Dream works is kind of interesting to me, it’s this medium between complete artist freedom you get from indie projects and the solid, stone cold existence of Disney.
For Disney, they need to maintain a rigid identity. Not only are they simply *a* family friendly media conglomerate, they need to be *the* family friendly conglomerate. Everything they make must funnel into this identity of squeaky clean perfection. If anything were to be even slightly controversial, it has to be ditched. Now this seems to ONLY apply to their production and not who they support politically but whatever.
Dreamworks however has the freedom to change, its identity can be modified. It originally started as a producer of counterculture movies that aimed to a general audience, with movies like Shrek 1 and 2. In its supposed awkward teenage hood, it made a number of flops and derivative knock offs, but it went past that. Likely with the success of Spider-Man Into The Spiderverse by Universal, They saw the potential of cartoony looking movies and ran with it. I think this change of perspective really opened them up to making better movies, as it showed that even a big company can risk being creatively free, and absolutely come out on top.