Pixar today said that it is ending its discussions with The Walt Disney Company to extend their existing five-picture deal, and will begin discussions with other studios to distribute its films beginning in 2006. After completing the final two films under the current agreement with Disney, The Incredibles in 2004 and Cars in 2005, Pixar intends to retain full ownership of its future productions.
"After ten months of trying to strike a deal with Disney, we're moving on," said Pixar CEO Steve Jobs. "We've had a great run together - one of the most successful in Hollywood history - and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes."
The last sentence is harsh, almost a stab in the back, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Pixar surpass Disney in the animation business within a couple of years. They're a little amazing company with impressive results:
To date, Pixar's five films have earned more than $2.5 billion at the worldwide box office and sold over 150 million DVDs and videos.
Of course, Disney disagrees and lists its other partnerships and production in the pipe (of which I know none apart what has been created by Pixar).
P.S.: pardon my webmaster's geeky habits, but while sneaking around Pixar's sites I discovered this:
% curl -I http://www.pixar.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:07:17 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux) [...]
% curl -I http://corporate.pixar.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 [...]
Come on Steve, your corporate site is served by Microsoft IIS on Windows! You surely know better, I'm sure Apple can strike you a deal for an Xserve (even a G4 would suffice) ;-). No, wait, ColdFusion runs on Mac OS X for development purposes only (ah! Macromedia and their Mac afterthoughts). Well, what about WebObjects then or, simply, plain vanilla Mac OS X Server? ;-).
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