Pro-AIPerson

Jeffrey Katzenberg

Media Executive

DreamWorks co-founder and former Disney studio chief who predicted AI will cut the cost of a world-class animated film by 90% within years — and framed it as the greatest opportunity the industry has seen.

Executive Entertainment

Wikipedia WndrCo

In his words

In the good old days, it took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie. I don’t think it will take 10% of that three years out from now.

— Bloomberg New Economy Forum, 2023

Biography

Jeffrey Katzenberg (born 1950) ran Walt Disney Studios during the animation renaissance of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, then co-founded DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 1994, building DreamWorks Animation into the house of Shrek. After the high-profile failure of his short-form streaming startup Quibi in 2020, he has focused on his investment firm WndrCo.

The 90% prediction

At the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore in November 2023, Katzenberg said AI would slash the cost of making blockbuster animated films by about 90%, compressing the work of 500 artists over five years into a fraction of that. He called AI an extraordinary tool for storytellers, placing it in the lineage of disruptions — from hand-drawn to CG animation — that he had already lived through and profited from.

Coming weeks after the Hollywood strikes ended, the remark detonated across the animation industry: to working artists it read as an executive celebrating the elimination of nine in ten jobs, and outlets from The Hollywood Reporter to IndieWire framed it as exactly that. Groups like The Animation Guild cited such predictions in bargaining for AI protections.

Katzenberg, who also sits on the boards of AI-adjacent ventures and has invested in the space through WndrCo, has not walked the prediction back — his consistent public line is that every leap in creative technology has ultimately expanded, not shrunk, what gets made.