Disney lays off 75 Pixar employees, including Lightyear director

Disney's Pixar Animation Studios laid off 75 employees, including Angus MacLean, director of the box office flop Lightyears, and producer Garin Sussman, marking the studio's first large-scale layoffs in 10 years.

Angus MacLean, 48, is the director of Lightyear and was a senior creative team member on critically acclaimed films such as Toy Story 4 and Coco. Garin Sussman has been with Pixar since the release of Toy Story in 1995.

Foreign media Deadline announced earlier that Lightyear ranked third with a loss of $106 million in the top five Hollywood movies with the most losses in 2022. The film only received a score of 6.1 on IMDb, making it a poorly rated work in Pixar Studios.

When it was released in June last year, Lightyears caused a lot of controversy: the film involved kissing scenes between same-sex characters, which led to the film not being shown in theaters in the Middle East markets such as Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, nor in theaters in Malaysia and Indonesia. The film was also not introduced to mainland China due to the epidemic lockdown.

In addition, some viewers also complained that Lightyear was voiced by "Captain America" ​​Chris Evans, rather than Tim Allen, who voiced the characters in the first four "Toy Story" films.

In addition to the director and producer of Lightyears, Michael Agunek, who has served as Pixar's vice president of global publicity since 2015, was also fired. The layoffs took place on May 23 and were part of Disney CEO Bob Iger's previously announced plan to lay off 7,000 people and cut costs by $5.5 billion. This reorganization merged the film and television groups into a single Disney entertainment division and eliminated a department responsible for distribution.