... “I could imagine that with a good financial partner coming with us, putting together the assets of Paramount and DreamWorks could be extremely valuable,” he told attendees at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “We could bring a lot to that business.” ...
Mr. Katzenberg, of course, spent his formative years at Paramount under the benevolent eyes of Barry Diller and Michael Eisner. If that seems like a lifetime ago, it's because it is. Jeffrey K. moved over to Disney in 1985, then formed DreamWorks a decade later.
Time flies when you're building empires.
Jeffrey Katzenberg has been looking to sell DreamWOrks Animation to the highest bidder for the better part of a decade. There was no way he was going to match Pixar's sale price to the Walt Disney Company, but he gave it the old college try. Unfortunately a financial meltdown got in the way. Plus there was no Perfect Storm at his back, the way there was for Steve Jobs. Disney was the only conglomerate desperate for a going animation concern. Everybody else was happy to be in theatrical cartoons, they just weren't willing to pay six or seven billion dollars to get in the game.
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He's been looking to dump the animation division for a while now. I wonder who Paramount would get to run it? No one in the industry thinks it would be him---that would be a terrible idea.
Jeffrey, I think, wants to run it himself. With a long-term employment contract.
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