On 11th January 1991, the-then head of The Walt Disney Company’s motion picture division, Jeffrey Katzenberg, sent out a memo. Running to over 10,000 words, he sent this document to key higher-ups at the studio, noting that “it is meant for internal use only”. Naturally, the memo leaked, and was widely ridiculed in the Hollywood trade press as a consequence. Thanks to the wonderful Letters Of Note, you can read it in full here.

If parts of this sound familiar, then it should: Cameron Crowe used Katzenberg’s memo, entitled ‘The World Is Changing: Some Thoughts On Our Business’ as the basis for his 1996 hit, Jerry Maguire.

But re-reading Katzenberg’s memo, over 20 years later, the now head of DreamWorks Animation called a lot of things right. In fact, given that as he wrote it, Disney was in the business of releasing over 40 pictures a year into cinemas, an awful lot has changed. So what did he predict, and what actually happened? Glad you asked…

It’s worth noting before we get going that Katzenberg wrote his memo in the aftermath of 1990, when Disney topped the box office charts, but at a cost. It spent heavily on Dick Tracy, which just about recouped its costs, but as Katzenberg noted, “our number one status was far from a sign of robust health. Instead, it merely underscored the fact that our studio did the least badly in a year of steady decline for Hollywood”.