Steve Jobs

released.”
    Lasseter began to get worried when, in early 1996, he heard rumors that DreamWorks might be making its own computer-animated movie about ants. He called Katzenberg and asked him point-blank. Katzenberg hemmed, hawed, and asked where Lasseter had heard that. Lasseter asked again, and Katzenberg admitted it was true. “How could you?” yelled Lasseter, who very rarely raised his voice.
    “We had the idea long ago,” said Katzenberg, who explained that it had been pitched to him by a development director at DreamWorks.
    “I don’t believe you,” Lasseter replied.
    Katzenberg conceded that he had sped up
Antz
as a way to counter his former colleagues at Disney. DreamWorks’ first major picture was to be
Prince of Egypt
, which was scheduled to be released for Thanksgiving 1998, and he was appalled when he heard that Disney was planning to release Pixar’s
A Bug’s Life
that same weekend. So he had rushed
Antz
into production to force Disney to change the release date of
A Bug’s Life
.
    “Fuck you,” replied Lasseter, who did not normally use such language. He didn’t speak to Katzenberg for another thirteen years.
    Jobs was furious, and he was far more practiced than Lasseter at giving vent to his emotions. He called Katzenberg and started yelling. Katzenberg made an offer: He would delay production of
Antz
if Jobs and Disney would move
A Bug’s Life
so that it didn’t compete with
Prince of Egypt
. “It was a blatant extortion attempt, and I didn’t go for it,” Jobs recalled. He told Katzenberg there was nothing he could do to make Disney change the release date.
    “Of course you can,” Katzenberg replied. “You can move mountains. You taught me how!” He said that when Pixar was almost bankrupt, he had come to its rescue by giving it the deal to do
Toy Story
. “I was the one guy there for you back then, and now you’re allowing them to use you to screw me.” He suggested that if Jobs wanted to, he could simply slow down production on
A Bug’s Life
without telling Disney. If he did, Katzenberg said, he would put
Antz
on hold. “Don’t even go there,” Jobs replied.
    Katzenberg had a valid gripe. It was clear that Eisner and Disney were using the Pixar movie to get back at him for leaving Disney and starting a rival animation studio. “
Prince of Egypt
was the first thing we were making, and they scheduled something for our announced release date just to be hostile,” he said. “My view was like that of the Lion King, that if you stick your hand in my cage and paw me, watch out.”
    No one backed down, and the rival ant movies provoked a press frenzy. Disney tried to keep Jobs quiet, on the theory that playing upthe rivalry would serve to help
Antz
, but he was a man not easily muzzled. “The bad guys rarely win,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. In response, DreamWorks’ savvy marketing maven, Terry Press, suggested, “Steve Jobs should take a pill.”
    Antz
was released at the beginning of October 1998. It was not a bad movie. Woody Allen voiced the part of a neurotic ant living in a conformist society who yearns to express his individualism. “This is the kind of Woody Allen comedy Woody Allen no longer makes,”
Time
wrote. It grossed a respectable $91 million domestically and $172 million worldwide.
    A Bug’s Life
came out six weeks later, as planned. It had a more epic plot, which reversed Aesop’s tale of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” plus a greater technical virtuosity, which allowed such startling details as the view of grass from a bug’s vantage point.
Time
was much more effusive about it. “Its design work is so stellar—a wide-screen Eden of leaves and labyrinths populated by dozens of ugly, buggy, cuddly cutups—that it makes the DreamWorks film seem, by comparison, like radio,” wrote Richard Corliss. It did twice as well as
Antz
at the box office, grossing $163 million domestically and $363 million worldwide. (It also beat
Prince of Egypt
.)
    A few years later Katzenberg ran into Jobs and tried to smooth things over. He insisted that he had never heard the pitch for
A Bug’s Life
while at Disney; if he had, his settlement with Disney would have given him a share of the profits, so it’s not something he would lie about. Jobs laughed, and accepted as much. “I asked you to move your release date, and you wouldn’t, so you can’t be mad at me for protecting my child,” Katzenberg told him. He recalled that Jobs “got really calm and