Pixar to undergo 20% layoffs in 2024
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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?")
Sure, in fantasyland. This is unrealistic. What if you have a severe business downturn? No choice, but to layoff. In services, your number one cost is always people (talent).
Look, so much of layoffs from the past 1.5 years or so are the result of massive overhiring during the pandemic. Sure, it's easy to argue companies were short sighted, but even if they hadn't been, why would it be better to never have hired all those people to begin with? That is, even if a company had thought "the pandemic has really just pulled demand forward - we need a lot more workers now that we won' need when the pandemic ends", why shouldn't they hire workers for that period? Yes, I totally agree this is bad form to disrupt someone's career tenure if it's for a very short period, but a lot of these pandemic hires lasted several years. All those people got great experience and salaries, and I don't think the better thing would have been to never have hired them in the first place.
I wish people would move away from the mindset that a layoff is the most awful thing possible, as long as people are treated respectfully and with adequate severance. When a company hires me, I don't expect to work there for life, nor do I expect them to have an obligation to keep me employed for life. As long as we give each other enough heads up if we decide to separate (and folks can have an honest debate over how long "enough" is), I don't see the problem.
Telling your top talent a layoff is coming, even if they feel “secure” in their role, still gives them a reason to look.
Let alone competitors now have a great pitch to your top talent - “do you want to risk getting laid off or join our awesome company”.
Can you expand? Doesn't at-will meant that you can be fired without advanced notice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
Cal-WARN Act
I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Being bored was killing me. Draining your soul for money is not wise. Your mind takes on a personality you can't relate to and sinks to an imperceptible malaise. It's a form of torture. Leaving that to discover purpose again is an unforgettable relief. I feel young again and I'm flooded daily with feelings of optimism, something I thought was just lost to youth. Like being released from prison.
This is rich thinking. Most people that I met from developing countries who grew up poor would sell their soul for shitty unfulfilling work that pays huge salary / bonus / stock. I cannot blame them; I would do the same in their situation. I don't pass (too much) judgement on where and why people work. Mostly, it is a luxury to decide when / where / how you work, including for less than the maximum that you can be paid.
Personally, my biggest professional problem is that I get bored on a project after two years. It is incredibly rare in my career to stay more than four years on the same project. Yet, time and time again, my managers are surprised when I resign for a new role.
> I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Curious what your financial situation looked like between these two stages. It's easy to be willing to take a major pay cut to work on a fun project when you've already got 6 figures stashed in savings and your house and car are paid off.
I wish people would not use that term "x figures". It is too vague. Are we talking about 100K USD or 900K USD? There is a huge difference, yet both are "6 figures".
2023 inflation was ~3.5%
- soda is up about 50% for name brand, and generic soda is up around 80%
- diesel is up, what 50%? how much is regular gas in california?
- housing "values" where I am at are up 25-40% in the last two years
- Potato chips are up at least 40%
- Apples are much more expensive
- Restaurants are up at least 25%, some 50-75%
Many of these products went up by these amounts yet also engaged in shrinkflation. The biggest example of this is Chipotle which almost doubled the cost of its burritos but also shrunk them in size by about a third.
Governments are motivated to reduce inflation in inflation statistics. Perhaps the cost of goods for the ultra-rich hasn't really changed much, but for the poor (or cheap) they have all gone up quite dramatically in two years.
(which is to say that is just natural market forces, not collusion)
No it doesn't. You make a "gentleman's agreement" to do your layoffs and trust your chums to keep to it. Are you arguing that industry collusion is impossible?
After a month or two one company announces they're going through with layoffs, and that sets off a chain reaction for the rest to execute their own plans as soon as possible. It always happens like this. Everyone just decides now is the time to clean house, all at the same time, and we all decided to do this independent of each other...
The "collusion" is a dog-whistle protocol happening in plain sight. There is no "evidence," no damning email to be found, only behavioral patterns to observe. It's the same playbook every single time.
When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision. (And don't nitpick the analogy on things like "buy low sell high", you probably understand the point I'm making.)
Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.
> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.
That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.
Even give them reinforced contracts to make them at ease?
In fact at a company like this, your best talent probably wishes the bottom 10% would get trimmed because they produce so little relative to higher performers.
And this is the sort of thing that can be especially problematic in creative companies when the layoffs are being run by bean-counting executives who have no presence in the day to day work of ICs.
Will top talent get sacked at Pixar? I have no idea, but as a 50 year old tech worker I've seen a number of layoffs first-hand and have heard anecdotal reports of dozens more that lead me to the conclusion that being among the "top talent" does not make you immune when it comes to large belt-tightening layoffs.
In Titanic the folks that got on lifeboats early survived, the ones that didn't got caught up in whatever traps as the rest of the ship goes down. If the ship is going down, its good to not ride it to the depths.
If it's not going down, then maybe it's not worth jumping. That's thr skill in it I guess, knowing which is which.
Essentially the high performers understand that they'll be expected to do more with less (people, resources, benefits, ...).
Likely the layoffs won't affect the layers of grifters above them, so it becomes a question of whether they really want to work harder for little or no personal gain, just to support the layers above them who are making and being rewarded for the bad decisions, or whether the high performers should look elsewhere for something more aligned with their personal happiness.
The best talent is often unknown to the csuite.
If they didn't want to be at Pixar, they'd already be gone.
If they like it there, they aren't too worried about getting fired, because they know it won't be hard to find a different (probably better) job.
Its a big risk to just wait it out and see if you are not financially secure.
Thank you for speaking on my behalf. No, it does not. In my experience, I am never concerned with small and targeted layoffs because I am never in the bottom 25% performers in my team. Instead, when the layoff are mass and broad, only then, have I experienced those personalised meeting with senior management. (To be crystal clear: I was only invited to those meetings when I was viewed as a top-top performer. Not always.)
Also saving money on hiring often means saving money in general and elsewhere too, worsening quality of life.
In particular projects can get canceled, priorities shifted, grind increased, privileges revoked, remote work banned, etc.
People who have the option to leave might do just that.
Plus that L4/L5 employee might look stellar on paper. Or even be stellar, just not very vocal about what they’re doing.
I thought that was true as well but the tech layoffs that have been happening have all been about being leaner to grow faster. Look at Meta, for example, that did layoffs in spite of massive continuous growth.
This drives people to take a more mercenary approach to work and look for better pay elsewhere.
Cult connotations involving "chosen" families aside, it's family that's statistically most likely to molest you.
It's never just 10%, just 10% this week.
Once they see stocks go up, and costs go down because everyone is working an extra hour a week to keep on track why wouldn't you cut another 15%?
You cant force the talent to stay.
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.
I find that stressful even if I live in a country where I have the same level of healthcare no matter whether I'm employed or not. How do you guys in the US cope with that? Is it as bad as it looks from outside or you have mechanisms to not lose all your healthcare if laid off?
If you plan to jump ship, negotiate with HR to get the severance package and voluntary leave, especially if you're hot shit and can get another job quickly, otherwise you're leaving money on the table. The only thing you lose here is eligibility for unemployment, which you won't need anyway.
Healthcare is a shitshow. You can do COBRA, which lets you maintain your health plan by picking up the tab the employer previously paid. I've never done it myself but heard premiums were like $800 per person per month, years ago.
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.
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.
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.
As an IC, the day it happened and the weeks after it happened were tough, but I knew if I was the one impacted and my job was 'safe' for the time being.
As an EM, I knew months in advance, but I had no idea if I would be on the list. This caused months of stress while I planned for promotions and projects for people that might not (and eventually weren't) there after the rif.
Ripping off the band aid is much more human than telling people "sometime in the next 12 mo we may or may not fire a large portion of you, so please keep giving your 100%"
This gives the impacted people plenty of notice and time to look for new opportunities.
Now they have 80% of the company trying to leave.
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.
Most of the (risk averse) great folks I know have purposely found safe harbor over the past ~2 years.
Also cost savings to consider such as severance.
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.
Sounds like the mafia
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?
1. Layoffs were a surprise. 2. When you leave Google there isn't a better option + you are easily employable elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
Surely nobody actually believes that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> will falter and die in the next 30 years
Would you be willing to buy deep out of the money puts on it? I am happy to sell to you all day long. Else, this is just a rant.
> Nintendo will stay profitable and will continue to produce high quality products forever.
What a reach. Video game companies are much less stable than TV and film studios. No one knows what will happen to Nintendo when the old guard finally retires.
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.
If we're talking about remuneration, the audience/customer don't really want a "dedicated platform" since that's not the only thing they do, unlike the artists themselves. Or in other words, dedicated platform (like deviantart) is fine but it won't attract the largest audience.
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...
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?
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.
The story is everything and AI writing is just not there nor do I think it ever will be.
BTW, "good" is subjective metrics. As soon as it's known to be AI generated it becomes average at best. Just like with images today. Nobody is trying to find 'hidden depth' in them.
I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong.
This is the standard thing if you try to put together a UI without any design skills, you will use existing components and styles, and it will still look crap.
AI will make it easier for people who know how to write to do automated ghost writing, but it won't allow people who can't to do it.
But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.
I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI. Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.
While in general it's true, reality can be different. I'm using GPT-4 for coding thing that I don't know much about. I have only ideas what I want, but not how exactly to code it. Simple offloading to AI works fine. I can learn libraries and APIs it's using, but that isn't my goal. I want the working product. This semi-automated approach saves a lot of time.
That was just a practical example. We can argue that in some cases it doesn't work. Yes, and may never work. But there is an area where it works. And this area at least is not going to shrink.
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.
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.
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.
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
Disney lost not due to streaming, but due to its failed interactive division.
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.
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.
Something north of $20 billion in revenue. Just not known in the US.
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.
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.
https://blog.auditanalytics.com/when-does-a-companys-year-en...
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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?
Never. Because the carrot to join their class will continue to be dangled.
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.
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)
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).
Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.
I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.
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.
Luca (to me) was just so dull I barely remember the plot or message.
Encanto (v Puss in Boots Last Wish) both had a lot of "Soul" (Soul, and Inside Out being other really good animated movies), and I'd happily watch any of them again.
But I don't think that's a good reason to give credence to a metric that strikes me as being incredibly obsolete. A bad metric is a bad metric even if it's unclear what metric to replace it with.
Btw, zippia.com says their revenue is 624k USD per employee. Layoff is needed: less than 1m per employee is unacceptable! /s
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
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.
can anyone explain what are the biggest cost drivers for pixar in spending 200+ mills on a movie??
They dont work fulltime 40 hours per week on a single movie, do they? Its more like few hours here and there, as needed
Absolutely not.
They work 50+ hour weeks for 2+ years (discounting the much smaller team doing pre-production).
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.
https://nofilmschool.com/why-pixars-24000-core-supercomputer...
It can get more complicated (and expensive) if you want to hire someone to play one or more parts for real.
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
Are "animators" doing the original character/flow design work and then visual effects people punch up backgrounds/lighting/textures etc. and doing the rendering?
Visual Effects do wind, water, smoke, fire, cloth, etc.
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.
They’re coming to theatres now, years after they were released.
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.
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.
Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were not released in theaters in North America except for one week at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for Luca and and one day there for Turning Red. They only got international theatrical runs, and then only in countries that did not have Disney+.
Maybe Disney lied when they said they cited COVID as the reason for cancelling the domestic and most of the international theatrical releases of those movies, but the fact remains that those releases were cancelled.
Soul only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Luca only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
Turning Red only was in theaters in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Compare to the last Pixar movie whose theater run occurred entirely before COVID. That was Toy Story 4, and here are the countries it was in that Turning Red was not in: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
In the countries that both Toy Story 4 and Turning Red had theatrical releases in Toy Story 4 made $26 million and Turning Red made $11 million. If we assume the performance would have been similar had Turning Red been released in those other countries that comes out to about $420 million, which is indeed easily twice its budget just as I had speculated. Probably higher, but to get a more refined estimate I'd need to look at the countries it was in and see how their theater performance in general was compared to pre and post COVID.
For Luca it had $39 million in the countries it had in common with Toy Story 4. Toy Story 4 had $70 million in those countries. Assuming the same ratio if Luca had been in the other countries Toy Story 4 was in, that gives Luca a projected $560 million.
> Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?
It was the second most streamed movie in 2022 (Encanto was #1), which suggests of the theories that (1) people didn't watch it in theaters because they didn't want to watch it, or (2) people didn't watch it in theaters because it was not in theaters, the latter is much more likely. (BTW, Luca was the most streamed movie in 2021).
> It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney
That's a defensible argument in general (and since you comment a few have made that general argument), but not as an explanation for why movies that weren't in theaters didn't make a lot of money in theaters.
He was an awful lot of what made them work.
Mostly it’s that you’ve just grown older.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, of course. But it (IMHO) had an opposite effect, where instead of strengthening the emotional impact of this is his dad, the character was reduced to comedy and pantomime (walking the wrong way, etc). Compare with the masterful non-verbal performance of Wall-E and Eve, for example. I mean, there's no way around the fact that the dad only being re-embodied from the waist down, was meant to be funny and silly. Instead of one last adventure between father and son, and showing us the strong bond that the child wanted to experience one last time, they showed us a running gag of wrangling a pair of pants.
Jeffrey Katzenberg Says A.I. Will Eliminate 90 Percent of Artist Jobs on Animated Films
https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/jeffrey-katzenberg-a...
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.
Like how the fuck is Kathleen Kennedy still employed? She's the reverse Midas, turning money-printing machines into dust overnight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The franchise just can't keep reinventing itself to target every demographic. They need to cater to existing fans.
Making a thing into a different thing, unsurprisingly, alienates the people that pay you money for the first thing.
That doesn't mean that these IPs (and their fandoms) can't evolve, but you need to tell good stories that respect the universe they are set in.
To emphasize this point: There are literally 350+ Star Wars Legends books [1].
And that's not including film novelizations, comics, or individual short stories.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Legends_books
My understanding is this universe began as fan fiction and these trailers about an MMO are probably the most interesting Star Wars films since first two trilogies.
Betrayed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWFzfQs7vmk
Sacrifice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bmsNa9GOR0
Deceived: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGDBTDnW7d0
The MMO is over ten years old, but the trailers are so celebrated that they re-released them in 4K two years ago. In a matter of minutes, they all manage to tell a better story, with more compelling characters and dialogue, than anything Disney has put out.
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.
I live in Vietnam. Population 100 million. More than any country in Europe. It is not popular here. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia -- population 660 million -- from what I can tell.
I mean, it is popular in the way any big budget, CGI spectacular is popular. But it's not this big cultural thing it is in the US or Europe. Nobody cares in the slightest what the next Star Wars movie will be about or how the IP is doing. They think of Rogue One in the same way they think of Train to Busan. A fun enough foreign movie they watched that one time a few years ago.
The vast majority of my friends and family have never seen any of the original trilogy or even most of the prequels. They definitely aren't watching any of the Disney+ series, since it says "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region".
Of course nobody cares about how the IP is doing. That is for the corporation to worry about.
On the other hand people, individualy, will make up their mind about buying a ticket or not. There are many different things which go into that decision, but one of those is how much they enjoyed the earlier movies in the franchise.
Caring about the IP is the forest. And individuals making a decision to go to the cinema to watch the new star wars thing or doing literally anything else with their free time are the trees which make the forest.
My kid doesn't care about Star Wars nearly as much as I do, obviously - but the big thing about it are the memories from when I first watched it. It would be great to see a new Star Wars movie that can engage kids today in the same way it engaged us so many years ago.
Also, have in mind that a lot of old blockbuster movies can look silly today (Sound of Music is one I watched recently), but you have to appreciate them with the proper time period context.
Europeans are completely different. My German co-worker (well, when I was working in China) reminisced about the Original Battle Star Galactica, which was featured as a movie for his East German market. Star Wars of course, was popular, it helped that Lucas cast a lot of stars from the UK.
A lot of Asian pop movies and shows are exactly this. Child of Korean immigrants here, married to a Chinese wife. Lots of stupid fun that plays in one culture is just a non-sequitur in another.
It makes perfect sense. The only exposure China had to Star Wars when it came out, were bootleg comics where they drew the Star Destroyers as Space Battleship Yamato.
Disney is likely not focusing on Southeast Asia because, despite of the population, box office receipts and licensing deals must be fairly low in dollar terms. Most companies would rather be extremely successful in China, North America and Europe alone than be mildly successful everywhere, so content is optimized for these regions.
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!
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
Nope. Dig into it. There's TONS of meddling she did that turned out to be cringe.
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
This absolutely doesn't track with people wishing for the prequel days again. Yes, the prequels were disappointing, but still we didn't imagine how much worse it could be.
I think you reversed that.
I think they're about equal levels of bad. To be fair, the prequels are "stiffer" than the sequels. However, the bad writing of the sequels severely overall damages the lore, while the bad writing of the prequels somehow manages to overall improve it.
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.
So many great series ruined completely.
So, unpopular opinion, but most franchise-based books are trash.
I've read a lot of Star Wars EU stuff! I've read a lot of universally-acclaimed Star Wars EU stuff!
It's... not great writing and not great science fiction.
Sure, it's great plot, but that's because we already know and love the setting and stories. And "more" is enjoyable.
But I feel like holding the EU as a paragon of Star Wars salvation is overvaluing it.
Most of it would turn out just as poorly as the movies did, for the same reasons.
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.
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.
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.
That Kathleen Kennedy is in the room for all the important decisions about Spielberg and Lucas' best films in the 80s and 90s is outside the scope of this insane idea that somehow firing her will fix Star Wars. Star Wars itself is the problem. It was underplayed in the early 90s, and is massively overplayed now.
And I should have been clearer about its global reach. Star Wars is not this hallowed franchise outside the anglosphere, and is actually not particularly popular in China.
Either she matters or she doesn't, you can't only give her blame while denying credit for the same job.
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.
Producers don't write or direct. They produce. And her Star Wars movies, even though not creatively great, made a ton of money – way more than Disney put in. She did her part of the job.
(And the reason the money argument is relevant here is because OP brought her up out of nowhere on a thread about layoffs at a separate entity)
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!
As financial advisors say, past returns are no good predictors for future performance
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.
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.
100% with you there—I meant to imply a pipeline failure was a management failure of some sort.
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.
I think it’s probably much simpler: money isn’t cheap anymore and everyone overhired for a long time.
The truth is, as usual, messier: constrained executives are confronted with targets they don’t know how to meet, and so start shoving round pegs into square holes.
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.
That is to say: not at all.
HN in 2024: "Companies should not reduce their headcount."
In 2018 people were advocating against bloat. Now they’re advocating against poor treatment of employees. Both are valid. In 2018, people were right, and the price of bloat is being paid by employees now.
Companies can start new products instead of laying people off. Companies constantly start new things, and can internally allocate resources. Google has open positions for hire right now; they just laid off 1K people.
Apart from avoiding layoffs, hiring less quickly also lets you be more intentional about quality and culture. How can you expect any real continuity in your culture if like 30%–50% of your engineers are new in any given year?
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.
Caveman jealous instinct? Eek. How management performs is between the management and the managed. Profit is not law, it’s not a god given right. Profit is a side affect from employees generating it. If you lay people off in a poor way, you can be chastised the same way a child gets chastised for cutting in line. Our society has an obligation to ensure everyone behaves in a pro-societal manner. Not a profitable manner. We shouldn’t need government laws to tell people to treat others well.
Oh and FWIW most companies that perform layoffs tend to not see positive outcomes for the shareholders, so you’d think they’d respond if they actually acted uniformly and rationally about shareholder value.
Neither is continued employment at a job that doesn't generate value
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...
The layoffs might prop up the margin in the short term, but I think there becomes long term lasting damage that would show as underperformance.
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.
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.
or
Some disaster on the horizon.