DreamWorks Looks For A Disney Ending

Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios is likely to sign on with Universal Studios for distribution after its seven-year agreement with Walt Disney Co. expires next August, according to numerous reports building on a story broken by the Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters. That pact didn’t exactly hue to the script but the departure is characterized as “amicable,” according to the New York Times.

“Sources say the DreamWorks team felt something of a strain from the start because its deal was negotiated with Dick Cook, then chairman of the studio, with the understanding that Disney would invest in DreamWorks' films and invite DreamWorks to participate in some of its projects,” Masters writes. “But soon after the deal was made, Cook was ousted and Disney CEO Bob Iger set a strategy of fully financing Disney movies.”

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Spielberg is riding the success of Universal’s “Jurassic World,” for which he was executive producer. His offices are on that studio’s lot. Universal, for its part, tells Masters that it “would welcome the chance to be DreamWorks' distribution partner” but no deal has been made. Indeed, Deadline Hollywood says “the live-action company … could end up at any studio in town at the moment.”

“There have been no negotiations, no proposals between DreamWorks or Steven and Universal,” one source informs Deadline’s Anita Busch and Anthony D'Alessandro, while another says the studio “could end up at Paramount, Fox, Universal or even Warner Bros., where the director is moving forward on the film ‘Ready Player One.’”

The 2009 deal gave Disney the rights to market and distribute the movies produced by DreamWorks, reports Jonathan Chew for Fortune. “However, sources have said the team at DreamWorks has often felt disappointed in Disney, as they had expected the company to contribute more financing ….”

“With Disney’s focus on big animated offerings, comic book adventures, and ‘Star Wars’ spin-offs, the kinds of adult-oriented, smaller pictures that DreamWorks made in recent years, such as ‘The Help’ and ‘Lincoln,’ often seemed like an awkward fit and a case of competing sensibilities,” observesVariety’s Dave McNary.

Disney will release two Spielberg-directed DreamWorks films before the distribution deal expires, “Bridge of Spies” in October and “The BFG” next July. The latter will be Spielberg’s first Disney-branded film; “all of the previous films from DreamWorks have been released under Disney’s Touchstone banner,” McNary reports. 

DreamWorks has “faced money issues — a $200-million investment from India's Reliance Entertainment was required to shore up finances in 2012,” Daniel Miller reports for the Los Angeles Times, also pointing out that its former CEO, Stacey Snider, quit for a top job at 20th Century Fox last year.

Wherever DreamWorks lands, it will probably be bolstered by “hundreds of millions in fresh financing from Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media and others, allowing Mr. Spielberg and his lieutenants to control their own film budgets,” Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply report in the New York Times. Participant, an “activist studio” that financed “The Help” and “Lincoln,” declined to comment.

Barnes and Cieply say that “the partnership between DreamWorks and Disney was never prickly, but it never exactly worked, either.” 

Initial expectations were that Disney would market and distribute “approximately six DreamWorks films each year,” Miller reports, but in recent years, it “has produced only a handful of films annually. And several have underperformed, including its two 2013 pictures, ‘Delivery Man’ and ‘The Fifth Estate.’”

DreamWorks was co-founded by Spielberg in 1994 with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left with the spun-off DreamWorks Animation in 2004, and David Geffen, who left in 2008. Its first feature film, released in 1997, was the action thriller “The Peacemaker,” starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Earlier, it produced the sitcom “Spin City,” according to its official history. It has had a relationship with Universal dating back to at least its 1999 co-production of “Gladiator.”

“‘Jurassic World,’ which rebooted Spielberg's ‘Jurassic Park’ dinosaur franchise, has become the third highest-grossing film in history, behind James Cameron's ‘Titanic’ and ‘Avatar,’” reports Reuters’ Devika Krishna Kumar. Universal is planning a sequel to be released in 2018.

“DreamWorks turned to Disney late in 2008 when Universal balked at its demand for more upfront money and fees from Universal's TV distribution pact with HBO, a source close to the matter had told Reuters,” Kumar writes.

The world, indeed, turns.

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