Mickey Mouse gets Buzz Lightyear!!

The Walt Disney Company is buying the Pixar Animation Studios. The creator of Mickey Mouse has offered the makers of ToyStory a reported $7.4 billion in an all stock purchase, wherein shareholders of Pixar will get 2.3 Disney shares for each Pixar share, making Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has a 50.6% stake in Pixar, largest shareholder in the Walt Disney Company, a feat good enough to put him on board of directors of the biggest and oldest animation studio in Hollywood. But in actual, Pixar cost Disney just about $6.3 billion once the cash reserves of Pixar, in excess of $1billion, are taken into consideration!!

The deal, which is expected to be completed by the coming summer, will see two important changes. Pixar president Ed Catmull will head the Pixar and Disney Animation Studios as its first president, while Pixar’s executive VP & its leading creative mind John Lasseter will take on the post of Chief Creative Officer in the newly formed animation studio. In addition to that, he’ll also serve as a principal creative adviser at Walt Disney Imagineering, reporting to Iger, and will help design theme parks for Disney. However, Pixar will continue to operate from its San Francisco Bay Area headquarters. In a conference call with Pixar investors, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying:

Disney is the only company with animation in their DNA, and the only company that we think has this incredible collection of unique assets like the theme parks, that are very attractive to us as well. They’re the only company who has Bob Iger, who we like a lot and have grown to trust.

Indeed, Disney does have a whole global empire based on cartoons, ranging from movies to TV shows, from toys/models to theme parks, its just a living dream!!

Though as it happens with mergers of these scale, people are sceptical about this one as well, with many doubting the path Pixar might go on from hereon, which might extinguish its creative spark & its soul taken over by the dark side of the corporate entity that Disney is now. Though CEOs of both companies, Steve Jobs & Robert Iger, have allayed such fears by assuring that they’ll do all they can to preserve the soul of Pixar & its culture, only time will tell how much they succeed in this preservation, first they have to get the nod for the sale, from the shareholders of Pixar and get a regulatory approval for the same as well.

Source: c|net