New Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro has instituted another wave of layoffs at Disney. This time the cuts are hitting Pixar especially hard, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The scale of the cuts is still unknown, though National Geographic and ESPN were also hit. It’s the third round of Disney layoffs this year as part of a new “one Disney” organizational strategy. January’s cuts streamlined marketing, and April layoffs that impacted over 1,000 included people at Marvel’s visual development team which, among other things, helps craft the style and feel of the MCU.
The cuts to Pixar come despite Toy Story 5 and Hoppers grossing a combined $1.25 billion at the box office this year. While the lion’s share of that was Toy Story 5, Hoppers didn’t flop. It grossed nearly $400 million before moving to Disney+. The new franchise is a sci-fi coming-of-age adventure about a young resident trying to save the local wildlife from greedy developers and urban sprawl. It certainly performed better than Disney’s live-action Moana flop.
“Pixar has just been utterly gutted of almost all its veterans,” wrote veteran artist Julia Lundman on Bluesky. “My partner Jamie has made it, but many of our friends have not. It is incredibly devastating.” Pixar was already hit with its biggest layoffs ever just two years ago as Disney pivoted back to focusing on quality instead of quantity. The latest round of layoffs come as Disney experiments with moving into short-form video and leveraging AI to create new content. Like I said, quality over quantity.
“Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney,” D’Amaro wrote in April. “Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs.”