Motley Fool Money - Pixar & Disney: Spanning the Range

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Disney dominates the film industry, but within the company itself the studios are a smaller fish in a big pond. How much pressure is there for the animated films to generate revenue beyond the box office? Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and longtime executive at Disney, shares how his teams maintain the balance between commercial output and artistic risk.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ed Catmel is one of the co-founders of Pixar, and before his recent retirement, he was the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. This is someone who helped revolutionize not just animated films, but the overall movie industry. So when we spoke a few years ago, I asked him about how much pressure Pixar and Disney Animation get from the merchandising side of the company. When we make our films, we have a span. Now, we want them to all be great films, so that goes without sense. that if you make the public wants it, consumer products wants it, it will be difficult to make, but Brad Bird is excited about doing it. Oh, it would be difficult.

It's a low-risk idea. There's a certain range of our films which are low-risk. When you do a cars film, then you know that at the same time, we've got the other end. Films would not pass the elevator test. idea or if you make a film about an old man who floats away, well, no matter how successful the film is, you were never going to sell a lot of toy. What we try to do is say, okay, let's span this range because you do want to do some things that are commercially likely to succeed because we want to be healthy and we're in a business. It's important for our films to do.

We're also a group of artists and it's really hard to figure out. But by By saying, and explicitly people, we're spanning that range from the very hard, conceptually hard, to those that are likely to do well, then we make ourselves financially healthy, and that allows us to continue to take risks. In addition to being an Academy Award winner several times over, at Catmell is also a best-selling author. Check out his book, Creativity Incorporated, overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration.

I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.