Funnily enough, the future founder of the Pixar, Ed Katmell, showed his first 3D animation program to Disney employees back in 1973, where he had an internship. He was told then that computers and animation had nothing in common, and as long as his program couldn't draw plausible bubbles, they weren't interested in it. With these words, they expressed the opinion of the entire film industry, which remained so until May 25, 1977. On this day, the first screens came out "Star Wars".
Unlike others, George Lucas opened a computer unit in his company and hired Katmell to run it. When Lucas divorced his wife in 1983 and lost much of his fortune in the divorce process, he needed to somehow optimize his business and decided to get rid of the computer unit. For several years he was looking for a buyer, which eventually became the recently dismissed from Apple Steve Jobs. He invested $54 million in the new company. That's how the Pixar was born.
In the early years of its existence, Pixar created several short animated films, one of which received an "Oscar", and a couple of commercials, but did not bring profit. Three times Steve Jobs tried to resell the company to someone else, such as Microsoft and Alias, but each time at the last minute refused the deal. Things were going badly until Disney came on stage. They offered to invest in the creation of a full-length cartoon Pixar, and in return to get the rights to distribution. Disney also wanted to get the rights to Pixar technology, but Jobs rejected the offer, saying that the secrets of production is not going to be revealed. After the deafening success of Pixar's first full-length cartoon "Toy Story," Disney head Michael Eisner was horrified to realize that he had created a great competitor with his own hands. The relationship between Eisner and Jobs became very strained.
Everything changed when Eisner was replaced by Eiger, who started to actively build relationships with Jobs. Unlike Eisner, he wasn't going to fight with their company, he wanted to help them and convinced the creators of Pixar that after the takeover he promised to preserve the spirit and values of their company. The contract with Disney stipulated the right of Pixar to preserve the creative principles of its work, which Jobs considered the basis of their success.
As a result, Pixar began to make cartoons faster, and they all made more profit: "Monster University", "Cars-2" and others.
At the same time, Disney's native studio has grown before our eyes, rising to the level of modern studios. Frozen has become one of the most profitable cartoons in the history of cinema, and "City of Heroes" is clearly very successful.
Superheroes in bulk
The first Marvel comics appeared in 1937. Since then, the company has been resold several times and, as a rule, unsuccessfully. In 1996, Marvel announced its bankruptcy. To save the drowning brand decided to save the owners of the toy company Toy Biz - Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter. These two so successfully reorganized Marvel's business that after ten years Disney paid for it 4.6 billion dollars.
Disney and its princesses have always been considered more of a "girl's company", and the heroes that boys may have liked have traditionally had very few. What did Avi and Ike come up with then? First of all, they started selling licenses to use popular Marvel characters. They were bought by TV and film studios, manufacturers of clothes, goods for schoolchildren and toys. Only a few thousand licenses were sold. Entrepreneurs decided to focus on films and games. The idea was to make Marvel's superheroes go beyond the usual teenage audience and become well-known. So the world saw films about Spider-Man, X-Men and Captain America.
At the same time, Marvel began to publish comic books again, found new sales channels for them, and rewrote her old stories for the young audience. By 2010, they had increased their share of the comic book market to 50%. In 2005, Marvel made 500 million investments in its own film production. Since the rights to use the most popular characters belonged to other studios, they focused on the less well-known characters - Iron Man, Torah, Hulke. The films made in cooperation with other studios warmed up the market, and the public was waiting for new adventures of Marvel's heroes so that the new films were expected to succeed.
Bob Eiger at Marvel was attracted not only by the number of potentially lucrative characters but also by the fact that the most loyal fans of the company were teenage boys. The owners of Marvel agreed to the deal relatively easily, as both were more businessmen than creators. Everyone had a few successful companies behind them, and Marvel was just one of them. The fact that the acquisition cost its 4 billion dollars, proved the incredible success of the "Avengers", who have collected in the world's distribution of more than 1.5 billion dollars and were among the top three box office films in the history of cinema.