Disney Lays Off Hundreds of Staffers, Pixar Hit Hard

The iconic Pixar ball has a little less air in it. A new round of layoffs hit Disney on Tuesday morning, impacting several hundred employees across corporate functions, ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television and Disney Studios, a Disney spokesperson told TheWrap. The Emeryville, California-based animation studio is being hit the hardest in the company’s studios business, TheWrap understands. On the DET side, National Geographic is expected to be hit the hardest. “These changes are part of our continual evaluation of how we manage resources and reinvest across the company as our industry continues to evolve,” a Disney spokesperson said. This is expected to be the largest round of Pixar layoffs since the summer of 2024, after “Inside Out 2” made a whopping $1.69 billion at the box office. Notifications went out company-wide on Tuesday morning. The new rounds of layoffs come against the backdrop of Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” exploding at the box office — it just cleared $957 million worldwide on its way to $1 billion. In 2024, the layoffs were blamed on the great streaming contraction, as Disney+ eased up on its demand for new animated product from Pixar. The animation studio’s inaugural long-form original animated series “Win or Lose” would be burned off at the beginning of 2025; the second original series developed for Disney+ was canceled and reworked as a feature set to be released in 2028. This round of layoffs is at least partially being blamed on the perceived underperformance of “Hoppers,” the Pixar original film that opened earlier this year, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap. The Daniel Chong-directed feature was a hit with critics and audiences, earning $389.5 million worldwide on a budget of $150 million. By typical Hollywood accounting standards, that puts “Hoppers” slightly shy of break-even. And “Hoppers” came on the heels of “Elio,” an original film that had a troubled production history and carried a final production budget of around $200 million, making just $154 million worldwide in 2025, Pixar’s lowest-grossing movie since the COVID-impacted “Onward.” The idea is that, to stay competitive in the marketplace, Pixar needs to be making movies (particularly original films) at more competitive prices. Among those impacted are Rej Bourdages, a legendary industry veteran who had stints at DreamWorks, Aardman and Walt Disney Animation Studios, who had been with Pixar for nearly fifteen years and whose first credit was the groundbreaking “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Earlier this year, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro’s “One Disney” edict, Disney cut 1,000 employees (or “Cast Members” in Disney-speak), including much of the Marvel Studios art department, all of the AV and home video publicity divisions and Asad Ayaz’s chief lieutenant in digital marketing. “Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney,” D’Amaro wrote in the April memo. “Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs. As a result, we will be eliminating roles in some parts of the company and have begun notifying impacted employees.” Next year will see a single Pixar animated feature released, “Gatto,” a painterly new movie by “Luca” director Enrico Casarosa. 2028 will be an original and “Incredibles 3,” a highly anticipated sequel, this time directed by Peter Sohn and written by Brad Bird.