It’s about the MONEY!

I have a friend.  He had a joint venture label with a major company.  Said company wanted to buy him out.  He was on a major hot streak.  He didn’t know what to do.  Whether to continue to gamble or take the money.  His attorney said SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE SOME MONEY OFF THE TABLE!

That’s what Steve Jobs is doing here.

Do you know the movie business?

It truly proves the adage that DISTRIBUTION is king, and not CONTENT!  God, in an era when even DREAMWORKS fails and has to throw in with the major do you want to go it alone?  With the major skimming profits for exhibiting your movie.  Controlling all your money.  The major can package films in a TV sale.  Leverage the GOOD ones with the BAD ones.  They’re truly not hit dependent.  They’ve got huge LIBRARIES!

What has Pixar got?  Six hit movies?

Nobody’s hot forever.  Everybody gets cold eventually.

It would be one thing to sell out after two hits, or even three, but after six, the odds are you’re going to have a failure.  Hell, the aforementioned DreamWorks was hot at FIRST!

FURTHERMORE, what is not included in all the spin and analysis in the business press about the synergy and content and other bullshit advantages to Mr. Jobs in this deal, is the decline in DVD sales.

You see DVDs used to sell for a long period of time.  But beginning just over a year ago, this is no longer the case.  Call it the Wal-Mart factor.  Wal-Mart buys a ton of product initially, promotes the hell out of it, to get people into the store to buy higher-margin goods, and then moves on to the NEXT title, to repeat the formula, and YOUR DVD is stocked on a minor aisle far from the cash register and excess inventory is RETURNED to you.  Sales TANK!  Look at the reports.  Pixar missed their targets a year ago, even though they had FINDING NEMO in DVD release.  DreamWorks Animation missed its targets TWICE and is now being investigated by the SEC.

The studio always has a new DVD to ship Wal-Mart, they’ve got a steady flow of product.  The independent?

So, Steve Jobs takes his money from a one trick pony and invests it in a diversified company.  That owns THEME PARKS AND TV STATIONS in addition to movie production and distribution.  He’s playing it SAFE!

As for Jobs leveraging his stock position…  Hell, Michael Eisner was the LARGEST stockholder of Disney and he got SQUEEZED OUT!

It’s not like Sumner Redstone and Viacom.  Where he could leverage all his properties in advertising sales.  And, even SUMNER broke the company in two.  So much for synergy.

And, if Jobs DOES lean on Disney to deliver…  It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY!  It’s a RAT’S NEST of obligations/regulations.  There are corporate bylaws.  State and federal laws.  And don’t tell me the sun’s not going to shine on anything Apple and Disney do.  God, Steve Jobs FARTS and it’s in the paper.

Steve IS trying to drag the content companies into the future.  And, this will make Disney somewhat of an ally.  But he already had Bob Iger as an ally.  If he just reupped distribution with him he’d STILL have him as an ally.  Furthermore, Sony OWNS a movie studio and can’t seem to get Blu-ray HD DVDs to be the standard.  No, Jobs will make it on his smarts, INNOVATION, not backroom dealings.  God, if he were about backroom dealings wouldn’t he have already caved into the record labels and given them variable pricing?  Hell, he could have BLAMED it on them if there was a consumer backlash.

Now Steve Jobs can sleep at night.  He doesn’t have to keep his mind on his money 24/7.  He can focus on Apple.  He can focus on changing the world.

And, with Pixar off his brain, EXPECT HIM TO!

Rumor has it there WAS a movie distribution scheme scheduled to be introduced at Macworld, it’s just that Intel could not deliver enough chips.

And make no mistake.  What’s happening in Cupertino is STILL light years more interesting than what’s happening in Burbank.  And that’s not BUZZ LIGHTYEAR!