$539 million

I do this more often than I should but my curiosity takes over and I can’t stop: I go to the Wiki or Google whatever a disagreement is about or whatever we don’t know in a conversation. The other day, Wall-E was mentioned on TV and I said that I can’t wait to see it. Nick and I started talking about Pixar, Steve Jobs and Disney and I ended up pulling up the Pixar Wiki page. Things I found interesting:

• The original team started out as the Graphics Group, a part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm in 1979. Their job was to write a 3D animation software package but in the early ’80s, they also worked on some film sequences.
• Steve Jobs bought the group from George Lucas in 1986. He paid $5 million and put an equal amount in to grow the company.
• They invented the word “pixar” as a fake Spanish verb meaning “to make pixels.”
• Jobs led the company into the hardware business, in addition to its animation software, selling the Pixar Image Computer which they mostly sold to the government and medical groups.
• John Lasseter was tasked with creating sample animations in order to demonstrate and help sell the system. He debuted some of his animations at a computer graphics convention and from there started selling animations for commercial advertising. That is how they got into creating their own animations and stories, just as the hardware division threatened to bankrupt the company.
• Jobs owned 50.1% of the company when they sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion worth of Disney stock, making him the largest shareholder in Disney by a mile.

Pixar’s culture had already intrigued me when I read this article about their inside jokes, particularly the bit about the Pizza Planet truck. And $539 million is the average worldwide box office receipts on their eight feature films to date.