It’s back, but just what is it this time?
That’s the essential question, as DreamWorks roars back to life after spending much of 2009 in the credit-market wilderness following its divorce from Paramount.
Now with over $800 million in privately procured financing in the bank and with the launch of six movies into production, the studio begins what can be termed its third life stage -- operating as a privately funded company with only one of the original Big 3 founders, Steven Spielberg, still running the show.
Unshackled from their unhappy Paramount home, and beginning a more simple life as a pure-play movie-production house, DreamWorks officials brim with the kind of hope that can only be found at a studio that hasn’t been around long enough to see anything flop.
“Being our own company, we’re now incredibly nimble – we can make quick decisions,” Holly Bario, who co-heads production for the new DreamWorks, told TheWrap.
"It seems to be DreamWorks 3.0," producer Don Murphy told TheWrap from the set of "Real Steel," one of the six movies that have just begun production around the country. "It's Steven and Stacey (Snider) taking chances on projects they believe in and pushing them out the door."
Of course, everyone seemed pretty happy back in 1994, when the power trio of Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg took $500 million from Paul Allen to create the entertainment company of the future.
It didn't quite turn out that way, as a new book about the company, "The Men Who Would Be Kings: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks," has described.
Asking if "Dreamworks was a failure," author Nicole LaPorte suggests that despite the talent of the early leaders, "these were not groupthink guys, or team players. They were lone wolves who ... locked arms in the face of crisis and catastrophe, but who otherwise tended to their separate fiefdoms."
Has all that changed? While it can’t be called a new studio, this DreamWorks is different from any other DreamWorks that came before it … and this certainly isn’t that DreamWorks.
For one thing, the new DreamWorks is far less ambitious. It's smaller. And for that reason, it may measure success by a more reasonable scale.
With Geffen retired, the studio now is short one formidable billionaire founder. Katzenberg has been gone since 2004, having taken the brand to Glendale to oversee DreamWorks Animation.
Also long gone is a music label that once floated such artists as Rufus Wainwright, George Michael and Randy Newman (it was sold to Universal in 2003), as well as a film library that includes everything from “Saving Private Ryan” to “A Beautiful Mind. (Paramount sold off the controlling interest to the library to a group led by George Soros for $900 million shortly after it purchased DreamWorks in 2005.)
Relaunching the company last August with support from Indian media conglomerate Reliance, Spielberg now finds himself partnered with the steady, well-regarded Stacey Snider (pictured with Jennifer Aniston), overseeing a stable, well-regarded staff of about 80 employees who work out of his Amblin Entertainment facility on the Universal lot.
