The film was set to focus on two teen girls whose friendship started to falter after they discover their favorite TV show, a Sailor Moon-type show, is real, setting them on a universe-spanning adventure. Staffers explain that after “Braintrust 3″—the third of six check-ins the filmmakers have with studio higher-ups to assess a project’s progress—the studio asked for major changes. “There was a meeting that took place after BT3, where Kristen [Lester, director] and Blaise [Hemingway, writer] made the case to Disney: ‘We know you don’t like where the film is at right now. Give us six weeks, and we’ll redo the entire film,'” said one former Pixar staffer who spoke to THR on the condition of anonymity. “Kristen, Blaise, Nick [C. Smith, editor] and a couple board artists spent six weeks of night-and-day, seven-days-a-week, literally reformatting.”
The staffer said that the process normally would take a year, but the team pulled it off. “It was on Hoppers’ level,” the staffer says. “It befuddles me why they passed on it, but with each round of notes, Disney just didn’t feel like little boys could see themselves in the film enough. Basically, Disney reps were like, ‘We can’t have a girl power movie.'” THR does note that the staffer heard this info second-hand and was not present for the meetings in question.
Of course, this was pretty devastating to those who spent years on the project, not just because Disney and Pixar had been willing to retool movies like Brave, but because female-centered movies can obviously have broad appeal. Says another staffer, “I can imagine that whoever at Disney denied Be Fri to exist looks at KPop [Demon Hunters] and is kicking themselves like, ‘Shit, I can’t believe Netflix is doing exactly what we wanted to do.’”
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