Pixar is laying off 175 workers, or approximately 14 percent of its total workforce.
Jim Morris, the Disney-owned animation studio’s president, confirmed the news to staff in an internal memo, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Disney had been planning to reduce Pixar’s staff by as much as 20 percent as part of a larger $5.5 billion USD (about $7.5 billion CAD) cost-cutting initiative. Pixar had avoided company-wide Disney layoffs last year because of production schedules, per THR, but the cuts had still always been planned.
Alongside the job cuts, Pixar will scale back its work on Disney+ streaming content and once again focus exclusively on theatrical films. The only exception is Pixar’s Win or Lose, a series about a co-ed softball team that is set to hit Disney+ later this year.
All of this comes after former Disney CEO Bob Chapek had ordered the company to go all-in on streaming, leading to a slew of titles from all of its divisions, including Marvel and Lucasfilm. For Pixar, that included making three films that were intended for theatres to head straight to Disney+ (Soul, Luca and Turning Red), as well as series like Monsters at Work.
This has led several recent Disney animated films to struggle in theatres, including Pixar’s Lightyear. Pixar boss Pete Docter, who also directed films like Soul and Monster’s, Inc., admitted that Disney had “trained” audiences to just wait for these animated films to come to Disney+ with its COVID-era straight-to-streaming releases.
Going forward, Pixar has big hopes for Inside Out 2, which hits theatres on June 14th. The film is a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, which grossed over $850 million USD (about $1.16 billion CAD) and is often considered one of Pixar’s best.
The company is clearly hoping that Inside Out 2 will perform more like last year’s Elemental — which had a slow start but went on to become Pixar’s highest-grossing film since 2017’s Coco — and less like Lightyear.
Beyond that, Pixar has Elio, a new sci-fi film coming in June 2025, and Toy Story 5 sometime in 2016.
Image credit: Pixar
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