The fact that the Pixar movie managed to have a higher gross is a big reason for why it is the king of this insect battle. Today I’d like to dive into that age-old question: Antz or A Bug’s Life? Then Z ends up dancing with a slumming Princess Bala (Sharon Stone), the daughter of the queen and the fiancée of psychotic warrior General Mandible (Gene Hackman). Z gets a glimpse of a world bigger and brighter than the vaguely communist dystopia he finds himself mired in when a drunk at a bar talks blearily but passionately about a heaven on earth called Insectopia. Let’s have a look. Regardless of how petty and sad the plan to one-up the movie was, it was brilliant. But now they were locked in a battle orchestrated by competing corporations and the men with very big egos behind those corporations.Still, it stung Lasseter personally. That's when I realized, it wasn't about me. “A Bug’s Life” and “Antz” weren’t just conspicuously similar animated features, they were mastheads in a violent battle between warring corporate entities. It would be nice if Allen and Stone were the Tracy and Hepburn of opportunistic cartoons, but they have so little chemistry that when Z tells Princess Bala, “I was going to include you in my erotic fantasies,” the effect is more creepy than romantic.If the film succeeds artistically, in addition to commercially, that’s probably because it sets the bar so low. It’s taken the studio decades and terrific, original films like Antz Theatrical release poster Directed by Eric Darnell Tim Johnson Produced by Brad Lewis Aron Warner Patty Wooton Written by Paul Weitz Chris Weitz Todd Alcott Starring Woody Allen Dan Aykroyd Anne Bancroft Jane Curtin Danny Glover Gene Hackman Jennifer Lopez John Mahoney Paul Mazursky Grant Shaud Sylvester Stallone Sharon Stone Christopher Walken Music by Harry Gregson-Williams John Powell CinematographySimon J. Smith Edited byStan Webb Production company DreamWorks Pictures Dream… “Antz” was released on October, 2 nd 1998 while “A Bug’s Life” was released on November, 25 th, 1998. But it was Lasseter who stopped any deal from going forward.
DreamWorks was able to save valuable time by skimping on quality. There’s a rich strain of vaudeville and the Catskills in the way Allen delivers his signature one-liners in a new form, but Z isn’t just on hand to crack wise. “The whole idea was to draw us into a bugs vs. bugs war, so they'd get compared to us," Lasseter told Business Week.
(This was during the time that Katzenberg had engaged in a costly legal battle with Shortly thereafter, Katzenberg offered a deal: He would cancel production on “Antz” if Disney would move “A Bug's Life” away from “The Prince of Egypt.” Lasseter, somehow, was even angrier, storming into Pixar CEO Steve Jobs’ office. Katzenberg later denied that those phone calls had taken place.In 1998, Lasseter said that the dust-up caused by the competing productions had “completely changed the community.” After all, they were so friendly with PDI that the two studios would co-host parties at the industry trade show SIGGRAPH. Oh sure, he has friends like a super-strong ant voiced by the super-strong Sylvester Stallone, but like the protagonists in all children’s movies, he hungers for more. But when “A Bug’s Life” flew into theaters a few weeks later, it racked up $163 million domestic and another $200 million, it handily squashed “Antz.” If DreamWorks and PDI were the bad guys in the scenario, as Jobs had suggested, they certainly didn’t win.Yet what Katzenberg knew -- and when he knew it -- remains the biggest mystery. Both movies feature the life of … At times As the film begins, Z is a lost man, just one of millions of workers diligently moving dirt from one place to another for the sake of the greater good. Old directors and plots get dropped and new directors and plots get introduced. A Bug’s Life ended up getting released the same year as Antz and outgrossed it at the box-office substantially, coming it at No. According to the Jobs biography, Katzenberg reached back out after the smash success of 2001’s “Shrek.” That film, which largely lampooned Disney, was an undeniable sensation, even if large swathes of it were stolen from a Disney animator at the time (that’s a whole 'nother story).
Where Pixar set out to evolve and revolutionize the technology of animation and join it with the best storytelling in the world, Katzenberg’s shamelessness in wanting to get his plucky-insect movie out before Pixar’s tarred DreamWorks Animation with a reputation for being tacky, vulgar, derivative, and mercenary, pejoratives that are seldom associated with Pixar. It was after “Shrek’s” success that Katzenberg told Jobs, again, that he had no idea about “A Bug’s Life” while working at Disney and that if he had known about it, he would have made more money thanks to his lawsuit and the associated profit participation owed him, than actually producing “Antz.”In fact, when DreamWorks Animation was up for sale a few years ago, Disney could have easily bought the studio and folded those characters into its already-bursting portfolio. When it comes to this particular battle, A Bug's Life dominated in the box office, grossing more than $360 million in comparison to the $170 million that Antz brought in.
That was the same timeframe that Katzenberg had earmarked for DreamWorks’ first animated epic, a splashy biblical tale called “Supposedly, it was PDI chief Carl Rosendahl who broke the news to Lasseter about the development of “Antz.” Rosendahl laid it all out for Lasseter: DreamWorks had agreed to purchase 40% of the struggling PDI, but only if the studio could deliver “Antz” In terms of the official story, Lasseter claims to have read about the film’s development in the trades.David Price’s book, “The Pixar Touch,” recounts that Katzenberg gave PDI “rich financial incentives” to make sure they could beat Pixar to the punch. He said he had to do something. Jobs didn’t budge. As knock-offs go, Antz is nowhere near as embarrassing as previous Forgotbuster subject A Shark’s Tale , another DreamWorks Animation project that gave the Poochie treatment to Pixar’s Finding Nemo.