Pixar to undergo 20% layoffs in 2024

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/as-disney-pushes-towards-streaming-profitability-pixar-to-undergo-layoffs-in-2024/

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

387 325 3 years ago

FredPret• 3 years ago

According to insiders, the Pixar layoffs include headcount that was hired for Disney+ — hires Disney pushed on Pixar to produce for its streaming division, which hasn’t yet turned a profit.

yreg• 3 years ago

Why are all of these announced on the same day? Is there some special date comming up or what?

wslh• 3 years ago

This is the week when people and families return from their winter vacations in USA?

tempnow987• 3 years ago

The budget cycle for 2024 has likely finished so orgs are moving to execute on 2024 plans.

Executives can finalize things a bit more easily when folks out of the office as the day to day a bit slower. HR / Acctg / IT also usually like doing a one off project in these spots - usually a smaller group is in loop on these things.

The week between Christmas and New Years for the quiet meetings and week after for plans to be finished up.

akira2501• 3 years ago

Wild guess. SEC Q1 Reporting Deadline is Jan 16th. Share prices have been flat or slightly down on a year over year basis for many companies. They're all trying to hedge the bad news?

paxys2• 3 years ago

Pretty much any unpopular decision made since mid November will be announced starting around now.

jncfhnb• 3 years ago

These are popular decisions

foooorsyth• 3 years ago

Doing it before the holidays is bad PR

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Let people run up their credit cards over Christmas first instead.

choppaface• 3 years ago

If every big company dumps at the same time, less chance of falling behind your competitors.

dexwiz3• 3 years ago

Many companies run fiscal calendars that start Feb 1 because having it Jan 1 means a bunch of year end work during the holidays.

paulddraper9• 3 years ago

Dated source, but AFAIK that's not common.

https://blog.auditanalytics.com/when-does-a-companys-year-en...

paulddraper9• 3 years ago

Most companies try to avoid holiday layoffs.

habibur• 3 years ago

Everyone waited for end of Christmas/New Year before laying off their own people.

HumblyTossed2• 3 years ago

I mentioned it in another thread but this is employers resetting employee expectations. Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

I think this makes sense from the perspective of a worker and what their fears are.

I think it’s probably much simpler: money isn’t cheap anymore and everyone overhired for a long time.

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Don’t let a “crisis” go to waste.

evantbyrne• 3 years ago

Do layoffs actually motivate workers though? I feel like from the people I've spoken to that have experienced losing coworkers to layoffs, they just kind of disconnect.

TerrifiedMouse3• 3 years ago

money isn’t cheap anymore

I know nothing about economics but I wonder if it’s time to ease up on the interest rates. Inflation might not be due to too much money in the system but rather supply simply drying up as China economy circles the drain. Maybe it’s a good idea to let money be cheap again so people could quickly set up alternative non-China suppliers to relieve the supply pressure. But then again I know anything about economics so add salt as required.

jimbob452• 3 years ago

People aren't cattle for you to get rid of. I'm tired of layoffs being a first resort rather than a last resort for companies. I'd like to see something where C-suite executives are required to resign if undergoing layoffs.

novagameco• 3 years ago

At the very least, layoffs should be seen as an indication of failure. Sundar Pichai should not be making as much money as he is with the amount of layoffs they did

paulddraper9• 3 years ago

HN in 2018: "Why do you need X employees to do that? That's like a weekend project."

HN in 2024: "Companies should not reduce their headcount."

throwaway5959• 3 years ago

Ultimately it’s bad management that usually leads to layoffs (barring extreme cases like the product your company makes being banned, for instance), it makes sense that leadership should be some of the first heads to roll.

woah• 3 years ago

The impotent instinct to go after top management is silly. How management performs is between them and the shareholders. The only reason to fire management is if someone else could make the shareholders more money.

If you don't think it should be legal to lay people off, then make layoffs illegal. Doing it through some weird requirement to spite management is just going to result in bizarre distortive effects in their behavior.

I think stuff like this comes from a low level caveman jealousy instinct, where management is seen as a person to envy, while shareholders are ignored as some kind of far off impersonal force.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.

There is little to no evidence of this. There is a lot of evidence of layoffs, particularly across-the-board ones, costing shareholders [1]. Companies that manage little to no laying off outperform their competitors and are rewarded in the capital markets.

[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-layoffs-cost...

WheatMillington• 3 years ago

How do you control for biases here? Of course companies who haven't needed to do layoffs are stronger than businesses who did need to.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

this is employers resetting employee expectations.

Many of these companies transitioned to remote work at the same time they did massive hiring sprees. Many of these new hires were getting their first taste of remote work in companies that were doing their first trial of remote work, all while a massive influx of new employees and initiatives introduced more chaos.

Predictably, a lot of this chaos happening all at once wasn’t a good environment for those new employees, especially those learning how to work remote for the first time.

There’s definitely a resetting going on. Many companies are reversing everything all at once in an attempt to get back to some of the stability they had before COVID.

I think we’ll see more remote work opportunities, but companies learned their lesson that throwing everyone into remote all at once doesn’t work. Remote isn’t for everyone.

rvz• 3 years ago

Profitability is the new target in 2024. Not losing so much money on useless underperforming movies. Let's go through the recent Pixar flops in the years before since 2020.

   Onward (2020) - Budget:     $200 million
                 - Box Office: $142 million (Loss)

   Soul (2020)   - Budget:     $150 million
                 - Box Office: $121 million (Loss)

   Luca (2021)   - Budget:     >$100+ million
                 - Box Office: $49.8 million (Loss)

   Turning Red (2022) - Budget:     $175 million
                      - Box Office: $20.1 million (Loss)

   Lightyear (2022)   - Budget:     $200 million
                      - Box Office: $226.4 million (Tiny profit)

Apart from Elemental (2023) which was highly successful, there seems to be a string of more box office failures from Pixar recently and it being turned into a high cost factory. Disney saw the same and decided to let 20% from Pixar go.

jemmyw• 3 years ago

If I understand what I read recently about movie budgets, for big films like these they need to make roughly double that headline budget to break even. The budget does not include distribution and marketing. So even Lightyear was actually a loss

edit: (and incidentally Lightyear is the only one of these I've seen. I've got 3 kids and we used to love Pixar films but these days.. meh. Even though we've since had the third so still should be the same demographic).

dexwiz3• 3 years ago

I would be careful about Hollywood loss numbers. Disney is in it for the merch. That said, I wonder how those movies stack up to older greats like Cars, Toy Story, or Monsters Inc. They are only true failures if they fail to sell toys. Which considering I’ve never seen merch for any of these movies on the street tells me they probably have failed.

nickpeterson• 3 years ago

I’m near certain they fail compared against the original Pixar movies. Pixar used to make surefire films for the whole family. Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.

the_doctah5• 3 years ago

If they were 100% in it for the merch they wouldn't be making the next Star Wars movie with Daisy Ridley as the lead.

HideousKojima• 3 years ago

With those numbers, Lightyear was definitely not profitable. Published budgets usually don't include the marketing budget, which is usually the same or more than the production budget. Even if you're skimping on marketing it's still going to be at least equal to half the production budget.

Additionally, theaters take a cut of the box office revenue. Domestically they usually take about half, internationally the average is about 60%.

Edit: Looking at the numbers, Elemental probably only broke even or made a slight profit.

ramses02• 3 years ago

Turning Red was better than $20M. IMHO Luca was a bit of a stinker, but Encanto (Disney but not Pixar?) was really solid!

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

Turning Red released straight to Disney+ where streaming was available. So it's no surprise its box office revenue was crap.

sanderjd3• 3 years ago

Oh I disagree, Luca is great! But of course nobody saw it in the theater, approximately everyone who watches Pixar movies has a Disney+ subscription...

irrational3• 3 years ago

Was it? I never saw it because my wife and the kids saw it and they said it sucked.

Xcelerate• 3 years ago

That’s funny. I thought Luca was the best, Encanto was mediocre, and Turning Red one of the worst kid’s movies I’ve ever seen.

sanderjd3• 3 years ago

Surely "Box Office" isn't the best metric to look at in any of those years? I get that it's hard to figure out what the better metric is, but are we all meant to pretend that theater ticket purchases are the primary driver of revenue for movie releases nowadays, even though it's obvious that can't possibly be true?

lumost• 3 years ago

There is a valid question on how valuable streaming is long term. The theory that we would make content once and lock in profits forever seems dubious if everyone competes on last weeks content. Non zero interest rates also pull in profitability horizons by decades.

Ruq• 3 years ago

Lightyear wasn't a success either when you consider marketing costs, which apparently makes it where you need 1.5x the budget just to break even, or so I've read.

johnnyanmac3• 3 years ago

Normally yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if marketing budgets were slashed with the pandemic as well. So all our usual rule if thumbs are out of whack.

TerrifiedMouse3• 3 years ago

A quick google says the general consensus is you need 2.5x the budget of the movie to breakeven.

ponector• 3 years ago

If budget is 200m and box office is 220m it means they have insane profitability. The movie will generate revenue for decades but is already paid up.

Btw, zippia.com says their revenue is 624k USD per employee. Layoff is needed: less than 1m per employee is unacceptable! /s

riotnrrd• 3 years ago

Not really. If you include the costs of marketing and distribution, a film needs to gross about twice its "budget" to break even. Furthermore, this rule of thumb only applies to US gross, where studios get much more of the actual ticket price (75% iirc) than overseas. In some markets, India for example, American studios get about 15% of the actual ticket-price gross.

TerrifiedMouse3• 3 years ago

There are quite a few numbers on the breakeven point but a quick google says it’s usually 2.5x-3x the budget - due to marketing cost and distribution fees.

6bb32646d83d• 3 years ago

To break even at the box office, you need to make at least 2.5x your production budget (so $500M for Lightyear). It's very unlikely that they were able to close the gap with streaming - the movie lost a ton of money.

The 2.5x multiple is because the production budget doesn't include marketing costs (which can easily be as high as the production budget) as well as the fact that they only get a percentage of the box office (the movie theaters need to live too). This is especially true for the non US box office, where the percentage going back to the studio is lower than in the US

jhp123• 3 years ago

I think Onward (edit: maybe not, see comment below) and Lightyear were bona fide misses, but Soul, Luca and Turning Red were all released straight to D+ during the pandemic, weren't they? You can't judge their performance without internal Disney metrics then?

phailhaus• 3 years ago

Onward almost made me cry over a van, I don't think it was a miss. Really surprised that it lost money! It really holds up on rewatches.

itsdrewmiller• 3 years ago

Onward was released March 6, 2020 - things hadn't completely shut down yet but Covid surely had a huge impact on its gross as well.

paxys2• 3 years ago

Most of these losses are self inflicted, considering Disney forced all these films to debut on Disney+ in an attempt to boost subscription numbers.

johnnyanmac3• 3 years ago

I mean, these numbers are almost dishonesty misleading when looking in a vacuum. Onward released March 6th 2020. It was receiving mid reviews but it was very much on par to st least break even if theatres stayed open for more than 2 weeks.And Soul IMO is one of Pixar's greats completely screwed by circumstance, released in June to Disney+. I'm surprised it even crossed 100m to be honest.

I'm not in charge of business, but the curve of box office seemed to rise back with the waning of the pandemic. Even for the critically panned Lightyear, so it's not like the better movies did better. It's no secret that streaming services make nowhere near the revenue of a theatrical release, but Disney aggressively shifted so it could get its handle in as 2nd in the streaming wars. I figure that unprofitable movies were a price to pay there.

slt20212• 3 years ago

how is it possible to have such huge budgets for animation movies???

can anyone explain what are the biggest cost drivers for pixar in spending 200+ mills on a movie??

teej• 3 years ago

Just watch the credits to see how much human labor goes into animation.

lozenge• 3 years ago

I don't know, but it will include...

A million for each main voice actor

$100k for supporting actors

Orchestral score (not many people can do those)

$50k per licensed song

Work on the "game engine" that supports the film (each film used to break technical ground... Fur in monsters Inc, hair in the Incredibles, etc)

Motion capture, clay modelling, 3D modelling, rigging, animating... everybody needs a studio quality machine and display...

The only thing I feel confident isn't a big chunk of the cost is the actual rendering.

tzs3• 3 years ago

To elaborate on some of the items others have mention, here are head counts for Pixar's most recent film, Elemental, based on the credits on IMDB:

    1 director
    3 writers
   20 voice actors
    5 producers
    1 music composer
    2 cinematographers
   12 editing
    5 casting
    1 production designer
    2 art directors
    2 production managers
   14 art department
   42 sound department
   85 visual effects
   68 animation
   46 music
    1 continuity
   77 additional crew

That's 387 people. These kinds of movies take years to produce (7 for Elemental), although not everyone works on them full time during the full length of production.

lattalayta• 3 years ago

I'd be careful just analyzing reported budget and box office numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

throwaway5752• 3 years ago

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187076/tickets-sold-at-t...

US and Canada movie tickets sold in 2019 was approximately 1.2B. In 2020, it was down 80% to 223M, to 499M in 2021, and to 813M in 2022. Onward was the 7th highest grossing film in 2020, Lightyear was 15th in 2022. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=total..., https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2022/?grossesOption=total...)

Weren't Soul, Luca, and Onward direct to Disney+ because of the covid pandemic?

Your analysis is missing the elephant in the room.

dagmx• 3 years ago

Some of those were released only on streaming services (Soul, Turning Red, Luca) so the box office numbers are really skewed.

They’re coming to theatres now, years after they were released.

tzs3• 3 years ago

Have you forgotten COVID already?

When Onward was in theaters COVID had already massively tanked attendance.

Soul, Luca, and Turning Red only had box office releases in countries that did not have Disney+, except possibly for very limited US releases (e.g., Luca had a theatrical release for 1 week in a single US theater).

In the countries where they did get a normal theatrical release if you compare them with Earlier big Pixar hits, they performed comparably.

If any one of them had been a 2019 movie instead of a 20222-2022 movie it would have easily made at least twice its budget and probably more.

Lightyear is the only real flop on your list.

the_doctah5• 3 years ago

So your imaginary grace period for covid effects extends until when, end of 2022 it seems like?

Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?

It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney.

tlivolsi2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure these numbers don't even include the marketing budgets, which are almost always greater than production.

irrational3• 3 years ago

What happened to Pixar? Their storytelling used to be second to none. But most of their latest films have been so lacking that I haven’t even bothered to watch the last few. In fact, the last one I saw was Onward on the very day the theaters closed down for the pandemic. It was… okay. A bit of a disappointment. They have lost something special they used to have.

NateEag• 3 years ago

They lost John Lasseter to Disney.

He was an awful lot of what made them work.

pavlov• 3 years ago

“They have lost something special they used to have.”

Mostly it’s that you’ve just grown older.

dahart4• 3 years ago

Domestic numbers for Turning Red have not been reported, and the movie is mostly streaming on Disney+. You can’t jump to conclusions about losses.

Also pay extra special attention to the warnings you find on the “sources” for this data: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets

“Note: Budget numbers for movies can be both difficult to find and unreliable. Studios often try to keep the information secret and will use accounting tricks to inflate or reduce announced budgets.”

If Disney was really losing that much money repeatedly, they would stop making movies. And yet they don’t stop, but they do keep making it look like they’re not very profitable. Why?

bpicolo• 3 years ago

Damn I really loved Soul

khazhoux5• 3 years ago

I'm in the camp that believes Pixar quality has fallen, and I'm not surprised at the recent losses (COVID or not).

Onward -- what a mess. The movie about walking pants. I could feel the churn of many story drafts they went through. It was a cool world and character designs, but the overall story just didn't land.

Soul -- full of emotion and beautiful, but didn't quite nail it. The pre-birth world has echoes of Inside Out, but not nearly as well-conveyed. In fact, the abstract art representations were a bit on the nose, and a rare case where I was too aware that these were ideations from the Pixar story team in the Pixar story room. Overall it had many wonderful sequences. But the main character journey was kind of odd. Joe loved music and it certainly seemed to be his source of happiness. But his lesson was that music wasn't necessarily his purpose and he should focus more on what makes him happy. ?

Luca -- adorable, but unambitious. The undersea world was so empty!

Turning Red -- ugh. What exactly was the character development? She is announced in the very first sequence as a confident individualist, and then her panda-journey teaches her to be... a confident individualist. Did no one notice this? Also, I'm bothered by the hubris of a first-time writer-director making the main character (and locale, and the time period) exactly themselves. I suppose if you need your stories to be biographical you can get away with it once, but it's poor form IMHO.

paulddraper9• 3 years ago

it was about walking pants

It was about a son reconnecting with his father...and his brother.

RT 88% critics, 95% audience

Not many saw it, but those who did loved it.

motogpjimbo• 3 years ago

Re: Lightyear, a $226.4M box office return on a $200M production budget isn't even close to being in profit, tiny or otherwise. For one thing, a film's marketing budget isn't included in the production budget figure and in this case was probably $100M+ itself. Secondly, Disney do not receive 100% of the box office take. After the distributor's cut, it's probably closer to 50%. Films of this type need to make maybe 3 times their budget at the box office to break even, making Lightyear a spectacular flop.

Moldoteck• 3 years ago

afaik it's also related to how disney treats pixar movies differently. Wasn't Soul & others first movies released exclusively/or with priority on disney+? To my knowledge they'll reverse this in 2024, will see how this pans out

nostromo• 3 years ago

Disney's problem is they're making trash content. Including Pixar. They need to fire some exes, not just the rank and file.

Like how the fuck is Kathleen Kennedy still employed? She's the reverse Midas, turning money-printing machines into dust overnight.

johnnyanmac3• 3 years ago

Idk, I guess Lightyear is the most critically panned. But Pixar's worst is any other animation studio's mid.

Elemental is one of the biggest whiplashes I've seen in animation. I didn't particularly care for it, but it may be like Turning Red where I simply wasn't the target audience. I don't want creatives to be punished for not trying to keep it safe and unoffensive to everyone.

seanmcdirmid3• 3 years ago

I thought Elemental and Turning Red were very well done story wise (Romeo/Juliet, teen angst), they are worth multiple watches on Disney+. Encanto (Disney, but not Pixar) was brilliant, it is too bad it didn't get the theater release it deserved because of COVID.

I get not being in the audience for a film. I felt like that about all the Star Wars prequels, and I spent my pre-10s on the original trilogy. I couldn't tell you what is wrong about sequels, even if they were done well I probably wouldn't be in the audience for them anymore.

cocacola12• 3 years ago

Saw Elemental in theaters. Liked it. Same with Strange Worlds.

anderber• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I still buy that. Super Mario was great. I think the Troll movies are very well done and entertaining. Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Rio, Klaus, Iron Giant, and Studio Ghibli films are pretty good and competitive to the low-mid tier Pixar.

cortesoft2• 3 years ago

I think the target audience is kids and their parents. As a parent of young children, I really enjoyed both Turning Red and Elemental, as did my kids.

It isn't easy to make movies that kids like and want to watch but parents don't mind watching multiple times (because that's how kids do movies... multiple times)

Disney still does a pretty good job of that.

throwup238• 3 years ago

In the 1980s she and her husband cofounded a successful production company with Steven Spielberg. They’re basically Hollywood royalty.

philistine3• 3 years ago

Kathleen Kennedy might as well be the boogeyman with how she's uselessly vilified. She's just at the head of a one-trick poney: Star Wars is not an infinite canvas. It's this very narrow thing, that's not exceedingly popular outside North America. And do you honestly believe the CEO of Disney does not review every single major move she makes already?

She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content. Star Wars itself is stretched out.

paulddraper9• 3 years ago

She's just at the head of a one-trick poney

A really, really big pony.

Disney's biggest opportunity of the last...forever? (Tied with Marvel)

And an opportunity that was squandered more than it needed to be.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

The Star Wars Extended Universe used to be massive. I bet if you just adapted some of the more popular novels they could continue making a lot of money. The problem is that in that case they'd be targeting the Star Wars fandom rather than throwing them under the bus to court as broad of an audience as possible.

The franchise just can't keep reinventing itself to target every demographic. They need to cater to existing fans.

seanmcdirmid3• 3 years ago

that's not exceedingly popular outside North America

You definitely don't mean Europe so I guess that is just code for China? It is true these days that movies have to do well in the world's second biggest market, but there is a lot of box office skim combined with fraud and low ticket prices that don't make the market that lucrative.

stcredzero4• 3 years ago

Kathleen Kennedy might as well be the boogeyman with how she's uselessly vilified.

So you think Disney way overpaid?

She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content.

The stupid Vespa scooter stuff in the Boba Fett series? Hers. Lots of the stupid stuff in Disney Star Wars is hers. The early Jedi stuff in the comics no one liked? Instigated by her.

Star Wars itself is stretched out.

Basically, KK put it on the rack!

TillE• 3 years ago

I have no idea who is personally responsible, but the idea that you can only tell stories about boring Jedi with no personality and Tatooine is just a massive failure of imagination.

There's a whole rich universe of EU novels exploring a wide variety of stories. Timothy Zahn wrote an Ocean's Eleven heist story in "Scoundrels". Andor was universally praised, partly because it's doing something completely different. Even the currently ongoing High Republic books are pretty good and nothing like the movies. Star Wars is a whole science fiction galaxy, it's as big or small as a writer wants it to be.

karmasimida• 3 years ago

How Kathleen Kennedy fumbled this much but still had a job is truly beyond me and is the best American corporate circus you can watch, live.

krisoft2• 3 years ago

not exceedingly popular outside North America

I can tell you it is exceedingly popular in Hungary. I have no reason to believe it is not similarly exceedingly popular elsewhere.

Star Wars itself is stretched out.

It is now. Franchises need nurturing to remain valuable.

The biggest crime they commited is that they did not employ the same screenwriter for all 3 of the sequels. When you are making a trilogy, and you know that you are making a trilogy, you better write the complete arch as a consistent whole and then find the 3 separate sub arches in that.

Instead of that what we got is 2 different teams subverting each other’s ideas and basically messaging to each other. (And the message was that “your ideas are baaad”) It was as if watching someone build a sand castle, someone else comming along kicking it down starting to build a different one, and then the first person returning and kicking the second sandcastle down to build a third.

“Yes, and…” is not just the way to do good improv, but also the way to build good movies built on each other.

pyuser583• 3 years ago

I remember 1990s frustration over the lack of Star Wars development.

George Lucas was seen as a dictator who was just sucking in legacy money without doing any real work.

Now the owners are criticizing it for being overstretched.

The Mandalorian was good. I’ll never forget Werner Herzogs character defending the Empire: “on every possible metric life improved!”

I haven’t seen Andor, but it got great reviews.

Star Wars seems in a good place.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

She's just at the head of a one-trick poney: Star Wars is not an infinite canvas. It's this very narrow thing, that's not exceedingly popular outside North America.

You're minimising her reach and impact on the industry, for better or worse.

Dial of Destiny was her last film. As for Star Wars, it's huge across the anglosphere and even in countries where English isn't spoken. I've personally queued for hours in Japan to get tickets.

jahbrewski• 3 years ago

According to Wikipedia she's produced five of the fifty highest-grossing movies in film history.

bigyikes• 3 years ago

I bet you too could’ve produced Star Wars and landed on that list a few times. It’s /Star Wars/.

gkoberger4• 3 years ago

I think Star Wars was fumbled, but she also produced/exec-produced ET, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, The Sixth Sense, Twister, War of the Worlds, Back to the Future, Lincoln, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gremlins, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seabiscuit, Shindler's List, The Color Purple, The Goonies, The Land Before Time and much more.

I don't think you can have a track record like that and be bad. There's something else going on.

This is a post about Pixar, and you're calling for Kathleen Kennedy (who has nothing to do with Pixar) to be fired? You may not like them, but the Star Wars projects she produced made a ton of money. The layoffs aren't because of her.

bordercases2• 3 years ago

Spielberg perhaps?

itsoktocry• 3 years ago

Most of those good movies listed are from 20+ years ago. Perhaps she's lost the touch. Hard to stay sharp forever.

stonogo• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I buy that being a good producer translates into being a good CEO. When I read your first sentence my thought is not "well she must be a good CEO then" but is instead "wow I hope she goes back to producing, these are some all-time greats".

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

she also produced/exec-produced...

That resume falls off a lot towards the end. Quoting Abe Simpson,

I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it anymore and what's it seems weird and scary. It'll happen to you!

ekianjo• 3 years ago

I don't think you can have a track record like that and be bad.

As financial advisors say, past returns are no good predictors for future performance

pokstad• 3 years ago

Put a chick in it and make her lame!

JeffSnazz2• 3 years ago

how the fuck is Kathleen Kennedy still employed

I don't think it can be on any one person. The CGI in some of these latest marvel movies (looking at you, Multiverse of Madness and Wakanda Forever) looks about as good as what I see when I play my PS5 which isn't terrible, but it looks cheap and lacks physical weight you normally associate with strong acting. You don't get that kind of product without the entire pipeline fouling up and then getting pushed out overtime rather than going with delays + reshoots. Add on to this that, for instance, the creators of Multiverse of Madness weren't even aware of the plot of the Scarlet Witch and allegedly it went over the same ground as her TV show (not that I've seen it), so it seems a lot more like studio dysfunction. I've got to imagine the problem is much, much larger than just one producer—one who has been attached to some of the largest Spielberg movies of the 20th century like ET and Jurassic Park.

Anyway, I'd think Kevin Fiege is far more closely tied to the decision making that appears to be hurting them right now—occasionally princess or Pixar movies miss, but they've sunk a lot of money into MCU movies that were not popular among their own fanbase, mostly due to his planning and, as I understand it from loyal fans, a lack of beloved characters returning.

LarsDu88• 3 years ago

Rumor has it Victoria Alonso was fired over the pressure and mismanagement of the VFX on these (to be fair) many, many MCU projects.

vineyardmike3• 3 years ago

You don't get that kind of product without the entire pipeline fouling up and then getting pushed out overtime rather than going with delays + reshoots

I have also done poor quality work before. It’s always managements fault for prioritizing speedy crap to meet some internal goal instead of prioritizing the end product.

Managers need to be judged on customer satisfaction not internal OKRs and metrics.

wonderwonder5• 3 years ago

The marvel movies lately have just been bad. Multiverse of madness, the marvels, black panther 2. Just not good. Pretty dissapointing.

dahart4• 3 years ago

turning money-printing machines into dust overnight.

What are you referring to? I just looked at the 5 Star Wars movies she has producer credits on, via Wikipedia, and not one of them demonstrates losses. The profits are in the billions and only one of the 5 movies, Solo, did less than a billion at the box office.

And why are you conveniently forgetting Jar Jar Binks and blaming someone else? Lucas was making trash long before Disney got involved. I thought Force Awakens was better done than most of the franchise up to that point.

josh_carterPDX2• 3 years ago

My first "startup" was cartoonlagoon.com. We were going to be a site for independent animators and artists with the draw being a showcase of more well-known artists releasing exclusive content you wouldn't see anywhere else.

We had some cool stuff from Kevin Eastman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Heavy Metal) and others, but it never really took off.

Hearing the news about Pixar and other studios letting people go, made me think that something like this could totally be done today. Maybe it doesn't need to be its own site, but could be a channel on YouTube or something. There's definitely a shift happening in the space and I'm so excited for what's going to happen next.

Solvency3• 3 years ago

All of the independent animators have their own IG/TikToks.

yterdy• 3 years ago

And they hate it. Patreon, too (particularly the ones with more risqué work). A dedicated platform would be a major boon in terms of community, reliability, and possibly remuneration.

echelon2• 3 years ago

The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination, focus, clarity, cohesion, and taste making.

Katzenberg has had a lot of flops, but he's right about this [1]. I'd even wager costs will get cut by 99.9% in ten years time.

All this to say I think you're 100% correct. Now's the time to build platforms and tools for independent animators.

[1] https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/jeffrey-katzenb...

mcphage2• 3 years ago

I wonder what he’s seen that makes him think that. I love playing with Midjourney, but if you want it to create a specific thing, you’re out of luck. I can see AI getting you somewhere, but I can’t see it coming up with a consistent, good quality result.

qp11• 3 years ago

Bill Watterson didn't need all these tools and platforms. Just paper and ink.

Right now we have content, info and tool overload and Layoffs are a sign of over production.

Plus people like Katzenberg love to jump around funding new stuff and telling/distracting/fomoing people more creative than them - hey you better learn this or be good at that, cause why else do people need him in the room?

two_in_one3• 3 years ago

The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination,

O yes, and those 'creative writers' wouldn't be humans. At least at low level it can be easily automated. After human gives the main idea and story line. Actually this can be done automatically too, but human touch is important to claim 'human made'. I'm afraid there will be radical changes. Like those which happened to photography once everybody got a camera. Now AI changes the field again. For the best or worst depends how you look at it.

coolandsmartrr2• 3 years ago

Animation is probably less capital-intensive than live-action film-making, but more labor-intensive given the need to care for each frame. But so long as you have an abundance of time, you can make a movie on your own.

Surprisingly, you also don't need to draw very well to animate. (But it will help a lot if you can.) There are crude works of animation that still found success (maybe more observable in the US than Japan), like South Park and Don Hertzfeldt's works. These examples might even illustrate that audiences care more about the writing than the drawings.

The tricky part may be finding an audience. There's so much content on the web, that it may still help to exhibit works in human-curated forums like film festivals. Somehow, then-student Don Hertzfeldt found his way into Cannes, where he probably gained much more exposure. Later, Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead fame) supported other animators find exposure by hosting The Animation Show (last held in 2008).

There are plenty of film festivals showcasing animation today, shorts and feature-length, but I wonder which ones would be most effective. The dream of "breaking in" with a film festival screening has allured many aspiring film-makers, to the extent that scammers even start their own film festivals for the sake of collecting exorbitant entry fees (which doesn't guarantee being showcased at the festival). With film-makers having to pay entry fees for numerous festivals to increase chances of finding the right audience, the "marketing" fee can become more expensive than an indie production itself.

I wonder how solo or skeleton-crew animators would "break in" and find an audience today.

dahart4• 3 years ago

Don’t get too drawn in by an ad. JK is pumping his AI startup here, he is intentionally exaggerating to generate surprise and interest to pitch to indies, knowing full well that high quality animated films that make a lot of money will continue to require large staffs and large budgets and take a long time to make.

If independent animation is super cheap and easy to produce, then how will indies make any money and support themselves? It’s already extremely difficult, and lowering the costs might only bring in more people with less skill and make that problem worse.

If you’re talking about a $200M Pixar film, on the other hand, cutting costs by 99.9% means a budget of ~$200K. Think about it: that would end up being a middling 1 year salary for a single person (especially if there’s any ancillary costs like benefits, software and equipment, office rent, etc..) They certainly can’t get any A-list Hollywood voice actors for that much. They can’t record the music for that much. Pixar will never be able to make a full length movie for a $200k budget, and they don’t actually want to, because that would signal low quality and low effort. Going too cheap would mean completely abandoning their aspirational status.

And don’t forget the marketing budgets are in the tens to hundreds of millions, which will not go down just because of better animation tools. It doesn’t make sense to dump that much marketing money into a product that only costs pennies to produce.

Animation production costs have gone down steadily over time, and animation is far more accessible to independent animators now than it was 20 years ago, and that will continue. Big Budget movie studios have historically used those savings to hire more people, increase the quality, and continued to spend more or less exactly the same amount of money (or more) per film. Budgets are higher now than they were on Toy Story, same goes for VFX, and I think it’d be quite safe to predict the general trend for movie budgets that has lasted around a hundred years to continue for the next ten, with or without AI.

FrustratedMonky• 3 years ago

Boom. On one hand, seems like a trend, Google, Twitch, Amazon, etc... Now Pixar.

But on other hand, it seems like each case is just isolated issues to each company. It isn't a general tech downturn because Disney isn't making good movies. It isn't a general tech downturn because less people are watching Twitch.

So, is it isolated problems at each company.

Some disaster on the horizon.

jmyeet• 3 years ago

Once again the workers pay the price for bad leadership while the leadership largely continues to simply collect large paychecks for that bad execution. It's no different to the layoffs for Google Assistant. Do you think the average IC determines the outcome of Pixar (or Google) projects?

Disney's content strategy has generally been abysmal. Milking Star Wars IP with content that varies between mid and bad for the most part. Marvel really fell off post-Avengers. Pixar once made some of the great movies period, animated or otherwise.

Creative ventures can't be reduced to a formula. Corporate America seeks to cut costs and reduce their business plan to a formula.

How many times do people need to see this before they develop class consciousness?

sbarre• 3 years ago

How many times do people need to see this before they develop class consciousness?

Never. Because the carrot to join their class will continue to be dangled.

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

To be fair, Bob Chapek also lost his job over how he managed Disney. I'm not sure if he actually dropped the ball, or if Iger left while things were good, but the pipeline was about to run dry.

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

I imagine it is mostly Iger leaving while things were good.

Disney was never going to be able to retain the amount of people’s time it had in previous decades with the competition from other forms of entertaining, from video games to YouTube to Instagram to TikTok to WhatsApp and even to sites like Reddit/HN.

I think they tried to battle this by saturating the market with their IP and that goose is done laying eggs, so I am assuming they will lean on sports gambling now as long as they have ESPN.

wonderwonder5• 3 years ago

Imagine working somewhere and then reading "The studio stressed the layoffs are not imminent, but will take place later this year as Pixar focuses on making less content". Then having to go to work each day at a place that keeps saying we are all family here knowing that 2/10 of you are going to get axed. I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition. Although for many of those people I would imagine they have landed their dream job; feel bad for them.

rapfaria• 3 years ago

Perhaps it's a pivotal moment for those folks to rethink the whole "dream job" shindig, while being in the great position of having a job at Pixar when interviewing in the coming months.

infotainment3• 3 years ago

This is a classic layoff debate -- is it better to do it with zero warning, or is it better to let employees know that a layoff is coming?

Personally, I believe advance notice is better, because it signals to employees that, if layoffs are going to happen, there will be some time to prepare. By choosing to blindside employees, it creates a culture of paranoia, IMO. ("Will today be layoff day?" "What about next month?" "Oh no, it's the end of the quarter, does that mean tomorrow my laptop will lock up at 4am?")

tiffanyh2• 3 years ago

In my experience, your best talent then leaves. Which is the opposite of what you want.

redserk• 3 years ago

Or there is the third option: do the layoffs, immediately cut access, then give a generous amount of severance with benefits.

tharne3• 3 years ago

This is a classic layoff debate -- is it better to do it with zero warning, or is it better to let employees know that a layoff is coming?

No good answers here. They're both bad, but in different ways, and I suspect that whether one is worse than the other is probably a matter of personality type.

tycho-newman• 3 years ago

California has the WARN Act.

deeviant• 3 years ago

I feel that's less of a benefit if you don't know it is you that is getting laid off or not...

pdimitar• 3 years ago

They just want people to leave voluntarily so they don't have to pay severance.

voidfunc• 3 years ago

It's kind of a weird move for companies to make because it's an oddly pro-labor signal to tell employees ahead of time to prepare for layoffs.

I agree, I prefer it.. but also, it's weird in 2024 where corps basically try to fuck everyone at every possible turn that they're being so open about these layoffs.

dojitza1• 3 years ago

I know it's not practical because of select few bad apples, but giving a year's notice to the affected people, letting them finish up the work and mentally prepare, and all the while coaching them through the process of finding a new job seems like a humane thing to do.

John23832• 3 years ago

Immediate layoff, long period of transition.

What Pixar has created is an environment where nobody knows is they’re going to stay, so people self select into two buckets: 1) those who say “I’m not going to bust my ass just to get fired”. They coast and prepare to leave. And 2) those who work their ass off to try to “prove” themselves. If any of 2 get fired, it’s a bad morale hit for anyone around after the layoffs. You’ll lose actual talent this way.

Make the decision of who to layoff and do it, but be kind as you do.

nunez• 3 years ago

There is no good option. Either embrace the suck immediately, or let the suck consume you.

itake3• 3 years ago

I don't understand the logic with employers dropping warnings like that. I knew ~2mo before my employer announced layoffs and it caused much unnecessary anxiety in my life.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

But it shapes how you'll feel about the event & the future for a long long time after. The company was honest with you. When the day came it wasn't a complete shock.

I don't have a conclusive answer, but I'd want to know I think & respect companies that have the bravery to be up front.

euos3• 3 years ago

Gives you a peace of mind once it is over. Also, allows you to prepare contingencies. Our company only now was recovering from the last year layoffs and now it is suddenly hit again. It would've been much more humane to know in advance not to relax.

oldsecondhand• 3 years ago

Depending on jurisdiction an employer might be obligated to announce a mass lay-off in advance. It gives more time for people to look for another job.

notatoad• 3 years ago

I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition

and before anybody says that's maybe intentional, that just a really dumb way to do layoffs. that's how you lose your best people, rather than your worst.

irrational3• 3 years ago

The worst will know they will have trouble getting a job elsewhere. The best might assume they are known to be the best, so they are safe. I would think it would be the middle people who would jump ship.

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

Doesn’t mean it isn’t intentional. Lots of companies don’t really seem to have a concept of “best people.”

Also cost savings to consider such as severance.

onion2k2• 3 years ago

This assumes that there's a significant difference between top performers and the next tier down, and that it's important to keep 'the best people'. In most businesses there are plenty of other good people who can step up if the best ones leave. Its also rare that someone is 'the best' at everything; people have a range of skills and you'll only be losing the person who's best at one or two of them.

Most people who think companies have a 'best person' aspire to be seen as that person, and haven't really thought about what it would actually mean.

baryphonic• 3 years ago

Then having to go to work each day at a place that keeps saying we are all family here knowing that 2/10 of you are going to get axed.

Sounds like the mafia

euos3• 3 years ago

I feel like there's a high chance of a layoff in my org as they had layoffs in other orgs yesterday and mine is one of major holdouts. I would very much wished for something definite, either for them to say that nothing currently planned or to say that it will happen later this month or something.

rhuru2• 3 years ago

There is a reason why layoffs always happen as a surprise and kept a secret. Now everyone thinks they might get laid off. The folks who are easily employable will switch. This might be the end of Pixar.

throwaway203712• 3 years ago

This might be the end of Pixar.

Classic overreaction on HN. Did you say the same when Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft slashed huge number of employees in last year? How about Spotify?

codemac• 3 years ago

Same happened at Meta for the 2023 "layoff moments".

The labor market is tough, the attrition you speak of did not happen at Meta. And that's for SWEs who have a lot of potential employers.

romwell• 3 years ago

I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition.

Which is one of the benefits of making such an announcement.

You don't have to pay severance or unemployment benefits to those who quit on their own.

And if you are already treating headcount as a fungible commodity, it's a pure win for the HR department.

onion2k2• 3 years ago

I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition.

And they won't have to pay any severance packages for that 10%. Heck, if 20% choose to leave they can cancel the layoff. Imagine the PR!

The outcome of corporate comms strategy is never unplanned or coincidental. People quitting over it is exactly why they made this announcement.

matheusmoreira• 3 years ago

we are all family here

Surely nobody actually believes that?

pvaldes• 3 years ago

A solution would be to make histories again that humans want to see, and stop all that panderverse nonsense

Solstinox• 3 years ago

Most companies approach this in two ways:

1. Say nothing until day of. 2. Say someone somewhere at some point or by some date.

For the employees, neither solves the problem of uncertainty that causes the most psychological turmoil.

The best for the employee is being told several months in advance exactly who is going to get axed and when.

This is considered risky for the business though. At that point you have an effective outsider with access to your systems for several months.

michaelcampbell2• 3 years ago

at a place that keeps saying we are all family

Is this actually happening now? It's a great trope and probably most of us have seen it in action, but I wonder if it's even reality any more.

dcolkitt2• 3 years ago

It's interesting that Disney today almost the entire profits of the company come from the parks division (which also includes cruises, resorts and "experiences"). The media division by itself is in a massive war for eyeballs with tons of other streaming competitors, all of whom are probably over-investing in content relative to what consumers can support.

One interesting possibility is that maybe the business model of media companies in the 21st century will become content as a loss leader for the purpose of providing valuable IP to amusement parks. Certainly seems like a similar thing is happening with Comcast with their massive expansion of Universal parks.

ethbr12• 3 years ago

Obligatory 1957 Disney growth plan, which hasn't changed that much: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disn... [0]

Change some distribution models and mediums of distribution, and it's the same cycle between content, brand, and customer eyeballs.

Which makes sense, as the key observation was: brands and characters are more valuable than content, but content creates and sustains them.

And you can afford more content if you have more channels to monetize it through. Which is the same observation Google made with respect to advertising integration, albeit just buying platforms instead of works.

[0] From article: https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st

Solvency3• 3 years ago

I was under the impression the real money came from merchandising the IP.

doctorpangloss• 3 years ago

Amusement parks are part of the inefficient monetization Hollywood is built around. The video games that make the most money give gameplay away for free too, but the difference is you can sell infinite skins and pay only 30% to assholes like Apple. It remains to be seen if even that cost will remain.

Disney lost not due to streaming, but due to its failed interactive division.

citizenpaul• 3 years ago

You have what is a common misconception. That the actual IP/Content is ever what has made money. It is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...

Look at the totals broken out by area of revenue. Pokemon is a big offender, the games and movies might as well not exist from a revenue standpoint.

Pokémon $88 billion Licensed merchandise – $80.8 billion[b] Pokémon mobile games – $6.13 billion[c] Box office – $1.156 billion[26]

Now you know why everthing has to have some sort of T-shirt, hat, pen, keychain blah blah.

throw7• 3 years ago

That is nuts. Queue up Space Balls: "MERCHANDISING!"

Well now though, I see a video game I never heard of "Dungeon Fighter Online". Here's one of the recent reviews from the Steam Store:

"I spent $45,000 on a relentless journey into the heart of darkness with Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO), a 2D beat-em-up game that has garnered both fervent enthusiasts and critical skeptics,..."

Holy Cow. I can't even.

dcolkitt2• 3 years ago

This is a fair point, but as of their most recent financials merchandise (excluding merchandise sold inside the parks) only made up $5bn of the $28bn in the "Parks, Experiences and Product" category. By contrast park admissions was $8bn, resorts was $6bn and food/merchandise sold in the parks was $6bn.

So IMO this is a departure from the classic merchandise based strategy. It seems pretty clear that the theme parks more so than the products are the major profit centers today.

danmaz74• 3 years ago

This is if course highly subjective, but for all this investment in content I, as a consumer, seem to find less and less content I like. Maybe it's just because I'm not part of the demographics that Hollywood cares about any more, but I personally would like to get much more "good" content.

lmeyerov• 3 years ago

Oof.

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kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

This gives Disney plenty of time to have them train their replacements.

achow• 3 years ago

Related?

Jeffrey Katzenberg Says A.I. Will Eliminate 90 Percent of Artist Jobs on Animated Films

https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/jeffrey-katzenberg-a...

firtoz• 3 years ago

It's a red herring.

coolandsmartrr2• 3 years ago

While layoffs are detrimental to employee morale (e.g. employees take less long-term risk), I wonder how much worse the effects of layoffs are in the creative industry.

You might be able to replace employees in a more utility-driven company. But creative people are not exactly interchangeable, as creative ideas tend to bounce better among employees who have "chemistry." These collective of creatives end up sharing tribal knowledge of producing creative outputs with a given expectation or taste. If you fire them, it will be difficult to replicate or enhance the creativity (by whatever metric we can try to measure it with).

Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once lamented the dissolution of the studio system, which turned the industry into a loose gathering on freelancers. He believed it would be antithetical to creativity, which he sees to happen tribally.

A famous counter-example to layoffs in the creative industry is Nintendo. Former CEO Satoru Iwata opposed layoffs as a way to weather financial downturns, as layoffs would discourage employees from committing to their work in the long-term. Instead, Nintendo tries to guarantee stable employment with their sizable financial reserves, albeit not paying a high salary.

Animation studios were able to garner a sense of "expectation" and establish a brand (e.g. Pixar especially with their first 11 features) because of the "regulars" who worked on their releases. Layoffs would change the collaborative chemistry among employees, and can make it difficult to establish or maintain a brand.

throwaway203712• 3 years ago

The Nintendo model would never work in the Silicon Valley. Literally, some of the most talented video game programmers that the world has ever known worked most of their career for relative peanuts... compared to what Activision & Co. would have paid them. Much less stable? Yep.

From a purely financial perspective, Nintendo is not well run. An infamous quote: <<Nintendo has such a large cash reserve it could lose $250 million every year and wouldn't go bankrupt until 2052.>> Or: <<Nintendo cash on hand for the quarter ending September 30, 2023 was $14.250B.>> There is a limit to useful cash reserves. Else, it should be distributed as a cash dividend, share buyback, or buy a competitor / "invest".

In Japanese corporate thinking from 1950s to 1990s, lifetime employment was the singular goal for your employees, above all else. Read that twice and let that sink in. Layoffs were viewed as culturally impossible due to loss of face. It is nearly impossible to (culturally) "translate" this goal into the American state of mind. Simply stated: US employees take much more career risk and, correspondingly, are paid much more. I am not making a moral judgement here about either system -- there are pros and cons for both. My point: Little insight can be found here when comparing the layoff practices of uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-conservative Japanese corps vis-a-vis American tech companies. It is literally Mars vs Venus or Moon vs Earth -- a different planet (culture state of mind).

I work in Japan, but I am not Japanese. One of the biggest complaints from foreign software developers is that salaries are awful compared to their home countries. The complaining never stops about it. However, they overlook the full picture -- as noted above. From what I hear, Germany is quite similar -- much lower salaries, but way more stable (fewer layoffs) compared to SV.

Solvency3• 3 years ago

Ok so Japanese game developers work for peanuts on the most beloved IP in the world... with stable lifelong careers. Are they happy? Miserable? How far does their salary go relative to their living conditions? Honestly curious.

pie4204• 3 years ago

Or maybe this is how you keep a company alive and producing good work. Sure Disney is more profitable, but it's become a soulless corporate machine, and will falter and die in the next 30 years. Nintendo will stay profitable and will continue to produce high quality products forever.

majani• 3 years ago

Japan has way less inflation though, so if the whole culture is on the same page then I guess it's fine

caubert• 3 years ago

How is going from 1300 workers to under thousand only 20% cut?

SushiHippie• 3 years ago

While sources at the company said the layoffs would be significant and as high as 20% — or reductions that would see Pixar’s team of 1,300 dropped to less than 1,000 over the coming months — Pixar says those numbers are too high. Rather, the studio said the number of impacted employees is still being determined due to factors like production schedules and staffing for future greenlit films.

There is an "or" betwen that, as there is no definitive source, they said that one source said the layoffs would be up to 20% and another source said, that Pixar's team would drop below 1000. But Pixar denies, that the layoffs are this high.

Pixar to undergo 20% layoffs in 2024

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