DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg recalls the summer of 1994 like it was yesterday.
Katzenberg was chairman of The Walt Disney Studios , a role that included reviving its animated film business. And revive it he did. Come 1994, Walt Disney Studios was back on top: “The Lion King” was the No. 1 movie, the top-selling soundtrack with 25 million albums sold, and a blockbuster video game developed by Sega. Oh, and the No. 1 TV show — a half-hour family sitcom called “Home Improvement,” with Tim Allen — belonged to Disney, too. But all that success did little to stop ex-CEO Michael Eisner from firing him over irreconcilable differences.
The lesson learned? “Do good — just don’t do too good,” quipped the 63-year-old Hollywood exec onstage at a conference hosted by online file-sharing startup Box on Wednesday. Katzenberg is now CEO of DreamWorks Animation , the Glendale, Calif.- animation studio he co-founded with media moguls Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 2004. Not every film has performed well at the box office — this March’s flop, “Mr. Peabody & Sherman,” cost the studio $57 million in the first quarter — but the studio has also produced blockbusters like “Shrek 2″ and “Shrek the Third.” And its most recent film, “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” crossed the $600 million mark in ticket sales this weekend.
The process by which Katzenberg and his studio go about making movies follows a general philosophy he’s followed for decades. “The one thing I always tried to do a little bit better than what I was expected to do,” he said. “When I go into a situation, whether it was an assignment I had, whether it was as a gopher [years ago], retrieving a danish for someone, or when I come into a staff meeting, I think about how I can exceed expectations and have people walk out of those engagements thinking, ‘well, that was a little bit better. I didn’t expect that.’ When people walk into any product or movie of ours, we want it to be a little bit more than what they were expecting. We don’t always succeed, but we really try hard.”
Case in point: Katzenberg’s 40th wedding anniversary with wife Marilyn isn’t until early next year, but the exec is already plotting a surprise for her. “I’m already working on how in the hell am I going to exceed her expectations,” he mused. “So, if you can you exceed the expectations of those people you’re in business with, almost every single time you will win.”
