Jeffrey Katzenberg

Jeffrey Katzenberg is an American entrepreneur who played a pivotal role in transforming the Walt Disney Company into a multibillion-dollar empire and who, along with filmmaker Steven Spielberg and music mogul David Geffen, founded the film studio DreamWorks SKG.

Katzenberg attended New York University for one year. He worked as a political organizer and held odd jobs (including that of talent agent) before taking a job at Paramount Pictures. While there Katzenberg became a protégé of Michael Eisner, who was president of Paramount from 1976 to 1984. Katzenberg started in the mail room and worked his way up through the ranks to become the president of the production of motion pictures and television. When Eisner took over the reins at the moribund Disney with Frank Wells from Warner Brothers in 1984, Katzenberg joined them as a junior partner.

Over the next decade Eisner, Katzenberg, and Wells built Disney from a beleaguered $2 billion not-so-magical kingdom into a $22 billion empire. Katzenberg oversaw film and television production, with special responsibility for Disney’s animation division and Touchstone Pictures, Disney’s first adult-feature subsidiary. A ruthless cost cutter, he expanded studio revenues from $320 million to $3.7 billion and pretax profits from $2 million to $800 million. The highly profitable animation features he produced—The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King—fueled Disney’s growth. Moreover, they made Disney once more a weaver of richly textured fantasies comparable to those of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Katzenberg resigned in September 1994 after it became clear that Eisner would not bestow greater responsibilities on him following Wells’s accidental death in April of that year. Within days of his resignation, Katzenberg, Spielberg, and Geffen founded DreamWorks. With their new entertainment studio, they intended to make movies, television shows, and music albums and to produce interactive computer-based entertainment. Katzenberg’s first feature film as executive producer was the animated The Prince of Egypt (1998). DreamWorks subsequently produced such films as American Beauty (1999), Gladiator (2000), and A Beautiful Mind (2001)—all recipients of the Academy Award for best picture—and the animated Shrek (2001) and Shark Tale (2004).

In 2004 the animation arm of DreamWorks was spun off as a separate company headed by Katzenberg. Among other productions, DreamWorks Animation was responsible for Madagascar (2005) and its sequels and for the continuation of the Shrek series. Katzenberg remained a principal member of the original DreamWorks company until its sale to Paramount Pictures in 2006. Ten years later he sold DreamWorks Animation to NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast, for $3.8 billion; Katzenberg reportedly received some $400 million. He then established (2017) WndrCo, a media and technology holding company. One of its ventures was Quibi (formerly NewTV), a start-up focusing on short-form videos for mobile devices. The app was launched in April 2020. It struggled, however, and in October it was announced that Quibi was shutting down.

For his involvement in charitable activities, Katzenberg received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012.