Recently Disney began a new wave of layoffs across the company. According to Deadline the estimated number of positions being eliminated range from 1,000 – 2,500 and mainly focus on the entertainment side of the company.

This past Saturday the highly acclaimed animation studio Pixar was hit with a round of layoffs cutting 75 total staff. This marks the studio’s biggest staff cut in over a decade. Of those cut from the studio were two high profile executives. Those being director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman.



Angus MacLane had been working at Pixar since 1997 and was an animator of A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. He would continue being an animator (even voicing the side character BERN-E in WALL-E) but got his directing great when he co-directed Finding Dory with Andrew Stanton. MacLane would also serve as a member of the creative team on films such as Coco, Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4.

Galyn Susman had been working at Pixar since 1995 and is often credited as the person who saved Toy Story 2 due to 90% of the files for the film being accidentally deleted. Thankfully she had a backup saved on her personal computer. Susman would go on to produce films like Ratatouille, Toy Story 4 and many of the Toy Story short films.



The reason why their cuts are significant is due to them being the creative duo behind the poorly received 2022 film Lightyear. MacLane being the film’s director (and his first solo outing as director) and Susman as Executive Producer. The film had a $200 Million budget but marketing rose the “break even point” to $373 Million. The film only earned $267 Million worldwide and thus Disney lost $106 Million.

With Pixar seeing these kinds of cuts ahead of their new film Elemental film things do not look good for the studio. Currently, Elemental is expected to be a box office dud with only a $40 Million opening against a $200 Million budget. If things don’t turn around for the nearly 30 year old studio soon they might go the way of BlueSky.

Source: The Guardian