No New Marriage?

Per the L.A. Times, DreamWorks Animation could be stuck with its original spouse for awhile.

It's looking unlikely that Shrek will share a home with Bugs Bunny. ... Top film executives at Warner Bros. ... feel that releasing future DreamWorks Animation movies would not be a good use of the studio's distribution and marketing resources for anything close to the 8% of revenues that Paramount has collected for the service. ...

As I've said before, Jeffrey has kept the high-wire act of running an indi cartoon studio spinning along for a lot longer than many industry cynics ever expected. It produced credible though not wildly successful hand-drawn features, shifted to c.g.i. and 3-D features. After a string of high-performers, it's fallen into the ignominy of making under-performing movies that only gross half a billion instead of the more socially acceptable $700+ million.

Oh, the shame.

My guess is that Paramount is running something of a bluff regarding its own new animation division, and will be happy to keep DreamWorks Animation on board if the Glendale studio is agreeable to maintaining the present relationship with the mother conglomerate, percentage-wise.

I mean, $500 million might not be optimum, but it's quite presentable in many industry circles. And in the cartoon department, Paramount's done a lot better with Mr. Katzenberg than it ever did with the Fleischer brothers. It is, in the final calculation, all relative, yest?