10 Movies Probably Made Out Of Spite

2. Shrek

Shrek is such a wonderful, heart-warming movie that it's tough to imagine its primary creative impetus was vengeful fury, but that's exactly what happened.

Jeffrey Katzenberg served as the chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994, a tenure which ended amid a major falling out with Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney.

Katzenberg was ultimately forced to resign from Disney and received an estimated $250 million settlement after filing suit. Later in 1994 he co-founded DreamWorks, and soon enough set about producing an adaptation of William Steig's 1990 picture book Shrek!

Even the most casual observer of the Shrek movie will appreciate how thoroughly it skewers both general fairy tales and more pointedly tired Disney tropes, deconstructing them with a playful wink at the audience.

It's no stretch at all to suggest that this was Katzenberg's ultimate "F**k you" to Disney, to creatively rib how staid their animated output had become by the turn of the millennium, long after the Renaissance which Katzenberg himself spearheaded had come and gone.

In the lead up to the film's release, Disney responded by refusing to air commercials for Shrek on their Radio Disney station, and DreamWorks clapped back by releasing Shrek on home video the same day as Monsters, Inc., where it went on to become one of the best-selling DVDs of all time.

But perhaps the real validation of Katzenberg's cinematic tantrum was that Shrek beat Monsters, Inc. to win the first ever Best Animated Film Oscar, and even today, Shrek remains one of the few DreamWorks films that can truly live up to the majesty of Disney's finest.