Bad Buzz: Disney lays off Lightyear director in first Pixar staff cuts in a decade
Lightyear director Angus MacLane was one of 75 employees laid off at Pixar over the last two weeks
Aux News Disney
The director and producer of 2022 Pixar flop Lightyear have both been laid off at Disney. According to Reuters, director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman, veteran Pixar employees who’d been with the company since the Toy Story and A Bug’s Life days of the 1990s, were among 75 employees cut from Pixar in recent weeks, as Disney engages in staff reductions across the board.
It’s been nearly a decade since Pixar last got hit with staff reductions like this, also in the wake of a major flop—although 2015's The Good Dinosaur actually did a bit better at the box office than Lightyear, which made $226 million at the box office off of a $200 million budget, i.e., bupkis.
Lightyear—which purported to be *deep breath* the “real” sci-fi movie that Andy from Toy Story watched, inspiring him to get a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday—was drubbed by both audiences and critics alike. (It was also cut from a number of international markets due to very briefly depicting a same-sex relationship, which cut into its earning potential.) Released in mid-2022, the film just couldn’t seem to justify its existence, despite the presence of star Chris Evans, and that handy text disclaimer laying out the whole premise of the film.
Disney is in a brutal cost-cutting phase at the moment; the company also announced that it’s taking a $1.5 billion impairment charge to try to improve its fiscal standing—which is a fancy way of saying they kicked a huge amount of content off of Disney+ so they wouldn’t have to count it as an asset they’d have to pay taxes on. The cuts were handed down back on May 23, as part of a $5.5 billion cost-reduction effort by CEO Bob Iger.
23 Comments
I haven’t seen a Pixar movie in almost 15 years after it became increasingly evident they had hit their sausage factory stage. It sucks to see people lose their jobs but this boat needs a new rudder bad but I don’t see McDisney ever letting anyone have Lassiter level control again and that’s what they desperately need, someone to reimagine the studio from top to bottom because you can smell the Pixar formula from miles away and it has gotten stale. Maybe cleaning house will inadvertently result in some fresh blood being hired down the road but I don’t see Pixar ever regaining their glory.
That’s a shame, you missed Luca, an underrated Studi-Ghibli-esque delight.
Luca was pretty mediocre.
Nope! You’re wrong and foolish.
Seeing the trailers for Elemental feels depressing; it feels like seven other past (and better) Pixar movies stitched together in hopes that it can recapture the old magic, which I last felt with Inside Out.
I want to like Elemental but the designs just look off-putting and the premise feels like a sitcom joke from the 70’s. See, men are like [thing] and women are like [opposite thing!] Haha, gender!
Yeah the designs bug me too. It doesn’t feel like a step forward for their animation. The designs look cheap, like the work of another studio trying their best to ape Pixar.
Having just come out of seeing Across the Spider-Verse, maybe the most jaw-dropping major Western animated film I’ve ever seen in terms of visuals, I’d really love for Pixar to go away from their standard “rounded” look and try something daring, different, anything that’s not:
Yeah they’re really mired in their own style, and desperately need some new visionaries. Because you can only go so far with detail. Turning Red seemed to max this out, where seemingly every fiber in that woolen cap she wears was visible. Yet for all that technical wizardry, there is something so hollow about their animation, compared to what, say, Cartoon Saloon is doing, and with a fraction of the budget.
The worldbuilding evidenced so far for Elemental certainly calls to mind the several other “non-human sapients in a familiarly-human society” settings Pixar has used in the past (as well as Disney’s Zootopia), and the plot seems to be a standard Hollywood rom-com “Romeo and Juliet but lighter and with a happy ending”. On the other hand, Peter Sohn has said the story was inspired by his childhood memories of growing up in an immigrant family in the Bronx, and the strongest parts of Luca were the ones that most clearly conveyed Enrico Casarosa’s childhood.I’m not optimistic that Elementals will take a place among Pixar’s classics, but I’m cautiously hopeful that it will give me a window into someone else’s experiences and be an entertaining watch.
i am so sick of ‘fantastical thing is actually mundane and normal’ as a concept.
Elemental feels 100% like someone in the c-suited called down to the writer’s room for an Inside Out knockoff.
They still make great stuff from time to time. Coco, Inside Out, and Turning Red are all at the same level of quality as classic Pixar. But the days when they were reliably churning out a new classic every year are over, and most of their movies inspire shrugs more than anything else.
Angus MacLane? Damn Irish.
i wonder what the reaction would be if pixar said they were gonna do a marvel or star wars project.