Antz
as a way to counter his former colleagues at
Disney. DreamWorks’ first major picture was to be
Prince of Egypt
, which was scheduled to be
released for Thanksgiving 1998, and he was appalled when he heard that Disney was planning to
release Pixar’s
A Bug’s Life
that same weekend. So he had rushed
Antz
into production to force
Disney to change the release date of
A Bug’s Life
.
“Fuck you,” replied Lasseter, who did not normally use such language. He didn’t speak to
Katzenberg for another thirteen years.
Jobs was furious, and he was far more practiced than Lasseter at giving vent to his emotions.
He called Katzenberg and started yelling. Katzenberg made an offer: He would delay production
of
Antz
if Jobs and Disney would move
A Bug’s Life
so that it didn’t compete with
Prince of
Egypt
. “It was a blatant extortion attempt, and I didn’t go for it,” Jobs recalled. He told
Katzenberg there was nothing he could do to make Disney change the release date.
“Of course you can,” Katzenberg replied. “You can move mountains. You taught me how!” He
said that when Pixar was almost bankrupt, he had come to its rescue by giving it the deal to do
Toy
Story
. “I was the one guy there for you back then, and now you’re allowing them to use you to
screw me.” He suggested that if Jobs wanted to, he could simply slow down production on
A Bug’
s Life
without telling Disney. If he did, Katzenberg said, he would put
Antz
on hold. “Don’t even
go there,” Jobs replied.
Katzenberg had a valid gripe. It was clear that Eisner and Disney were using the Pixar movie to
get back at him for leaving Disney and starting a rival animation studio. “
Prince of Egypt
was the
first thing we were making, and they scheduled something for our announced release date just to
be hostile,” he said. “My view was like that of the Lion King, that if you stick your hand in my
cage and paw me, watch out.”
No one backed down, and the rival ant movies provoked a press frenzy. Disney tried to keep
Jobs quiet, on the theory that playing up the rivalry would serve to help
Antz
, but he was a man not
easily muzzled. “The bad guys rarely win,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. In response,
DreamWorks’ savvy marketing maven, Terry Press, suggested, “Steve Jobs should take a pill.”
Antz
was released at the beginning of October 1998. It was not a bad movie. Woody Allen
voiced the part of a neurotic ant living in a conformist society who yearns to express his
individualism. “This is the kind of Woody Allen comedy Woody Allen no longer makes,”
Time
wrote. It grossed a respectable $91 million domestically and $172 million worldwide.
A Bug’s Life
came out six weeks later, as planned. It had a more epic plot, which reversed
Aesop’s tale of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” plus a greater technical virtuosity, which allowed
such startling details as the view of grass from a bug’s vantage point.
Time
was much more
effusive about it. “Its design work is so stellar—a wide-screen Eden of leaves and labyrinths
populated by dozens of ugly, buggy, cuddly cutups—that it makes the DreamWorks film seem, by
comparison, like radio,” wrote Richard Corliss. It did twice as well as
Antz
at the box office,
grossing $163 million domestically and $363 million worldwide. (It also beat
Prince of Egypt
.)
A few years later Katzenberg ran into Jobs and tried to smooth things over. He insisted that he
had never heard the pitch for
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