The Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studios have established a partnership to collaborate on five films over a ten-year period. (Pixar Animation Studios, n.d.)
Pixar's management found themselves at a turning point when their five-film deal with Disney came to an end (Wise, 2014). In many respects, Disney and Pixar's partnership has been one of the most successful in the history of the entertainment industry. To illustrate, DreamWorks' global box office average from 1998 to 2005 was $317 million, whereas Pixar's was $538 million. In addition, DreamWorks, which employed 1,280 people, produced two computer-generated pictures annually as opposed to Pixar's one movie, which brought in $1 billion in 2004 (Alcacer et al., 2010).
The popularity of Pixar's characters increased as Disney's own animated films declined, and Pixar executives became less satisfied with the Pixar-Disney partnership (Wise, 2014). Accordingly, parts of Pixar and Disney's contract were a topic of many debates and arguments, regarding character ownership or whether Toy Story 2 is one of the five feature films (Wise, 2014). The Walt Disney Company ends up purchasing Pixar Animation Studios. After many long negotiations between the studios, Disney paid $7.4 billion for Pixar agreeing that Ed Catmull and John Lasseter both take over as Walt Disney Animation Studios' leaders (Wise, 2014).