Word: bugging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feature, Antz. The computer-animated story of life in an ant colony, Antz features the voices of Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone and Dan Aykroyd. In November Pixar, the creator of Toy Story, and Disney, the studio where Katzenberg was chairman for 10 years, plan to release A Bug's Life, which also happens to be the computer-animated story of life in an ant colony. It features the voices of NewsRadio's Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary...
Disney, however, buzzed into Katzenberg's plans by slotting A Bug's Life for November, directly against Prince of Egypt. Disney had completely underestimated the phenomenon Toy Story would be, but it was expecting great things from A Bug's Life. It had its McDonald's meals and its merchandise deals all lined up. Pixar has alleged that Katzenberg was so intimidated that he offered to cancel Antz if Disney would move A Bug's Life away from Prince of Egypt. DreamWorks denies that, but Katzenberg eventually shifted Prince of Egypt to what he thought would be a safer date...
Months earlier, though, Katzenberg had decided to give Disney a taste of its own medicine. He put Antz on a rush schedule to get it out five months early--beating A Bug's Life by several weeks. Katzenberg insists that he has "not a scintilla" of interest in tweaking Disney by upstaging Bugs but that he hurried his film merely because "the movie's great, and we could get it done...
Disney studio chief Joe Roth insists he isn't bugged by the DreamWorks strategy. "I think Antz will come out and do fine, and I think Bug's Life will come out and do fine," he says. But Disney and Pixar apparently are not speaking with one voice on this topic. In fact, Jobs has irked his Disney partners by speaking to reporters without consulting them. Roth has asked Jobs to tone down his anti-DreamWorks rhetoric, without much luck. Jobs declines to comment...
Ironically, Disney's toughest competition may not come from Antz. The studio is pushing A Bug's Life back from Nov. 20 to Nov. 25--not, according to Roth, to move another week away from Antz but to avoid going mano a mano with Paramount's Rugrats, the movie version of the popular children's TV show, which opens Nov. 20 and is expected to be a powerful contender in the intense holiday family-entertainment race. But that move to Nov. 25 puts A Bug's Life in direct competition with Universal's sequel to the popular pig movie, Babe...