> Do people think companies really behave this way?
An interesting anecdote from the Steve Jobs biography:
Finding Nemo had just been released to critical acclaim and Pixar were in renegotiation talks about their deal with Disney.
(Disney's) Michael Eisner had one powerful trump card. Even if Pixar didn't renew, Disney had the right to make sequels of Toy Story and the other movies Pixar had made, and it owned all the characters from Woody to Nemo. Eisner was already planning -- or threatening -- to have Disney's own animation studio do a Toy Story 3, which Pixar had declined to do.
The threat had teeth not because Pixar would lose control of some of their characters, but because Disney's animation studio had been releasing flop after flop. After ten years of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, there were ten years of rubbish. As a company, Disney had been creatively brain-dead for a decade.
(Pixar's) John Lasseter was aghast at the prospect of breaking up with Disney. "I was worried about my children, what they would do with the characters we'd created," he recalled. "It's like you have these dear children and you have to give them up to be adopted by convicted child molesters."
Effectively, Disney's negotiation tactic was "re-sign with us, or else we'll spin up a shitty division to make shitty sequels of your movies!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_7_Animation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_3#Production