Walt Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios has eliminated 75 positions including two executives behind box office flops ‘Lightyear’, as per Reuters report. It is even considered as first significant job cuts at studio in a decade.
‘Lightyear’ director Angus MacLane, a 26-year old animator who was part of the senior creative team on acclaimed films like ‘Toy Story 4’ and ‘Coco’ was fired. The producer of ‘Lightyear’ Galyn Susman also faced the heat of Disney studio layoffs. Susman had been at Pixar since the release of the original ‘Toy Story’ movie in 1995.
The recent layoffs at Disney took place on May 23, and are part of the Walt Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger’s previously announced plan to eliminate 7,000 jobs and slash $5.5 billion in costs. The idea behind the restructuring was to combine the film and television groups into a single Disney Entertainment unit and eliminated a division charged with distribution.
The layoffs are significant for Pixar because the studio is a creative force generating franchises and characters that drive revenue across Disney.
Pixar Animation Studio is famous for cinematic franchises including ‘Toy Story’, ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Cars’. But things were not going good for Pixar post ‘Lightyear’ release, it received a mixed criticism and it was released with a reported budget of $200 million and only brought $226.7 million worldwide ticket sales.
The same-sex depiction in ‘Lightyear’ played a crucial part as the movie could not be shown in 14 Middle Eastern and Asian Countries which impacted on its box office performance.
