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Disney laid off hundreds of employees across its divisions on Tuesday, including National Geographic and ESPN. Animation giant Pixar was hit hard as the animation studio is estimated to have let go of a "high single percentile of its 1,100 staff," or around 100 employees, according to Deadline. TheWrap reports the number of laid-off employees is closer to 150.
The layoffs hit Pixar's production and operations teams, and it's not clear yet if any high-profile executives have been let go as well. The new round of layoffs is the biggest at Pixar since May 2024 when 14%, or about 175 people, were let go.
According to TheWrap's source, the Pixar layoffs are being blamed on the underperformance of Hoppers, which was released in March. It had strong reviews (94% on Rotten Tomatoes), but somewhat underperformed at the box office, bringing in about $390 million. Meanwhile, Toy Story 5 has grossed $957 million so far.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, Pixar has had an up-and-down run at the box office. For every Inside Out 2 ($1.7 billion box office gross), there's an Elio ($154 million). Several Pixar films in the 2020s, like Luca and Turning Red, were released directly on Disney Plus. "Executives felt that inadvertently trained audiences to watch Pixar’s films at home," Variety reports. That seems obvious in retrospect, and likely a factor why making sequels for the Inside Out and Toy Story franchises has worked for Pixar but new, original films have struggled to find audiences, like Elio.
Pixar's next movie is an original one. Gatto will be released next March and will star Mark Ruffalo as a black cat living in Venice, Italy. The studio is also working on The Incredibles 3, which is due out in June 2028.
