Toy Story 5 approaches $1 billion box office as Pixar lays off a bunch of staff

Says a Disney spokesperson, “These changes are part of our continual evaluation of how we manage resources and reinvest across the company as our industry continues to evolve.” 

As well as Toy Story 5 might be doing at the box office, the layoffs are actually the fault of Hoppers, according to a source who spoke to TheWrap. Hoppers made just under $390 million against a budget of $150 million, which TheWraps estimates means it didn’t quite break even. Still, it landed Pixar’s best opening for an original movie since 2017’s Coco. Last year’s Elio was a fairly significant underperformance for the company, grossing only $154 million against a budget as high as $200 million. In 2023, Pixar President Jim Morris admitted to Variety that the studio’s films do have a higher budget than most other animated films because they don’t use offshore labor and because “our whole company exists only to make these films,” meaning the budget includes things like executive salaries. 

This is the second large round of layoffs at Disney since new CEO Josh D’Amaro took the reins of the company in the spring. The last round took the jobs of about 1,000 people, including a ton of the staffers responsible for Marvel’s VFX.