advise you to stop living in a fictional fantasy world and rejoin the real world.
From the article:
"There's this part of Steve that most people don't understand," says Catmull. "He's a very loyal person - he's invested in only two companies his entire life.
Lessee.... Jobs co-founded Apple, was ousted from Apple, founded NeXT, Apple boughtNeXT, and somewhere in between, Jobs got involved with Pixar.
Historically, that's three companies, all of which have accomplished some seriously badass things in their fields. Though I suppose if you look at it in the Now, Jobs is currently invested in only two companies....
As the article points out, Pixar is so concerned with the story that they spend the first two years of a film just on the story, and Pixar employees believe that Disney's early success came from its characters and story lines. So Disney thinks that spending less time and money on a money will help it compete?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
and adds a scene showing the blonde super-hero character shouting: Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers
The reason Disney is what it is today, and the reason nobody will be able to touch them on their pedestal for a long time is because Disney has the ability to do something that nobody else does.
They can bring the movies to life.
Pixar does not have Pixarland. They do not have a whole huge chunk of land dedicated to recreating every single aspect of the movies. They can look as realistic as they do on the screen, but in the end, the magic stops at the screen.
Disney is more than just characters and movies. Disney USED to be just about those things, but now they are more about the experience.
Don't get me wrong, I love Pixar and all the work they do, and they have put out better stuff than Disney as of late, but nobody should be so daft as to think that Pixar is out-disneying Disney. Once Pixar has a couple of parks, then I might start to believe they have a shot.
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I keep hearing and reading all these news stories about how traditional 2D animation is dead, about how Disney is only doing CG animation from now on. I'm amazed at how ignorant these bean counters and suits are: it's not about the technique that produces these films, it's all about the story and the characters.
The animation in "The Lion King" isn't too different than what we saw in "Snow White" almost 60 years earlier. It was the story and the characters that made the movie (and the other Disney classics from the early 1990s) such a great hit and instant classic.
I think that Pixar should surprise everyone and come out with a traditional 2D cell movie and show just how brilliant their storytelling really is. That way the public and media will get over how computer animation alone will make blockbusters.
The Lion King has been toppled by Finding Nemo as the highest grossing animation ever.
The Lion King was lauded for it's return to traditional hand-drawn animation techniques. In the past Disney had created some of the most stunning and timeless visual effects without the use of computers, and it's use of CGI was critised as they tentatively tried this new technology (most notably the flying carpet in Alladin). It seemed Disney was turning back to it's roots.
But they weren't. Instead, they turned 180 degrees, and their next movie would be 100% CGI.
Disney's early attempts at CGI belied the problems inherent in training their artists to drop the pencil and grab the mouse. The decision to hire Pixar Studios to take over their CGI efforts was made, and will go down in history as a Damn Good Move.
Toy Story was a groundbreaking film. Nothing like it had ever been tried before. Pixar were the pioneers of feature length 3d animated films. Toy Story set a precedent that would be surpassed by each subsequent film from Pixar Studios, and a precedent for others to aspire to.
Almost ten years since Toy Story, Pixar are now in direct competition with Disney. Disney's The Lion King, praised for it's hand-drawn animations, has been knocked off the box-office podium by Pixar's Finding Nemo, 100% computer-generated.
Both companies now make CGI films exclusively.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
Not to take sides on this, but when you take into consideration the strength of brand and physical distribution channels that Disney has, Theme parks etc..., Pixar is far behind. IANAE but I do believe that there is more to creating a brand than just releasing a number of blockbuster films. When you say cartoon to kids, or some adults, your get, the usual Bugs Bunny, mickey mouse etc... and if your lucky you get Disney, or Warner Brothers or possibly Loony Tunes. Brands long established. Now pixar has a ways to go in order to create a fuzzy associative feeling that occurs when you say their name. They can do it, it will just take time. For the time being, Disney and all it's marketing might and money can buy the skills they need to produce films pretty damn close to pixars quality, but Pixar can not buy brand. You also need to take into account the story writers. He who buys the best script and pulls it off wins. Disney could buy the best script in the world and do a lousy job of it and get nowhere. Likewise, Pixar could get a crappy script and do a bang up job on the film and get nowhere. There is a winning combination and it isn't bad script/bad production. I for one hope both find space in the market and that they both push each other to be better. At least that way we, the consumers, win.
Feed my eyes...
My apologies for posting this three times. As you probably know, slashdot has been down today. I tried to post this 3 times, but the server was down.
;p
Argh! Go ahead and mod this post down as redundant, as I have posted this already. This really bothers me as out of ~60 comments I have been modded down only twice. Oh well it's just a SNAFU
My favorite bits (in no particular order):
- Mention of the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II
- The stories of Disney's rejections and failures trying to assembly-line movie production
- A feeling of satisfaction reading about how rejects from Warner and Disney found their utopia
- A left-brained acknowledgement of the tools and their makers.
- A right-brained acknowledgement of the creative stories and their creators.
Having lost interest in superhero power fantasies for a number of years, I had zero interest in seeing The Incredibles. From what little bits anyone knew about this movie it sounded like the first Pixar loser story. "Rev up the digital effects Joe! Another superhero movie broke box office records. Get the writer to draft something where the good guy uses the new fire effect!" I'm now quite intrigued to see just what sort of spin Pixar plans to put on superheroes.Call me a sucker, but Pixar really does seem to know what can make or break a good movie. Now let's just hope they aren't beaten by the quantity over quality rules that other animation houses may adopt.
Again, my apologies for posting this three times. As you probably know, slashdot has been down today. I tried to post this 3 times, but the server was down.
;p
Argh! Go ahead and mod this post down as redundant, as I have posted this already. This really bothers me as out of ~60 comments I have been modded down only twice. Oh well it's just a SNAFU
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
I'll believe it when they survive long enough to produce their own theme parks, not just license characters to Six Flags or equivalent, and especially not to Disneyland.
Pixar have tapped into something thats been missing from stories for a long time: originality. They feature insects or the undersea world, or retired superheros, and put them in engaging circumstances... a journey to rescue a fish captured by divers, or a band of aging heros coming back together to save the world.
Then Pixar wraps it all up in a team rescue at the end.. as wired puts it:
It's that rousing moment of collective action close to the movie's end: The Frankentoys rally to save Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story; the ant colony in A Bug's Life, inspired by the circus insects, stands up to grasshopper thugs; the netted fish in Finding Nemo pull together to swim, ingeniously, down. This is Pixar's own take on the rescue story: the point when everybody rescues one another.
Can you see how much appeal this has? Children go nuts for this, its saying they are as equally important in helping us as we are in helping them. It speaks about a family bond, a lesson that we try and teach but is understood on a primal level anyway.
Of course, it helps that the animation is so wickedly good, renderman is an industry legend and used by everybody - but in the article they mention how the STORY is tested on a group of kids as a rough sketch animation to see if it works - kids dont need the cgi to like it.
Do you need a website upgrade?
At Pixar, people come first, and these aren't ordinary people, they are the best people, and thats why Pixar is kicking butt...
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
Pixar films, on the other hand, are fewer and further between. They are produced with a lot of tender loving care and it shows! All in all, this leaves us on the edges of our seats wondering what their next bundle of joy will be. Certainly Pixar could hire lots of techies and buy/lease plenty of horsepower to render with, but they don't! So each new movie gets its fair mind-share, and so they are fresh, witty, and a joy to watch. To me, that's what makes Pixar great...
"Pixar could hire lots of techies" Or they could just outsource to India! There fellow slashdotters... I saved you some time.
You make art a team sport by having people do it together and fail publicly at it. "You have to honor failure," Nelson explains, "because failure is just the negative space around success."
That is one shrewd, long-term thinker.
<grrr>
...by being fundamentally less bunched up in the shorts than the Eisner Imperium. It realized that profit should not precluse wasting energy pissing off your customers and generally being belligerent twits. Pixar actually bothered to craft product the public wants
Steve Jobs is still a schmuck though.
I watched Toy Story in 1995, as a 10 year old.
Nine years later, I'm still enthralled by all of Pixar's works. I've done four years of television & Film production classes in high school, so I have a good idea about the whole creative process. And at the level, the STORY is all you have. Pixar starts there. Their stories could be told with bounding boxes and still be interesting (OK, maybe stick figures, but you get the idea).
The stories include a rich, multithreadded plot (something the rest of Hollywood has yet to grasp of late), in-jokes, loveable characters, and the like. All of which take precedence over how it actually looks on screen. After the animators get done with it, you're left with one movie that kicks ass in every possible department (Oscars be DAMNED).
When's the next movie coming out?
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I _so_ have to see The Incredibles when it comes out instead of waiting for the DVD.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Rick belluzzo of SGI "fame" - sold out to MS buy spending SGI resorces on (crappy non-standard)NT boxes and... after leaving SGI after became the operating officer of microsoft.. but not for long.
but the worst thing, by far, was that he dicided to change the company name from - silicon graphics to SGI, scraping the old cube logo, which in my view is probably the best logo any hitech company ever had.
and of cource John Scully. who should have continued selling colored sugered water instead of driving Apple to the ground.
Finding Nemo was done by Pixar. Shrek was done by Dreamworks. How stupid are you?
Its about emotional resonance. Pixar know this and have blended technical expertise with storytelling with many other elements in a remarkable way to create emotional resonance. Take Luxo Jr. This short movie was able to convey real human emotion within the framework of a short movie, no human facial expressions, no words and a terribly simple story. It was, and still is, one of the finest pieces of animation ever made because it conveyed emotion. As a member of its audience I was able to observe a "mother" and "child" playing. I could feel her care for the baby and I could see its enthusiasm and wonder at playing with a small ball. The moment when the ball burst was at once amusing and generated sympathy. I empathised so I was drawn in.
Story (and intellectual appeal), characters, rendering (eg mood lighting), music (think Gladiator), acting all blend to create emotional resonance *if* you get it right. But its terribly hard to get it right. A wrong element can easily throw the balance and the film will fail. If the balance is thrown too far, the general public can no longer relate to the movie and it fails. If the atempt to create emotion in the audience is too obvious we feel like its a sickly sweet treat and don't like it. We are smart now when it come to movies, so its getting harder to tell a story and have it appeal widely.
Sure there are story forms to study, derived from Aristotle, to the modern film, there is structure to a successful story. However look at Willow, largely a failure despite one of the writers studying myth and story form with Joseph Campbell (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces). All the technically correct elements are present in Willow but it fails to engage the vast majority of the audience.
Meanwhile look at the wonderful imagery in Final Fantasy. So much work and such great vision. Still a financial failure perhaps because the story had little mass appeal, despite the fact that it follows traditional structure.
This stuff is hard to get right once never mind time after time. Pixar will inevitably get it wrong. In the end, heros of animation or not, they are a film studio now and all film studios get it wrong. If it were easy or a science we would all be getting it right now.
Wroceng
Yes, movies are a "hits" business but care to name some non-Pixar animations that Disney has released recently?
I can think of one non-Pixar animation that's been a hit for Disney in recent years - The Lion King - and plenty of turkeys that barely made back their money (if that) - Prince of Egypt, etc.
And that one hit is a movie that's almost a decade old: clearly, Disney's in-house animation team isn't scoring touchdowns of the Snow White, The Jungle Book or Bambi variety, so what makes you think that they'll do anything but fumble the ball when it's handed to them once the deal with Pixar is finished?
Pixar's talent and ability is established. It's star is in the ascendency. Disney's 2D animation talent and ability hasn't been able to compete. It's star is in the descendency. Disney's 3D talent and ability (if it has any) is unproven. So what makes you think that Disney is the one that stands to gain more than it looses from the split?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
>> ... and the mother-and-child desk lamps show all the same style of creative scripting...
Mother-and-child desk lamps?
That was father and child desk lamps!
What were you smoking?
Hmmm, could be also full-grown and dwarf desk lamps, too... see what you've done!
This really isn't meant as flamebait. Pixar's movies are extremely cool looking but I really wish they'd make some movies that weren't oriented towards children. I recognize that there's a lot of content in them that is geared towards adults. Besides keeping the parents mildly entertained while their kids enjoy the movie I'm it also has to do with the reason pixar's movies do so well. But even so, why no adult content? THere's definitely this pervasive attitude that animation is the domain of children only in America. (I'm probably pegging myself as an anime nerd here. :) )
And btw, by 'geared towards adults' I certainly don't mean sex and explosions, that doesn't hurt though if the plot is interesting and supports it.
You copied this WORD FOR WORD from MY POST on the previous slashdot article about the incredibles trailer.
Sources close to Disney report that Michael Eisner was seen angrily removing his CEO hat and punching his fist through it.
Unknown host pong.
Few will agree with me, but I think that Disney came out ahead when they dumped Pixar.
Disney holds the copyrights to "Toy Story", "Toy Story 2", "Monsters, Inc.", and "A Bug's Life", and will still make revenue from those properties (think disney-created sequels, toy merchandising, new media releases), all the while Pixar is contractually obligated to make more movies.
The movie business is all about hits, which are inherently unpredicible. Jobs wouldn't even talk to Disney because they refused to sell the rights back to the existing movies. They would have been insane if they had done this, because those properties are worth billions of dollars over the next few years. It's not a wise idea to trade existing hits for only the expectation of new ones.
You don't take a baseball player with a .200 batting average and keep him as lead-off hitter because ten years ago, he batted .300.
If you look at Eisner's work recently, it's been terrible, unless Pixar was there to save Disney. It's been so bad that over 43% of stock-holders voted for him to get out. Keep in mind that 43% is huge because most shareholders just throw those things away when they get them.
If you want the best example of greed, look at the California Adventure amusement park. Roy Disney Jr even admits he hates it. He said that Eisner took half an amusement park and charged full price instead of expanding Disneyland. Ever been there? Worst amusement park I've ever been to.
To claim that Pixar has more success than Disney ever had, you'd have to adjust their numbers not only to inflation but also to the size of the market at the time of Disney big successes.
That fallacy could be ascribed to chronological snobbery, but it is in fact simple lack of historical perspective.
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See, when Walt Disney started Disney, he had a lot of creative and innovative ideas. Granted, there were some less-than-desirable aspects about the man, but he was passionate, creative, and innovative. He invented ways to show depth in cartoons, and the storyboarding process (I learned today). His studios, for a time, made some really clever and fun films. Roy Disney was his brother who was more on the left-brain side of things and did a lot of the business. Now, Michael Eisner is at the helm, and Disney is just riding on brand recognition. Granted, there is a lot of creativity and passion still in the company, but it's overshadowed by the sheer shamelessness they have in business. Their films in the last six years or so, with some exceptions, have been crap. Gimmicky, overcommercialized crap. The Disney corporation has stooped to new lows. It's all brand recognition that's keeping Disney alive. There have been some scathing reviews of recent Disney films, and yet unwitting parents really don't care, since little kids can't really realize the poor quality of Disney's stuff. At Pixar, there's a company that, like Disney did in the beginning, knows how to use technology and creativity to make great stuff. It's got people like Steve Jobs and John Lassater there who can think outside the box. They've got some amazing 3D technologies, some great talent there, and a lot of experience under their belt. I think if Pixar is going to not sign a new contract with Disney (which I hope will happen, somebody correct me if I don't know something), then they need to get some people who are good at the distribution aspect, marketing, and commercializing. Not quite as unscrupulous as the folks at Disney, but something that can give their films the sucess they deserve. As has been pointed out, Pixar is bound to have some cruddy films. But it seems like if there's a movie that you spend 2-3 years working on, there are a lot of people who are going to want to make sure the movie is worth the amount of time and money put into it. If you're going to spend that much time and resources to sculpt such a large thing, you've got incentive to make sure it comes out right. That said, though, 3D animation could just as much be the next big thing as a fad. Pixar's sucess may be attributed to how relatively new computer animation is to the feature film industry. There are some appealing aspects to the style of 2D animation, if it's good 2D animation. But even bad animation can be carried along well by good writing. With all the technological advances, a good story is still the most important in my eyes. Pixar may need to reinvent itself down the road. One competitor that I think is a serious threat to them is Dreamworks. I really like Dreamworks, their 3D animation is probably the best I've seen, besides the Final Fantasy movie. As is their 2D animation. The Iron Giant, The Prince of Egypt, Spirit, and others were amazing. It's important to have a visual flair to movies, be it in the general style or specific elements of the movie. Pixar's great, but there's a lot of hurdles they'll have to overcome.
Spoken like an MBA rather than a artist. The logical flaw is in point #3, and it's caused by the fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the word "franchise" in point number 4.
WHY are the Toy Store/Nemo/Monster "franchises" worth anything? Because the story was good, the movie was well crafted - In short because they are a work of art rather than a "franchise".
You CAN predict if future movies will be successful, if you have real talent at your disposal, and both the talent and the management see it as art and refuse to compromise it for short term profits you have very good odds of continuing to produce hits and valuable franchises. You will have the occasional flop but even the flops will often end up being long term successes years after their initial failure (like Fantasia) This attitude was what made Disney a success in the first place and what makes Pixar a success today.
If you view it as a "franchise" - a mere vehicle for merchandising and profits you have very good odds of producing a string of lackluster flops and of driving once valuable franchises into the ground This is what is happening at Disney today.
Disney will get two more hits out of Pixar, it will retain the rights to the Toy Story/Monsters/Nemo/Incredibles/Cars franchises which it will profit from immensely... But they can't create NEW franchises that will be similarly profitable, and they will run the franchises the DO have into the ground with crappy direct-to-video sequels. Pixar will go on to create new franchises from which it will keep all the profits, after a decade or so Pixar will be profiting from the new/fresh/latest franchises they created while Disney will still be hawking increasingly dated Woody dolls and Nemo plush toys.
It has out-Disneyed Disney
... it out-herods Herod."
What I love with English is the ability to turn nouns into verbs and vice-versa without shocking anybody (and without even needing to be in Soviet Russia).
It's a paraphrase from Hamlet, iii. 2: "Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to latters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundings
That may not necessarily be true.
All time is a big place with some pretty successful studios and films. Even Disney will attest to that.
Although Pixar may have the highest dollar value to date, it's really unfair to compare today's dollar to the dollar of 1951 or 1935 for that matter.
You can sell a tenth of the tickets now, and end up at the same net dollar amount as Gone with the Wind. Most movies today net more than that movie did. Does that make your movie more successful? Absolutely not.
I think a better indicator may be gross sales; in which case you may find that the most successful studio of all time is probably Sony or one of the other legacy studios that have been around forever.
Mind you, my opinion means nothing.
I'm not in the movie business, but if I were, that's how I would evaluate it.
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The funny thing about that is Disney wanted to release Toy Story 2 direct to video (for your convenience) like all of its other sequels. Not sure who worked the theater release, most likely Mr. Jobs, but it's a good thing he did.
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Warcraft III
After all, nobody has ever made stories about toys coming to life (The Nutcracker, etc.) or monsters hiding in the closet who live in an alternative world (Little Monsters, etc.) or fish in the sea (countless animated films).
And yet despite all that, they still chose OS X instead of just using plain vanilla FreeBSD or Linux. Why do you think that is?
Sounds a bit like... the recording industry's relationship to its artists, doesn't it?
No. It doesn't. Record labels often are the ones who rent the studios, rent the equipment, hire the producers, the mixers, buy new instruments, give the artists a place to stay, and more.
Pixar is its own studio and hires its own people. Stop trying to turn this into a completely off-topic RIAA jab.
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(they're your friend
I see these ads on TV for Disneyland with Mickey Mouse. When I was a kid, Mickey was still being animated. Is he anymore?
Without characters, there's no toys, no lucrative burger sponsorship. If you don't have any characters, why are kids going to go to your theme park, and not someone else's?
Like all good movies, it is the story you are telling that counts and how well you tell it. Pixar has put really good entertaing stories that appeal to a wide range of ages. That story telling coupled with good animation, sound tracks, and voice actors is why the films have been so successful. Wonderful animation alone would not have produced the results (box office) and great reputation Pixar has.
Disney has obviously helped Pixar become what Pixar is now. Eisner has too big an ego to make deal with Pixar.