When Disney bought Pixar from Steve Jobs back in the 2000s, Pixar’s films reliably outperformed Disney’s at the box office. The acquisition inspired Disney to shift its entire animation studio over to 3D graphics and to retire its storied hand-animation division.
Now, nearly 20 years later, Pixar’s pixels may still fill the theater screens, but they’re not filling the seats like they used to. As a result, its workforce is feeling the pinch. The once-mighty computer animation powerhouse has announced that it will show 14 percent of its workers the door. The layoffs come as part of drastic budget cuts being carried out across the Walt Disney media empire.
For the last several years, the media conglomerate’s streaming service, Disney+, has issued series orders that have kept the digital animation house busy. Now, due in part to a major drop-off in those series orders, Pixar finds itself an overstaffed division of an under-performing company. As a result, around 175 Pixar employees will lose their jobs. These numbers are lower than those initially rumored, which had the layoffs cutting more like twenty percent of Pixar’s staff.
The cuts follow another round of layoffs earlier this year, in which Pixar nuked 75 jobs—including two executive positions—in response to the box office failure of it’s Toy Story spinoff Lightyear.
Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted at a recent earnings call that the media powerhouse had drastically overextended itself on the streaming front. The strategy was intended to help draw in more subscribers to its streaming platform, but it didn’t generate the numbers hoped for. As a result, Disney lost billions of dollars on the gamble. Disney was suffering, Iger said, from “too many stories.”
Company-wide, Disney has axed 7,000 jobs globally, totaling more than three percent of the total workforce. Iger has warned that more budget cuts are on the way as part of the effort to pull Disney out of its financial nose-dive.
