Closing the Circle

The brief, unproductive life of the Circle 7 Studio ...

... [I]n early 2004 ... Steve Jobs announced to the staff at Pixar that they would not be renewing their deal with Disney. Jobs and Eisner couldn’t see eye to eye, and it didn’t appear that they ever would. So for about a year and a half, during which time the studio completed production on The Incredibles and went into overdrive on Cars, Pixar was an animation studio in search of a new home. And Circle 7 Animation was beginning to ramp up production of its own on sequels to Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. ...

Let's remember what was going on way back when.

Disney topkick Mike Eisner was in a spitting match with Steve Jobs. And Mr. Jobs was far from happy. He announced his intention to pick up his fancy and very profitable marbles and go to an entertainment conglomerate not named Disney. Eisner then invoked Disney's right to make sequels of earlier Piar features. Michael E. commenced putting together a Disney-controlled sequel studio -- a sprawling, one and two-story building that sat across the street from Disney's ABC broadcast studio in Glendale, on Circle 7 Drive.

Steve Jobs, also John Lasseter, were enraged.

But Mr. Eisner, unbeknownst to everybody, was near the end of his Disney career. As Michael went about building a new animation division, he was fighting with Roy Disney (Walt's nephew, if you're keeping tabs on the players at home). Roy, pushed off the Diz Co. board by Eisner in the early oughts, was running a guerrilla campaign that aimed to make Michael E. the EX-Disney C.E.O., and as rapidly as possible.

Which was, ultimately, what happened. Roy Disney orchestrated a shareholder revolt against the Chairman, and within eighteen months Eisner was sliding down a greased corporate exit chute (wheee!).

Meanwhile, the Pixar "sequel studio" was still in ramp-up phase, with Pixar sequels -- one of them a new Toy Story feature -- in development. In fact, scads of new animation employees were hired, some from the states, some from Canada and overseas, and Disney executives were assuring the newbies that the work on which they were embarked would be long-term.

But such was not the case. Michael Eisner stepped down as chief exec, and new topkick Bob Iger soon brokered a $7.2 billion merger with Pixar. The Circle 7 studio was shuttered.

Most of Circle 7's employees were given their walking papers. Some of them found work in other divisions of the Walt Disney Company, and others returned to their home countries (losing a chunk of money in the process). The media theme at the time was "the House of Mouse has swallowed Pixar, and all's well that ends well." But one of the smaller realities were a goodly number of people lost their jobs and got burned. And were more than a teensy bit ticked off.