Several hundred employees were laid off on Tuesday across multiple Disney divisions, including ESPN, National Geographic, Disney Entertainment Television, and Disney Studios.
Surprisingly, Pixar staffers were most heavily impacted—a July 21 WARN notice outlined that Pixar will cut 108 positions from its Emeryville, California, headquarters. (WARN stands for “Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification” Act of 1988.) Editors, technical directors, and software engineers are among those impacted, according to the notice, reported by The Mercury News.
The majority of layoffs will take place in September, while additional positions will be cut this November, December, and January.
“After careful evaluation of many factors, Pixar has made the decision to permanently reduce the size of the workforce at Pixar’s facility located at 1200 Park Ave.,” Reema Batnagar, Pixar’s vice president of people, wrote in the WARN notice.
“Affected employees do not have bumping rights,” or the ability for senior employees facing layoffs to take on the roles of junior workers, Pixar also stated in the WARN letter. “None of them is represented by a union.”
Disney did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.
Pixar’s recently released Toy Story 5 is approaching $1 billion in box office sales—but if these layoffs are any indication, that doesn’t seem to be enough to make up for the performance of some of the studio’s previous releases. A source familiar with the matter told The Wrap that this round of layoffs occurred in part because of the underperformance of Hoppers, which has earned $389.5 million on a budget of $150 million. A film tends to need to accrue two to 2.5 times its production budget at the global box office to break even, to account for marketing costs and extra fees. The studio’s previous animated release, Elio, made $154 million at the worldwide box office, compared with its estimated cost of between $150 and $200 million.
The layoffs mark Pixar’s largest round of cuts since 2024, when 14% of its workforce—around 175 employees—were laid off just as production for Inside Out 2 wrapped up. Because the cuts happened just before the film became a major box office hit—eventually grossing $1.69 billion worldwide—the laid-off employees missed out on any bonuses from its massive success.
Under the leadership of CEO Josh D’Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger this March, Disney has already faced company-wide reductions. Earlier this year, it slashed 1,000 jobs, including the Marvel Studios art department, all of the home entertainment team, and several digital marketing roles. While these most recent cuts are smaller in scale, Disney is clearly rethinking its structure amid a rapidly evolving industry driven by new technologies. Back in April, D’Amaro addressed that outlook in a memo to employees.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
