DreamWorks Animation is profitable.  It has been ever since a billion pop-culture references vomited out of Shrek’s mouth back in 2001.  I suppose DreamWorks Animation is useful in that we’ll always have a company that will be wildly inferior to Pixar.

But when reading Variety’s report about DWA’s plans for the future, it’s not hard to see why.  For starters, they want five new films over the next two years.  Pixar keeps to one really, really good film per year.  Second, bragging about their successful franchies of “Shrek”, “Kung Fu Panda”, and now “Monsters vs. Aliens”, Co-President of Production Bill Damaschke says they want two sequels a year and one original movie.  Huzzah.  And finally, as per CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg’s asinine mandate, all projects will be produced in 3D (you know, because it’s the future and shit.  Emphasis on the “and shit”).

I don’t mean to be so down on DreamWorks Animation because they have produced some enjoyable flicks like “Bee Movie” and “Over the Hedge”.  But this insistence on arbitrary business guidelines like how many films they’ll make and how many must be sequels and why they all have to be in 3D so that we can breed a nation of cross-eyed children (someone will do a study; mark my words) is the hollowness of Hollywood laid bare.  And I’m not saying that Pixar only thinks of stories and lives in a magical world where they don’t have business considerations.  But it’s so disheartening to read an article like this because it reads like “Happy Meal First, Movie Second”.

However, they do know the movies they’re making through 2012 and we’ve included a list of them below along with brief synopsis after the jump.