Behind Pixar's big layoffs, Hollywood content crisis

Rhino Entertainment Original

Text|Fat Department Editor|Park Fang

Pixar's massive layoffs are becoming a signal.

This is not Pixar's first layoff, as early as 2013, Pixar Animation Studio broke the news of a 5% layoff, which is not much different from the 6.25% layoff; This is not Disney's first layoffs, just part of a 7,000-person layoff plan in February, which reportedly affected more than 2,500 employees in this round alone.

The reason why Pixar layoffs have received so much attention is twofold.

First of all, Disney's multiple rounds of layoffs since the epidemic have mainly focused on media distribution and streaming business, but this time Pixar is attacking the core creative department, including serving as a senior creative team member of many works such as "Toy Story" and "Coco".

Secondly, at the level, the executives who were laid off included Michael Agunek, vice president of global communications at Pixar, and Angus McLean, director of the movie "Lightyear", and producer Garin Sussman; Among them, Sussman is a "legend" since the Jobs era - he once found the movie spare parts at home when the file data of "Toy Story 2" was all mistakenly deleted, saving the entire movie.

Both of these aspects seem to confirm speculation that the Pixar layoff is related to the dismal box office revenue of the movie "Lightyear".

The North American opening score was 50 million US dollars, the total box office was 118 million US dollars, and the global box office was only 226 million US dollars, compared with the cost of 200 million US dollars, it can be described as an epic fiasco. But more frightening than the failure itself is that Pixar fired a large number of creative team members as a result, which means that the top judgment is not an accidental failure, but a structural crisis at the company level.

Looking further, this is not a problem for the Pixars. Over the years, Hollywood movies, represented by Disney, have gained far more certainty than before with the development of universes and series IP. Behind Pixar's defeat and layoffs, this set of plays may be "extinguished".

The early winter of Pixar, the hypothermia of old logic

If the company had four seasons, Pixar would have been spring until 2010.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, the second of his three last wishes was to keep Pixar going. And "Toy Story 3", released the year before, was nominated for Best Picture as an animated film at the Oscars this year, making history.

This is not the peak of Pixar, in 2017, "Coco" broke the record of "applauded or not sold" in Chinese mainland and exceeded 1 billion, and in 2019, "Toy Story 4" received more than 1 billion US dollars worldwide, etc., all of which prove Pixar's infinite possibilities. But in fact, many problems have accumulated since 2010.

On the one hand, although Disney promises to "never interfere with creative freedom", the team is bound to consider Disney's interests and deliver talent and technology; John Lasseter of Pixar's "Five Tigers" is also the chief creative officer of Disney Animation Studios.

This became the basis for Disney's animation department to take off again after 2010, successively launching 3D animations such as "Trolls" and "Invincible Destruction King", and creating "Frozen" with a global box office of $1.27 billion in 2013.

On the other hand, Disney broke many of Pixar's previous rules, such as one work a year, never a sequel, and so on. By around 2020, Pixar's maximum annual output will reach 4; Since the acquisition, a large number of sequel movies have been produced, and 4 of the 5 movies launched from 2016 to 2019 are sequel movies.

The result, on the one hand, is frequent infighting and talent drain, such as Brad Lewis, co-director of "Cars 2", went to Warner to serve as a producer for "Funny Bird"; External competition continues to intensify, and latecomers are encroaching on Pixar's market little by little.

Just on June 5, the New York Post published an article titled "Pixar is losing Hollywood's 'animation war'", and Universal Pictures' "Super Mario Bros. Movie" has recently exceeded 1.3 billion US dollars at the box office, becoming the third highest-grossing animated film in the world ever; And this makes the failure of "Lightyear" even more glaring.

These further led to another result, the overall decline in the reputation of Pixar's works. After 2020, that is, the stage when Pixar re-announced that it would re-energize its original efforts, the golden signboard was already in danger, and many works with a Douban score of less than 8 points, such as "1/2 Magic", "Summer Friendly Sunny Day" and "Lightyear True Story" appeared in China, and overseas word-of-mouth also performed mediocre.

Whether it is the frequent development of sequel movies, or the self-repetition of content such as "1/2 Magic" and "Spiritual Journey", it is the result of Hollywood's conservative strategy in the past ten years.

So far, the top ten films at the North American box office this year, without exception, are all series or IP adaptations, among which the top three with the highest box office are "Super Mario Bros. Movie", "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" and "Avatar 2: The Way of Water"; And Disney's advantage does not seem to be so obvious, occupying 3 seats in 10 movies.

As a model pioneer, Disney has experienced multiple rounds of defeat in recent years. Taking Marvel as an example, sequel IPs such as "Spider-Man 3", "Doctor Strange 2", "Thor 4" and "Black Panther 2" can still maintain box office performance, but word-of-mouth performance has all fallen into decline; New IPs such as "Shang Qi" and "Eternals" have a global box office of 400 million US dollars, which has just reached the basic line of ordinary blockbusters.

It's not just Marvel and Disney, old rival DC's "Thunder Shazam 2" this year has a North American box office of $57 million and a global box office of $133 million.

Pixar's early winter was accompanied by the collapse of the content logic of the entire Hollywood over the past decade. After a series of high-investment blockbusters were inaccurate, Hollywood had to calculate more than just economic accounts. When overseas audiences begin to feel disgusted by homogeneous and low-quality Hollywood content, the impact may be more far-reaching than imagined.

The Hollywood cycle may enter a new end

If you break Pixar's golden period, from the world's first all-digital 3D animation of "Toy Story" in 1995 to the final glory in 2019, these 30 years seem to be consistent with a new cycle in Hollywood.

It is controversial how many golden cycles Hollywood has experienced, but the most recent should be considered to have started in 1993's "Jurassic Park", and the momentum that drove this golden cycle came from two aspects: the establishment of a global distribution system, and the comprehensive leap forward of digital technology.

Perhaps familiar to Chinese-speaking audiences, "Jurassic Park" topped the Hong Kong annual box office list for the first time in 1993, and is considered one of the symbolic events of the decline of Hong Kong films. The same story takes place in many parts of the world, the film grossed a whopping $912 million worldwide, and dinosaurs were the highest-grossing icon in the world before that big ship cruised the world.

In the new century, the development of digital production has added a fire to this success, and the certainty at the production level, after Disney locked in with IP as a weapon, constitutes a world-leading content advantage.

To this day, Hollywood still has a leading presence in the global film market, but some changes are happening. In the top ten of the global box office ranking in 2022, Hollywood holds nine seats, and the only thing missed is the Chinese-language film "Watergate Bridge"; In addition, if Korean film and television began to use streaming media as a platform to open the North American market, Hollywood's traditional global distribution system has also suffered a certain degree of dissolution.

The decline in the quality of Hollywood content is only an internal factor, the strengthening of film and television production capabilities in various countries, new channels and new efficiencies of online communication, as well as differences and cognitive differences in the ideological field, all of which have caused the dissemination of several works.

For example, "The Little Mermaid", which was released for two weeks, currently has a box office of US$190 million in North America, much higher than the overseas box office of US$140 million, while the mainland box office is only 25 million yuan. The box office snub of Hollywood films in the mainland in recent years is also a typical example.

It should be assumed that we may be witnessing another golden age in Hollywood begin to enter the end of the cycle, at least the half-life: the motivation that drives it into this cycle has gradually failed, and it is now more about leading by accumulated production capabilities, capital advantages and existing IP, but these advantages are not enough to serve as a long-term moat.

It's certainly too early to talk about going beyond Hollywood movies; At least from the urgency shown by Pixar's layoffs, Hollywood is aware of the current situation, and whether there will be a new content revolution to solve the increasingly obvious content crisis, Hollywood still has a lot of time, but the good card will not be in its hands forever.