The History of DreamWorks Pictures

The story of DreamWorks is unique in the history of cinema. The three men who founded the company had plenty of wealth and plenty of experience working in the entertainment industry, but the idea of self-distributing your own big-budget films in the nineties? And releasing them without the help of any of the major studios? That was unheard of. This was not an independent film studio like Miramax. This was a studio that sought to compete directly with WB, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Sony and Disney. The closest any other non-independent film studios came to achieving that goal since DreamWorks was founded were Lionsgate and Amazon MGM, but even those two are more tight with their budgets than usual. DreamWorks not only self-distributed expensive animated films with well-known actors but they also made period dramas, war epics, fantasies and science fiction that could stand toe to toe with anything made by the Big Six. Of course they were only partly successful because DreamWorks would have a relatively short lifespan as a self-distributor. It turns out building your own studio is hard. But the studio still produced some great films and they continue to do so today.

DreamWorks was founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen as DreamWorks SKG. Spielberg was of course one of the most successful filmmakers on the planet thanks to movies like Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park, Katzenberg was one of the most successful movie executives thanks to the winning streak of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King during his tenure as chairman of Walt Disney Studios and Geffen was a huge record executive thanks to the success of Geffen Records and his collaboration with artists like John Lennon, Aerosmith, Peter Gabriel, Guns n’ Roses and the generation-defining Nirvana.

After Katzenberg resigned from Disney following the death of Disney president Frank Wells in 1994 (and the power struggle that followed), he approached Spielberg and Geffen with the idea of forming their own live-action and animation studio. Very few people in Hollywood attempted self-distribution due to the expense and the risk, but the three founders agreed on the undertaking under the condition that they would make less than nine films a year, they would all be free to work for other studios at the same time, and they would always be home in time for dinner. An assurance that relieved much of the typical pressures of running a Hollywood studio.

That same year, DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation were also founded, followed shortly by DreamWorks Records and DreamWorks Interactive. Although some of these divisions would be more successful than others.

The first film to be released by DreamWorks was political thriller The Peacemaker (1997) starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. It made enough money to be successful but it was largely dismissed by critics for being thinly plotted and generic. That film was followed the same year by Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Amistad and Gore Vidal’s slapstick comedy Mouse Hunt, the former receiving good reviews and little commercial success and the latter receiving negative reviews and huge commercial success. In 1998, DreamWorks distributed their first animated films The Prince of Egypt and Antz, which were both successful. Animation of course would become what DreamWorks is best known for thanks to the huge success of DreamWorks Animation, although that studio would eventually split from DreamWorks Pictures and the two would become separate companies by 2005.

The wide variety of films released by DreamWorks Pictures would also include Saving Private Ryan (1998, co-distributed with Paramount), American Beauty (1999), Galaxy Quest (1999), Gladiator (2000), Almost Famous (2000), Chicken Run (2000), Shrek (2001), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Road to Perdition (2002), The Ring (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Old School (2003), Anchorman (2004), Dreamgirls (2006, with Paramount), Sweeney Todd (2007) and Tropic Thunder (2008, with Paramount). DreamWorks actually won some astonishing accolades early in the studio’s lifespan, nabbing three Oscars for Best Picture three years in a row thanks to American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. They also won the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature thanks to Shrek.

DreamWorks often teamed up with other distributors like Paramount, Universal and Fox around this time to keep themselves afloat until they eventually morphed into more of a production company than a distributor. They completely halted their own distribution operations by the mid-2000s, although they still had a lot of success producing films for other studios. Those films included A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, WB), Minority Report (2002, Fox), War of the Worlds (2005, Paramount), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, Sony), Flags of Our Fathers (2006, WB), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, WB), Blades of Glory (2007, Paramount), Transformers (2007, Paramount), Up in the Air (2009, Paramount), True Grit (2010, Paramount) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011, Paramount).

Paramount briefly bought DreamWorks Pictures in 2006 and entered into a distribution agreement with DreamWorks Animation that began that year with Over the Hedge and ended in 2012 with Rise of the Guardians, until the animation studio partnered with 20th Century Fox in 2013 and eventually got acquired by Comcast in 2016 (I’ll go into more detail about DreamWorks Animation in my next blog). Meanwhile, following the production of Paramount’s 2011 rom-com No Strings Attached, DreamWorks Pictures entered a distribution deal with Disney, beginning with the sci-fi action film I Am Number Four (2011) which was produced by DreamWorks for Touchstone Pictures. After that, DreamWorks would consistently produce films for Touchstone like The Help (2011), Real Steel (2011), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012) and Bridge of Spies (2015). The partnership between DreamWorks and Disney was beneficial to both companies because DreamWorks was a production company in serious need of an international distributor and Touchstone was a dying label in search of quality productions. The Help, War Horse, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies would all end up with Oscar nominations for Best Picture so the partnership worked out well.

The deal with Disney lasted until 2016. The year before, DreamWorks Pictures was acquired by Amblin Partners, a joint venture co-founded by Spielberg that he used to produce family-oriented films under the Amblin banner and adult-oriented films under the DreamWorks banner. In 2018, DreamWorks began teaming up with Universal as a distributor for films like First Man (2018), Green Book (2018) and 1917 (2019). Universal has become DreamWorks Pictures’ closest partner in recent years but DreamWorks also produces films for many companies from Lionsgate to Focus Features to HBO to Netflix.

DreamWorks could have easily failed as a company but Spielberg seems to still get a lot of use out of the label (Geffen left the company in 2008 and Katzenberg stepped down as CEO of DreamWorks Animation in 2016). The company’s last production was the 2023 supernatural horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter while the release date for their next production, a sci-fi comedy called Distant, is still unknown. But chances are, as long as Spielberg continues to show interest in making films for adults, we will see that logo again.