If you've been following the news at all, last week Pixar agreed to be bought out by Disney.
Many industry analysts have been pondering why Steve Jobs agreed to this. Jobs owns 51% of the stake in Pixar, so his participation is necessary. I've been thinking about it myself. John Lassetter, one of Pixar's VPs will be handling most of the day to day business interactions with Disney.
As far as I can see, the situation with Pixar is a lot like the problems we experienced with Castaway in finding a publisher. Film is much the same. Pixar is an independent animation studio, but at the end of the day, they need a distributor to get their films out to the theaters -- not just throughout the nation, but throughout the world. Who has the resources necessary for doing that? Only the biggest distributors can internationalize. Pixar cannot do this by themselves -- their greatest hits have been under the Disney label. Most other distributors are generalists -- Disney is a bit more niche -- aiming squarely at the family market, and they've had more success with promotion of children's films. I think though at the end of the day, it just comes down to the money of it all -- Disney is going to give them the sweetest deal -- Disney needs Pixar more than any other studio house -- and Disney is probably the only company that isn't going to balk at the $100 million price tag that an average Pixar production costs.
Contrast this with other animation projects in the recent past:
Hoodwinked (independent - $15 million)
Racing Stripes (WB - $30 million)
Chicken Little (Disney, est. 60 million)
Shrek 2 (Dreamworks, est. 75 million)
All of this seems good for Disney, but what's in it for Pixar?
As far as I can tell, it's the ability to make hack sequels and really reap some of the benefits from the Disney name. Pixar is at the end of their creative chain in original storytelling -- Cars has got to be one of the weakest story ideas put onto the drawing board -- but with access to Disney's properties, they can churn out Toy Story sequels until infinity and beyond, which no other studio could have given them.
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