Imagine working somewhere and then reading "The studio stressed the layoffs are not imminent, but will take place later this year as Pixar focuses on making less content". Then having to go to work each day at a place that keeps saying we are all family here knowing that 2/10 of you are going to get axed. I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition. Although for many of those people I would imagine they have landed their dream job; feel bad for them.
This is a classic layoff debate -- is it better to do it with zero warning, or is it better to let employees know that a layoff is coming?
Personally, I believe advance notice is better, because it signals to employees that, if layoffs are going to happen, there will be some time to prepare. By choosing to blindside employees, it creates a culture of paranoia, IMO. ("Will today be layoff day?" "What about next month?" "Oh no, it's the end of the quarter, does that mean tomorrow my laptop will lock up at 4am?")
What Pixar has created is an environment where nobody knows is they’re going to stay, so people self select into two buckets: 1) those who say “I’m not going to bust my ass just to get fired”. They coast and prepare to leave. And 2) those who work their ass off to try to “prove” themselves. If any of 2 get fired, it’s a bad morale hit for anyone around after the layoffs. You’ll lose actual talent this way.
Make the decision of who to layoff and do it, but be kind as you do.
Maybe they wanted to be at Pixar because it was a successful company with safe jobs, but don't want to be at the new less successful layoff-threatened Pixar anymore? And the "best talent" also tends to have better salaries, and management decisions are often not really well-informed, so IMHO thinking you are immune from layoffs because you're better than average is hubris...
This is tempered by everyone's financial situation.
Even in tech a large group of people don't have the resources to sit on the shelf for a few months unpaid. Even if they know a severance package is included the amount is unknown and there are not a ton of animation studios that can probably compete with Pixar on salary, a few but not a lot.
Its a big risk to just wait it out and see if you are not financially secure.
My experience is different. _When_ (not always!) I was considered a top performer, you had a 1:1 or small group meeting with senior leaders who told you point blank: "Layoffs are coming. You are top performers. None of you will be laid-off." People would sigh with relief, then go back to their desk. The layoff announcement would come moments later.
This happens only when layoffs are small and targeted. In reality of big corps your whole department would be cut including the managers promising you that you wouldn't be affected
> This happens only when layoffs are small and targeted.
Thank you for speaking on my behalf. No, it does not. In my experience, I am never concerned with small and targeted layoffs because I am never in the bottom 25% performers in my team. Instead, when the layoff are mass and broad, only then, have I experienced those personalised meeting with senior management. (To be crystal clear: I was only invited to those meetings when I was viewed as a top-top performer. Not always.)
Even if they don't leave, I was at a company that warned us 3 months before a 20% layoff, and basically everyone treaded water for 3 months until they knew if were staying. Huge company loss of productivity.
I think this is one of those situations where the optimal strategy for one interaction is very different to that for multiple, iterative interactions. The company has to presumably hire again in the future, and having a reputation for firing without notice may make it harder to attract the people you want.
on the other hand, top talent is also likely to feel disrespected by having layoffs sprung on their team with no warning. It was a trigger for 3 of my job changes during my career, each time a "regretted attrition."
"firing without notice": First, not legal in California where most of their highest skilled people work (Emeryville, last that I knew). These people will probably will receive (very) large severance packages worth months of pay. Plenty of time to find a new job. If they are very high skill, it will be easy to find a new role. Also, reputation for an employer is quickly forgotten if salaries are high enough. Please don't forget how many people went to work on dumb projects at the height of Facebook. After the Metaverse was cancelled and many people were laid off, suddenly a bunch of blog posts appeared: "That place was awful to work, but they paid me lots of money." (Example: Eric Lippert) Investment banking is similar. In short, if you pay enough, there are enough (plenty of?) people who don't care about your reputation.
I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Being bored was killing me. Draining your soul for money is not wise. Your mind takes on a personality you can't relate to and sinks to an imperceptible malaise. It's a form of torture. Leaving that to discover purpose again is an unforgettable relief. I feel young again and I'm flooded daily with feelings of optimism, something I thought was just lost to youth. Like being released from prison.
> I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
This is rich thinking. Most people that I met from developing countries who grew up poor would sell their soul for shitty unfulfilling work that pays huge salary / bonus / stock. I cannot blame them; I would do the same in their situation. I don't pass (too much) judgement on where and why people work. Mostly, it is a luxury to decide when / where / how you work, including for less than the maximum that you can be paid.
Personally, my biggest professional problem is that I get bored on a project after two years. It is incredibly rare in my career to stay more than four years on the same project. Yet, time and time again, my managers are surprised when I resign for a new role.
> I am so done with "awful but lots of money." I won't even do boring but lots of money any more.
> I recently took a shocking pay cut to get "not awful and very fun."
Curious what your financial situation looked like between these two stages. It's easy to be willing to take a major pay cut to work on a fun project when you've already got 6 figures stashed in savings and your house and car are paid off.
I wish people would not use that term "x figures". It is too vague. Are we talking about 100K USD or 900K USD? There is a huge difference, yet both are "6 figures".
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of either of those, so good to know. For anyone reading, the federal act only applies to employers with 100 or more employees and the Cal act requires 75 or more.
If I may suggest am interpretation: different kind of professionals may see different things. E.gm I'm told the market rate for react devs dropped like a brick, which is not the case for other software engineers.
If you call yourself a react dev, then I’m sorry you’re not a software engineer. That’s like calling urself a Facebook marketer instead of a marketer. Good way to box yourself into a niche that may run out of demand
> If you can collude on layoffs, that means industry demand for labor is down and salaries are reflecting lowered demand.
No it doesn't. You make a "gentleman's agreement" to do your layoffs and trust your chums to keep to it. Are you arguing that industry collusion is impossible?
Yes, because companies need labor. They aren't going to willingly crash their growth if the economy is booming and other industries are growing, because that will destroy themselves. It is insanely better to shed labor when the economy is poor than when the economy is great.
When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision. (And don't nitpick the analogy on things like "buy low sell high", you probably understand the point I'm making.)
Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.
> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.
That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.
The "silicon valley anti-poaching agreement" is a known case where it happened a few years ago. So it's not too implausible to think that the current round of layoffs might be being coordinated in a similar way.
All you have to do is look at how these things play out. One large company announces they're considering layoffs, which primes everyone else to compile their own lists.
After a month or two one company announces they're going through with layoffs, and that sets off a chain reaction for the rest to execute their own plans as soon as possible. It always happens like this. Everyone just decides now is the time to clean house, all at the same time, and we all decided to do this independent of each other...
The "collusion" is a dog-whistle protocol happening in plain sight. There is no "evidence," no damning email to be found, only behavioral patterns to observe. It's the same playbook every single time.
I don’t know which of you is right, but I think you’re saying different things. They’re saying positions that are actually open right now are paying less, and you’re saying salaries for existing employees are flat. They could be right if the positions which are open are only recruiting those with lower salary expectations.
No, I’m saying pay for new openings is flat. I just went through a job search, the numbers in the level.fyi data match my own job search experience looking at current openings.
- soda is up about 50% for name brand, and generic soda is up around 80%
- diesel is up, what 50%? how much is regular gas in california?
- housing "values" where I am at are up 25-40% in the last two years
- Potato chips are up at least 40%
- Apples are much more expensive
- Restaurants are up at least 25%, some 50-75%
Many of these products went up by these amounts yet also engaged in shrinkflation. The biggest example of this is Chipotle which almost doubled the cost of its burritos but also shrunk them in size by about a third.
Governments are motivated to reduce inflation in inflation statistics. Perhaps the cost of goods for the ultra-rich hasn't really changed much, but for the poor (or cheap) they have all gone up quite dramatically in two years.
oh god, how will SF SWEs survive with more expensive potatoe chips and soda. Maybe stop drinking poison and processed foods and you'll be fine. A whole rotisserie chicken is only $8.99 at whole foods
boo hoo, how will SWE survive on a paltry $150k per year for adjusting drop down menu fonts. The salaries in tech were ridiculous and an insult to other professionals that actually improved the world. Now that 0% interest rates are gone and most tech is mature and cranking up margins by pushing more ads, you don't need as many SWEs. Michelin-chef meals, onsite daycare, 400K salaries, and nap rooms were not a sustainable long term thing
Isn't that the case in all layoffs, regardless of announcement timing? I'd argue all layoffs are, as a rule, foolish and short-sighted, because they tend end up with so many unintended consequences like that.
Couldn't disagree more strongly. Saying "The best way to do a layoff is to never have one" is really saying that you want to hire so cautiously that you will prevent people from getting the opportunity to have a job in the first place.
Look, so much of layoffs from the past 1.5 years or so are the result of massive overhiring during the pandemic. Sure, it's easy to argue companies were short sighted, but even if they hadn't been, why would it be better to never have hired all those people to begin with? That is, even if a company had thought "the pandemic has really just pulled demand forward - we need a lot more workers now that we won' need when the pandemic ends", why shouldn't they hire workers for that period? Yes, I totally agree this is bad form to disrupt someone's career tenure if it's for a very short period, but a lot of these pandemic hires lasted several years. All those people got great experience and salaries, and I don't think the better thing would have been to never have hired them in the first place.
I wish people would move away from the mindset that a layoff is the most awful thing possible, as long as people are treated respectfully and with adequate severance. When a company hires me, I don't expect to work there for life, nor do I expect them to have an obligation to keep me employed for life. As long as we give each other enough heads up if we decide to separate (and folks can have an honest debate over how long "enough" is), I don't see the problem.
> The best way to do a layoff is to never have one
Sure, in fantasyland. This is unrealistic. What if you have a severe business downturn? No choice, but to layoff. In services, your number one cost is always people (talent).
People will make choices to leave either way. If you do not give advance warnings and just fire people, remaining people will still make decisions to leave.
Your best talent at a company like this knows they aren't going to get fired.
In fact at a company like this, your best talent probably wishes the bottom 10% would get trimmed because they produce so little relative to higher performers.
Large layoffs are rarely, if ever, performance anchored at the IC level. They're anchored in the performance at product/unit level. So the major decider for layoffs is whether you're working on something that is deemed as business positive or not.
The best talent is often the highest paid and that gets factored into these decisions as well when the company is trying to hit specific budget targets.
And this is the sort of thing that can be especially problematic in creative companies when the layoffs are being run by bean-counting executives who have no presence in the day to day work of ICs.
Will top talent get sacked at Pixar? I have no idea, but as a 50 year old tech worker I've seen a number of layoffs first-hand and have heard anecdotal reports of dozens more that lead me to the conclusion that being among the "top talent" does not make you immune when it comes to large belt-tightening layoffs.
Layoffs could also mean trimming the dead weight at the company that is sitting around and collecting paychecks, which in my experience is super common in california tech. Hit L4/L5, attend that weekly standups, and rest and vest till 50, then FAT FIRE and move to New Zealand
Unless you’re the one conducting layoffs, what you think is dead weight and what people conducting layoffs think is dead weight might be different people.
Plus that L4/L5 employee might look stellar on paper. Or even be stellar, just not very vocal about what they’re doing.
I thought that was true as well but the tech layoffs that have been happening have all been about being leaner to grow faster. Look at Meta, for example, that did layoffs in spite of massive continuous growth.
For a lot of people going through a first layoff, it would be shocking.
This company that keeps telling them they are all family here just cut x% of them. Its a slap in the face and makes them understand that there is no loyalty from the business to the employee so why be loyal to the business?
This drives people to take a more mercenary approach to work and look for better pay elsewhere.
In Titanic the folks that got on lifeboats early survived, the ones that didn't got caught up in whatever traps as the rest of the ship goes down. If the ship is going down, its good to not ride it to the depths.
If it's not going down, then maybe it's not worth jumping. That's thr skill in it I guess, knowing which is which.
Things change with layoffs - whatever they liked about company before is not there anymore. The relationships get worst, there is a lot more political infighting due to unclear competencies and changes. The people who stay after layoff tend to be demotivated in general too.
Layoffs usually occur within the wider context of a more cost constrained/austere environment.
Essentially the high performers understand that they'll be expected to do more with less (people, resources, benefits, ...).
Likely the layoffs won't affect the layers of grifters above them, so it becomes a question of whether they really want to work harder for little or no personal gain, just to support the layers above them who are making and being rewarded for the bad decisions, or whether the high performers should look elsewhere for something more aligned with their personal happiness.
often the decisions for the cuts are not made at the manager level, the people who know who the best performers are. The C Suite just says we are cutting these departments often including the managers. Its not done with a scalpel but with an axe and only the very best, known to the c-suite get a stay of execution.
> This is a classic layoff debate -- is it better to do it with zero warning, or is it better to let employees know that a layoff is coming?
No good answers here. They're both bad, but in different ways, and I suspect that whether one is worse than the other is probably a matter of personality type.
I know it's not practical because of select few bad apples, but giving a year's notice to the affected people, letting them finish up the work and mentally prepare, and all the while coaching them through the process of finding a new job seems like a humane thing to do.
I'd argue that's basically option 2: blindsiding employees. Severance softens the blow, but fundamentally doesn't fix the "I might get axed tomorrow" paranoia.
It's kind of a weird move for companies to make because it's an oddly pro-labor signal to tell employees ahead of time to prepare for layoffs.
I agree, I prefer it.. but also, it's weird in 2024 where corps basically try to fuck everyone at every possible turn that they're being so open about these layoffs.
It depends on the amount of severance and the person. Not sure if everybody would prefer to get a couple months worth of severance but have to go through the stress of quickly finding a new job.
I find that stressful even if I live in a country where I have the same level of healthcare no matter whether I'm employed or not.
How do you guys in the US cope with that? Is it as bad as it looks from outside or you have mechanisms to not lose all your healthcare if laid off?
You get severance and can claim unemployment for a while too if you're laid off. Getting people to jump ship themselves avoids severance payouts and UI claims.
If you plan to jump ship, negotiate with HR to get the severance package and voluntary leave, especially if you're hot shit and can get another job quickly, otherwise you're leaving money on the table. The only thing you lose here is eligibility for unemployment, which you won't need anyway.
Healthcare is a shitshow. You can do COBRA, which lets you maintain your health plan by picking up the tab the employer previously paid. I've never done it myself but heard premiums were like $800 per person per month, years ago.
>I have to think they will lose at least 10% just through attrition
and before anybody says that's maybe intentional, that just a really dumb way to do layoffs. that's how you lose your best people, rather than your worst.
This assumes that there's a significant difference between top performers and the next tier down, and that it's important to keep 'the best people'. In most businesses there are plenty of other good people who can step up if the best ones leave. Its also rare that someone is 'the best' at everything; people have a range of skills and you'll only be losing the person who's best at one or two of them.
Most people who think companies have a 'best person' aspire to be seen as that person, and haven't really thought about what it would actually mean.
Exactly. Companies really don't care as much about talent and performance as people think they do. Most of the time good enough is good enough. And companies almost always prefer attrition to layoffs or firings. Corporations are very conflict averse by nature.
The worst will know they will have trouble getting a job elsewhere. The best might assume they are known to be the best, so they are safe. I would think it would be the middle people who would jump ship.
Nah, layoffs are too random. Being the best on your team doesn’t matter if the division is cut, or if the VP is making the call, or if your manager is disfavored, etc.
Most of the (risk averse) great folks I know have purposely found safe harbor over the past ~2 years.
I don't understand the logic with employers dropping warnings like that. I knew ~2mo before my employer announced layoffs and it caused much unnecessary anxiety in my life.
But it shapes how you'll feel about the event & the future for a long long time after. The company was honest with you. When the day came it wasn't a complete shock.
I don't have a conclusive answer, but I'd want to know I think & respect companies that have the bravery to be up front.
I have experienced 2 layoffs, once as an IC and once as an EM.
As an IC, the day it happened and the weeks after it happened were tough, but I knew if I was the one impacted and my job was 'safe' for the time being.
As an EM, I knew months in advance, but I had no idea if I would be on the list. This caused months of stress while I planned for promotions and projects for people that might not (and eventually weren't) there after the rif.
Ripping off the band aid is much more human than telling people "sometime in the next 12 mo we may or may not fire a large portion of you, so please keep giving your 100%"
Really? Does it even help if you don't know who it is? Do they expect each person to look for another job and have it lined up on hold just in case he is one of the 20% that actually get fired?
Gives you a peace of mind once it is over. Also, allows you to prepare contingencies. Our company only now was recovering from the last year layoffs and now it is suddenly hit again. It would've been much more humane to know in advance not to relax.
There is a reason why layoffs always happen as a surprise and kept a secret. Now everyone thinks they might get laid off. The folks who are easily employable will switch. This might be the end of Pixar.
Classic overreaction on HN. Did you say the same when Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft slashed huge number of employees in last year? How about Spotify?
Perhaps it's a pivotal moment for those folks to rethink the whole "dream job" shindig, while being in the great position of having a job at Pixar when interviewing in the coming months.
I feel like there's a high chance of a layoff in my org as they had layoffs in other orgs yesterday and mine is one of major holdouts. I would very much wished for something definite, either for them to say that nothing currently planned or to say that it will happen later this month or something.
While layoffs are detrimental to employee morale (e.g. employees take less long-term risk), I wonder how much worse the effects of layoffs are in the creative industry.
You might be able to replace employees in a more utility-driven company. But creative people are not exactly interchangeable, as creative ideas tend to bounce better among employees who have "chemistry." These collective of creatives end up sharing tribal knowledge of producing creative outputs with a given expectation or taste. If you fire them, it will be difficult to replicate or enhance the creativity (by whatever metric we can try to measure it with).
Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once lamented the dissolution of the studio system, which turned the industry into a loose gathering on freelancers. He believed it would be antithetical to creativity, which he sees to happen tribally.
A famous counter-example to layoffs in the creative industry is Nintendo. Former CEO Satoru Iwata opposed layoffs as a way to weather financial downturns, as layoffs would discourage employees from committing to their work in the long-term. Instead, Nintendo tries to guarantee stable employment with their sizable financial reserves, albeit not paying a high salary.
Animation studios were able to garner a sense of "expectation" and establish a brand (e.g. Pixar especially with their first 11 features) because of the "regulars" who worked on their releases. Layoffs would change the collaborative chemistry among employees, and can make it difficult to establish or maintain a brand.
The Nintendo model would never work in the Silicon Valley. Literally, some of the most talented video game programmers that the world has ever known worked most of their career for relative peanuts... compared to what Activision & Co. would have paid them. Much less stable? Yep.
From a purely financial perspective, Nintendo is not well run. An infamous quote: <<Nintendo has such a large cash reserve it could lose $250 million every year and wouldn't go bankrupt until 2052.>> Or: <<Nintendo cash on hand for the quarter ending September 30, 2023 was $14.250B.>> There is a limit to useful cash reserves. Else, it should be distributed as a cash dividend, share buyback, or buy a competitor / "invest".
In Japanese corporate thinking from 1950s to 1990s, lifetime employment was the singular goal for your employees, above all else. Read that twice and let that sink in. Layoffs were viewed as culturally impossible due to loss of face. It is nearly impossible to (culturally) "translate" this goal into the American state of mind. Simply stated: US employees take much more career risk and, correspondingly, are paid much more. I am not making a moral judgement here about either system -- there are pros and cons for both. My point: Little insight can be found here when comparing the layoff practices of uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-uber-conservative Japanese corps vis-a-vis American tech companies. It is literally Mars vs Venus or Moon vs Earth -- a different planet (culture state of mind).
I work in Japan, but I am not Japanese. One of the biggest complaints from foreign software developers is that salaries are awful compared to their home countries. The complaining never stops about it. However, they overlook the full picture -- as noted above. From what I hear, Germany is quite similar -- much lower salaries, but way more stable (fewer layoffs) compared to SV.
Ok so Japanese game developers work for peanuts on the most beloved IP in the world... with stable lifelong careers. Are they happy? Miserable? How far does their salary go relative to their living conditions? Honestly curious.
Or maybe this is how you keep a company alive and producing good work. Sure Disney is more profitable, but it's become a soulless corporate machine, and will falter and die in the next 30 years. Nintendo will stay profitable and will continue to produce high quality products forever.
In your view, when and why did Disney become a "soulless corporate machine"? Many, many parents here subscribe to Disney+ to stream stuff for their kids. I've never once heard anyone use that term to describe Disney here. Honestly, it's a weird term. Are any big corps not?
> will falter and die in the next 30 years
Would you be willing to buy deep out of the money puts on it? I am happy to sell to you all day long. Else, this is just a rant.
> Nintendo will stay profitable and will continue to produce high quality products forever.
What a reach. Video game companies are much less stable than TV and film studios. No one knows what will happen to Nintendo when the old guard finally retires.
Nintendo was already pretty huge before the economic bubble burst in 1990. Japan had plenty of inflation in the 1980s. Also, currently, Nintendo is wildly profitable. They could easily pay their star designers millions of USD per year, but they do not. Yet, these designers stay and continue their work.
My first "startup" was cartoonlagoon.com. We were going to be a site for independent animators and artists with the draw being a showcase of more well-known artists releasing exclusive content you wouldn't see anywhere else.
We had some cool stuff from Kevin Eastman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Heavy Metal) and others, but it never really took off.
Hearing the news about Pixar and other studios letting people go, made me think that something like this could totally be done today. Maybe it doesn't need to be its own site, but could be a channel on YouTube or something. There's definitely a shift happening in the space and I'm so excited for what's going to happen next.
And they hate it. Patreon, too (particularly the ones with more risqué work). A dedicated platform would be a major boon in terms of community, reliability, and possibly remuneration.
If we're talking about remuneration, the audience/customer don't really want a "dedicated platform" since that's not the only thing they do, unlike the artists themselves. Or in other words, dedicated platform (like deviantart) is fine but it won't attract the largest audience.
The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination, focus, clarity, cohesion, and taste making.
Katzenberg has had a lot of flops, but he's right about this [1]. I'd even wager costs will get cut by 99.9% in ten years time.
All this to say I think you're 100% correct. Now's the time to build platforms and tools for independent animators.
Don’t get too drawn in by an ad. JK is pumping his AI startup here, he is intentionally exaggerating to generate surprise and interest to pitch to indies, knowing full well that high quality animated films that make a lot of money will continue to require large staffs and large budgets and take a long time to make.
If independent animation is super cheap and easy to produce, then how will indies make any money and support themselves? It’s already extremely difficult, and lowering the costs might only bring in more people with less skill and make that problem worse.
If you’re talking about a $200M Pixar film, on the other hand, cutting costs by 99.9% means a budget of ~$200K. Think about it: that would end up being a middling 1 year salary for a single person (especially if there’s any ancillary costs like benefits, software and equipment, office rent, etc..) They certainly can’t get any A-list Hollywood voice actors for that much. They can’t record the music for that much. Pixar will never be able to make a full length movie for a $200k budget, and they don’t actually want to, because that would signal low quality and low effort. Going too cheap would mean completely abandoning their aspirational status.
And don’t forget the marketing budgets are in the tens to hundreds of millions, which will not go down just because of better animation tools. It doesn’t make sense to dump that much marketing money into a product that only costs pennies to produce.
Animation production costs have gone down steadily over time, and animation is far more accessible to independent animators now than it was 20 years ago, and that will continue. Big Budget movie studios have historically used those savings to hire more people, increase the quality, and continued to spend more or less exactly the same amount of money (or more) per film. Budgets are higher now than they were on Toy Story, same goes for VFX, and I think it’d be quite safe to predict the general trend for movie budgets that has lasted around a hundred years to continue for the next ten, with or without AI.
Bill Watterson didn't need all these tools and platforms. Just paper and ink.
Right now we have content, info and tool overload and Layoffs are a sign of over production.
Plus people like Katzenberg love to jump around funding new stuff and telling/distracting/fomoing people more creative than them - hey you better learn this or be good at that, cause why else do people need him in the room?
Watterson needed Universal Press Syndicate to distribute his drawings to newspapers. And all the people involved in making, printing, and distributing those papers. There was a pretty long chain between his drawing table and you chuckling at Calvin's antics over your morning coffee.
But (and I say this as a huge Watterson fan and someone who kinda agrees with your crux) Watterson never animated anything. The single-strip format is far more fitting for a one-man shop than an animated film, at least at this point in time.
> The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination,
O yes, and those 'creative writers' wouldn't be humans. At least at low level it can be easily automated. After human gives the main idea and story line. Actually this can be done automatically too, but human touch is important to claim 'human made'. I'm afraid there will be radical changes. Like those which happened to photography once everybody got a camera. Now AI changes the field again. For the best or worst depends how you look at it.
I agree that writing is going to become more important. I do not think it'll be done by AI. Good stories come from quality character development, empathy, and the ability to tell a story that captures the imagination. Having an incredibly animated story is less important than the story.
The story is everything and AI writing is just not there nor do I think it ever will be.
GPT-4 was introduced just less than a year ago. Development didn't stop. It doesn't mean that AI will invent something, but mimicking existing works is easy. After all most humans writing is just this. There are real works, while most is just a flood of some gray mass. These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills. Today they use human coauthors, but soon AI will be doing text expansion and style correction just as well.
BTW, "good" is subjective metrics. As soon as it's known to be AI generated it becomes average at best. Just like with images today. Nobody is trying to find 'hidden depth' in them.
> These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills
I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong.
This is the standard thing if you try to put together a UI without any design skills, you will use existing components and styles, and it will still look crap.
AI will make it easier for people who know how to write to do automated ghost writing, but it won't allow people who can't to do it.
That kind of was my point as well.
If you are a good author, sure you can probably write a book faster with AI - maybe even faster than without using it.
But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.
I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI.
Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.
> I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong
While in general it's true, reality can be different. I'm using GPT-4 for coding thing that I don't know much about. I have only ideas what I want, but not how exactly to code it. Simple offloading to AI works fine. I can learn libraries and APIs it's using, but that isn't my goal. I want the working product. This semi-automated approach saves a lot of time.
That was just a practical example. We can argue that in some cases it doesn't work. Yes, and may never work. But there is an area where it works. And this area at least is not going to shrink.
Animation is probably less capital-intensive than live-action film-making, but more labor-intensive given the need to care for each frame. But so long as you have an abundance of time, you can make a movie on your own.
Surprisingly, you also don't need to draw very well to animate. (But it will help a lot if you can.) There are crude works of animation that still found success (maybe more observable in the US than Japan), like South Park and Don Hertzfeldt's works. These examples might even illustrate that audiences care more about the writing than the drawings.
The tricky part may be finding an audience. There's so much content on the web, that it may still help to exhibit works in human-curated forums like film festivals. Somehow, then-student Don Hertzfeldt found his way into Cannes, where he probably gained much more exposure. Later, Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead fame) supported other animators find exposure by hosting The Animation Show (last held in 2008).
There are plenty of film festivals showcasing animation today, shorts and feature-length, but I wonder which ones would be most effective. The dream of "breaking in" with a film festival screening has allured many aspiring film-makers, to the extent that scammers even start their own film festivals for the sake of collecting exorbitant entry fees (which doesn't guarantee being showcased at the festival). With film-makers having to pay entry fees for numerous festivals to increase chances of finding the right audience, the "marketing" fee can become more expensive than an indie production itself.
I wonder how solo or skeleton-crew animators would "break in" and find an audience today.
I wonder what he’s seen that makes him think that. I love playing with Midjourney, but if you want it to create a specific thing, you’re out of luck. I can see AI getting you somewhere, but I can’t see it coming up with a consistent, good quality result.
It's interesting that Disney today almost the entire profits of the company come from the parks division (which also includes cruises, resorts and "experiences"). The media division by itself is in a massive war for eyeballs with tons of other streaming competitors, all of whom are probably over-investing in content relative to what consumers can support.
One interesting possibility is that maybe the business model of media companies in the 21st century will become content as a loss leader for the purpose of providing valuable IP to amusement parks. Certainly seems like a similar thing is happening with Comcast with their massive expansion of Universal parks.
That is nuts. Queue up Space Balls: "MERCHANDISING!"
Well now though, I see a video game I never heard of "Dungeon Fighter Online". Here's one of the recent reviews from the Steam Store:
"I spent $45,000 on a relentless journey into the heart of darkness with Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO), a 2D beat-em-up game that has garnered both fervent enthusiasts and critical skeptics,..."
Dungeon fighter is one of the most valuable media IPs ever, beat a ton of video games player count and revenue records.
It's one of the things that put tencent on the map.
Something north of $20 billion in revenue.
Just not known in the US.
This is a fair point, but as of their most recent financials merchandise (excluding merchandise sold inside the parks) only made up $5bn of the $28bn in the "Parks, Experiences and Product" category. By contrast park admissions was $8bn, resorts was $6bn and food/merchandise sold in the parks was $6bn.
So IMO this is a departure from the classic merchandise based strategy. It seems pretty clear that the theme parks more so than the products are the major profit centers today.
Change some distribution models and mediums of distribution, and it's the same cycle between content, brand, and customer eyeballs.
Which makes sense, as the key observation was: brands and characters are more valuable than content, but content creates and sustains them.
And you can afford more content if you have more channels to monetize it through. Which is the same observation Google made with respect to advertising integration, albeit just buying platforms instead of works.
Amusement parks are part of the inefficient monetization Hollywood is built around. The video games that make the most money give gameplay away for free too, but the difference is you can sell infinite skins and pay only 30% to assholes like Apple. It remains to be seen if even that cost will remain.
Disney lost not due to streaming, but due to its failed interactive division.
This is if course highly subjective, but for all this investment in content I, as a consumer, seem to find less and less content I like. Maybe it's just because I'm not part of the demographics that Hollywood cares about any more, but I personally would like to get much more "good" content.
Wild guess. SEC Q1 Reporting Deadline is Jan 16th. Share prices have been flat or slightly down on a year over year basis for many companies. They're all trying to hedge the bad news?
The budget cycle for 2024 has likely finished so orgs are moving to execute on 2024 plans.
Executives can finalize things a bit more easily when folks out of the office as the day to day a bit slower. HR / Acctg / IT also usually like doing a one off project in these spots - usually a smaller group is in loop on these things.
The week between Christmas and New Years for the quiet meetings and week after for plans to be finished up.
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Once again the workers pay the price for bad leadership while the leadership largely continues to simply collect large paychecks for that bad execution. It's no different to the layoffs for Google Assistant. Do you think the average IC determines the outcome of Pixar (or Google) projects?
Disney's content strategy has generally been abysmal. Milking Star Wars IP with content that varies between mid and bad for the most part. Marvel really fell off post-Avengers. Pixar once made some of the great movies period, animated or otherwise.
Creative ventures can't be reduced to a formula. Corporate America seeks to cut costs and reduce their business plan to a formula.
How many times do people need to see this before they develop class consciousness?
To be fair, Bob Chapek also lost his job over how he managed Disney. I'm not sure if he actually dropped the ball, or if Iger left while things were good, but the pipeline was about to run dry.
I imagine it is mostly Iger leaving while things were good.
Disney was never going to be able to retain the amount of people’s time it had in previous decades with the competition from other forms of entertaining, from video games to YouTube to Instagram to TikTok to WhatsApp and even to sites like Reddit/HN.
I think they tried to battle this by saturating the market with their IP and that goose is done laying eggs, so I am assuming they will lean on sports gambling now as long as they have ESPN.
Profitability is the new target in 2024. Not losing so much money on useless underperforming movies. Let's go through the recent Pixar flops in the years before since 2020.
Onward (2020) - Budget: $200 million
- Box Office: $142 million (Loss)
Soul (2020) - Budget: $150 million
- Box Office: $121 million (Loss)
Luca (2021) - Budget: >$100+ million
- Box Office: $49.8 million (Loss)
Turning Red (2022) - Budget: $175 million
- Box Office: $20.1 million (Loss)
Lightyear (2022) - Budget: $200 million
- Box Office: $226.4 million (Tiny profit)
Apart from Elemental (2023) which was highly successful, there seems to be a string of more box office failures from Pixar recently and it being turned into a high cost factory. Disney saw the same and decided to let 20% from Pixar go.
I think Onward (edit: maybe not, see comment below) and Lightyear were bona fide misses, but Soul, Luca and Turning Red were all released straight to D+ during the pandemic, weren't they? You can't judge their performance without internal Disney metrics then?
I'm in the camp that believes Pixar quality has fallen, and I'm not surprised at the recent losses (COVID or not).
Onward -- what a mess. The movie about walking pants. I could feel the churn of many story drafts they went through. It was a cool world and character designs, but the overall story just didn't land.
Soul -- full of emotion and beautiful, but didn't quite nail it. The pre-birth world has echoes of Inside Out, but not nearly as well-conveyed. In fact, the abstract art representations were a bit on the nose, and a rare case where I was too aware that these were ideations from the Pixar story team in the Pixar story room. Overall it had many wonderful sequences. But the main character journey was kind of odd. Joe loved music and it certainly seemed to be his source of happiness. But his lesson was that music wasn't necessarily his purpose and he should focus more on what makes him happy. ?
Luca -- adorable, but unambitious. The undersea world was so empty!
Turning Red -- ugh. What exactly was the character development? She is announced in the very first sequence as a confident individualist, and then her panda-journey teaches her to be... a confident individualist. Did no one notice this? Also, I'm bothered by the hubris of a first-time writer-director making the main character (and locale, and the time period) exactly themselves. I suppose if you need your stories to be biographical you can get away with it once, but it's poor form IMHO.
> It was about a son reconnecting with his father...and his brother.
Yes, of course. But it (IMHO) had an opposite effect, where instead of strengthening the emotional impact of this is his dad, the character was reduced to comedy and pantomime (walking the wrong way, etc). Compare with the masterful non-verbal performance of Wall-E and Eve, for example. I mean, there's no way around the fact that the dad only being re-embodied from the waist down, was meant to be funny and silly. Instead of one last adventure between father and son, and showing us the strong bond that the child wanted to experience one last time, they showed us a running gag of wrangling a pair of pants.
When Onward was in theaters COVID had already massively tanked attendance.
Soul, Luca, and Turning Red only had box office releases in countries that did not have Disney+, except possibly for very limited US releases (e.g., Luca had a theatrical release for 1 week in a single US theater).
In the countries where they did get a normal theatrical release if you compare them with Earlier big Pixar hits, they performed comparably.
If any one of them had been a 2019 movie instead of a 20222-2022 movie it would have easily made at least twice its budget and probably more.
> So your imaginary grace period for covid effects extends until when, end of 2022 it seems like?
Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were not released in theaters in North America except for one week at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for Luca and and one day there for Turning Red. They only got international theatrical runs, and then only in countries that did not have Disney+.
Maybe Disney lied when they said they cited COVID as the reason for cancelling the domestic and most of the international theatrical releases of those movies, but the fact remains that those releases were cancelled.
Soul only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Luca only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
Turning Red only was in theaters in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Compare to the last Pixar movie whose theater run occurred entirely before COVID. That was Toy Story 4, and here are the countries it was in that Turning Red was not in: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
In the countries that both Toy Story 4 and Turning Red had theatrical releases in Toy Story 4 made $26 million and Turning Red made $11 million. If we assume the performance would have been similar had Turning Red been released in those other countries that comes out to about $420 million, which is indeed easily twice its budget just as I had speculated. Probably higher, but to get a more refined estimate I'd need to look at the countries it was in and see how their theater performance in general was compared to pre and post COVID.
For Luca it had $39 million in the countries it had in common with Toy Story 4. Toy Story 4 had $70 million in those countries. Assuming the same ratio if Luca had been in the other countries Toy Story 4 was in, that gives Luca a projected $560 million.
> Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?
It was the second most streamed movie in 2022 (Encanto was #1), which suggests of the theories that (1) people didn't watch it in theaters because they didn't want to watch it, or (2) people didn't watch it in theaters because it was not in theaters, the latter is much more likely. (BTW, Luca was the most streamed movie in 2021).
> It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney
That's a defensible argument in general (and since you comment a few have made that general argument), but not as an explanation for why movies that weren't in theaters didn't make a lot of money in theaters.
I would be careful about Hollywood loss numbers. Disney is in it for the merch. That said, I wonder how those movies stack up to older greats like Cars, Toy Story, or Monsters Inc. They are only true failures if they fail to sell toys. Which considering I’ve never seen merch for any of these movies on the street tells me they probably have failed.
I’m near certain they fail compared against the original Pixar movies. Pixar used to make surefire films for the whole family. Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.
> Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.
Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.
I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.
What happened to Pixar? Their storytelling used to be second to none. But most of their latest films have been so lacking that I haven’t even bothered to watch the last few. In fact, the last one I saw was Onward on the very day the theaters closed down for the pandemic. It was… okay. A bit of a disappointment. They have lost something special they used to have.
Re: Lightyear, a $226.4M box office return on a $200M production budget isn't even close to being in profit, tiny or otherwise. For one thing, a film's marketing budget isn't included in the production budget figure and in this case was probably $100M+ itself. Secondly, Disney do not receive 100% of the box office take. After the distributor's cut, it's probably closer to 50%. Films of this type need to make maybe 3 times their budget at the box office to break even, making Lightyear a spectacular flop.
Surely "Box Office" isn't the best metric to look at in any of those years? I get that it's hard to figure out what the better metric is, but are we all meant to pretend that theater ticket purchases are the primary driver of revenue for movie releases nowadays, even though it's obvious that can't possibly be true?
There is a valid question on how valuable streaming is long term. The theory that we would make content once and lock in profits forever seems dubious if everyone competes on last weeks content. Non zero interest rates also pull in profitability horizons by decades.
I agree! It seems super difficult to figure out whether a movie (or literally any media) is financially successful now.
But I don't think that's a good reason to give credence to a metric that strikes me as being incredibly obsolete. A bad metric is a bad metric even if it's unclear what metric to replace it with.
“Note: Budget numbers for movies can be both difficult to find and unreliable. Studios often try to keep the information secret and will use accounting tricks to inflate or reduce announced budgets.”
If Disney was really losing that much money repeatedly, they would stop making movies. And yet they don’t stop, but they do keep making it look like they’re not very profitable. Why?
I mean, these numbers are almost dishonesty misleading when looking in a vacuum. Onward released March 6th 2020. It was receiving mid reviews but it was very much on par to st least break even if theatres stayed open for more than 2 weeks.And Soul IMO is one of Pixar's greats completely screwed by circumstance, released in June to Disney+. I'm surprised it even crossed 100m to be honest.
I'm not in charge of business, but the curve of box office seemed to rise back with the waning of the pandemic. Even for the critically panned Lightyear, so it's not like the better movies did better. It's no secret that streaming services make nowhere near the revenue of a theatrical release, but Disney aggressively shifted so it could get its handle in as 2nd in the streaming wars. I figure that unprofitable movies were a price to pay there.
With those numbers, Lightyear was definitely not profitable. Published budgets usually don't include the marketing budget, which is usually the same or more than the production budget. Even if you're skimping on marketing it's still going to be at least equal to half the production budget.
Additionally, theaters take a cut of the box office revenue. Domestically they usually take about half, internationally the average is about 60%.
Edit: Looking at the numbers, Elemental probably only broke even or made a slight profit.
Lightyear wasn't a success either when you consider marketing costs, which apparently makes it where you need 1.5x the budget just to break even, or so I've read.
Normally yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if marketing budgets were slashed with the pandemic as well. So all our usual rule if thumbs are out of whack.
To elaborate on some of the items others have mention, here are head counts for Pixar's most recent film, Elemental, based on the credits on IMDB:
1 director
3 writers
20 voice actors
5 producers
1 music composer
2 cinematographers
12 editing
5 casting
1 production designer
2 art directors
2 production managers
14 art department
42 sound department
85 visual effects
68 animation
46 music
1 continuity
77 additional crew
That's 387 people. These kinds of movies take years to produce (7 for Elemental), although not everyone works on them full time during the full length of production.
Just curious, what distinguishes a "visual effects" staff member from an "animation" staff member when making an animation?
Are "animators" doing the original character/flow design work and then visual effects people punch up backgrounds/lighting/textures etc. and doing the rendering?
Oh I disagree, Luca is great! But of course nobody saw it in the theater, approximately everyone who watches Pixar movies has a Disney+ subscription...
Turning Red v Wish Dragon are both kindof Asian-oriented kids movies with pretty decent messages and "mature" topics if you watch them with an adult mindset. Those both kindof felt "cash grabby" but I didn't feel like I wanted my time back after watching them.
Luca (to me) was just so dull I barely remember the plot or message.
Encanto (v Puss in Boots Last Wish) both had a lot of "Soul" (Soul, and Inside Out being other really good animated movies), and I'd happily watch any of them again.
afaik it's also related to how disney treats pixar movies differently. Wasn't Soul & others first movies released exclusively/or with priority on disney+? To my knowledge they'll reverse this in 2024, will see how this pans out
If I understand what I read recently about movie budgets, for big films like these they need to make roughly double that headline budget to break even. The budget does not include distribution and marketing. So even Lightyear was actually a loss
edit: (and incidentally Lightyear is the only one of these I've seen. I've got 3 kids and we used to love Pixar films but these days.. meh. Even though we've since had the third so still should be the same demographic).
Not really. If you include the costs of marketing and distribution, a film needs to gross about twice its "budget" to break even. Furthermore, this rule of thumb only applies to US gross, where studios get much more of the actual ticket price (75% iirc) than overseas. In some markets, India for example, American studios get about 15% of the actual ticket-price gross.
To break even at the box office, you need to make at least 2.5x your production budget (so $500M for Lightyear). It's very unlikely that they were able to close the gap with streaming - the movie lost a ton of money.
The 2.5x multiple is because the production budget doesn't include marketing costs (which can easily be as high as the production budget) as well as the fact that they only get a percentage of the box office (the movie theaters need to live too). This is especially true for the non US box office, where the percentage going back to the studio is lower than in the US
There are quite a few numbers on the breakeven point but a quick google says it’s usually 2.5x-3x the budget - due to marketing cost and distribution fees.
> While sources at the company said the layoffs would be significant and as high as 20% — or reductions that would see Pixar’s team of 1,300 dropped to less than 1,000 over the coming months — Pixar says those numbers are too high. Rather, the studio said the number of impacted employees is still being determined due to factors like production schedules and staffing for future greenlit films.
There is an "or" betwen that, as there is no definitive source, they said that one source said the layoffs would be up to 20% and another source said, that Pixar's team would drop below 1000. But Pixar denies, that the layoffs are this high.
I think Star Wars was fumbled, but she also produced/exec-produced ET, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, The Sixth Sense, Twister, War of the Worlds, Back to the Future, Lincoln, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gremlins, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seabiscuit, Shindler's List, The Color Purple, The Goonies, The Land Before Time and much more.
I don't think you can have a track record like that and be bad. There's something else going on.
This is a post about Pixar, and you're calling for Kathleen Kennedy (who has nothing to do with Pixar) to be fired? You may not like them, but the Star Wars projects she produced made a ton of money. The layoffs aren't because of her.
I'm not sure I buy that being a good producer translates into being a good CEO. When I read your first sentence my thought is not "well she must be a good CEO then" but is instead "wow I hope she goes back to producing, these are some all-time greats".
That resume falls off a lot towards the end. Quoting Abe Simpson,
> I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it anymore and what's it seems weird and scary. It'll happen to you!
Sure, but he wouldn't keep her around if she was a bad producer.
Producers don't write or direct. They produce. And her Star Wars movies, even though not creatively great, made a ton of money – way more than Disney put in. She did her part of the job.
(And the reason the money argument is relevant here is because OP brought her up out of nowhere on a thread about layoffs at a separate entity)
Kathleen Kennedy might as well be the boogeyman with how she's uselessly vilified. She's just at the head of a one-trick poney: Star Wars is not an infinite canvas. It's this very narrow thing, that's not exceedingly popular outside North America. And do you honestly believe the CEO of Disney does not review every single major move she makes already?
She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content. Star Wars itself is stretched out.
I have no idea who is personally responsible, but the idea that you can only tell stories about boring Jedi with no personality and Tatooine is just a massive failure of imagination.
There's a whole rich universe of EU novels exploring a wide variety of stories. Timothy Zahn wrote an Ocean's Eleven heist story in "Scoundrels". Andor was universally praised, partly because it's doing something completely different. Even the currently ongoing High Republic books are pretty good and nothing like the movies. Star Wars is a whole science fiction galaxy, it's as big or small as a writer wants it to be.
But Disney plans to keep dropping crapola at regular intervals with their old tired characters because it worked in past. I think there is partial blame to audience also who kept Disney afloat for so long despite their atrocious content.
The Star Wars Extended Universe used to be massive. I bet if you just adapted some of the more popular novels they could continue making a lot of money. The problem is that in that case they'd be targeting the Star Wars fandom rather than throwing them under the bus to court as broad of an audience as possible.
The franchise just can't keep reinventing itself to target every demographic. They need to cater to existing fans.
Speaking of the Extended Universe, everyone should watch the trailers of Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), especially Kathleen Kennedy and anyone at Disney working on Star Wars content.
My understanding is this universe began as fan fiction and these trailers about an MMO are probably the most interesting Star Wars films since first two trilogies.
The MMO is over ten years old, but the trailers are so celebrated that they re-released them in 4K two years ago. In a matter of minutes, they all manage to tell a better story, with more compelling characters and dialogue, than anything Disney has put out.
Kathleen Kennedy might as well be the boogeyman with how she's uselessly vilified.
So you think Disney way overpaid?
She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content.
The stupid Vespa scooter stuff in the Boba Fett series? Hers. Lots of the stupid stuff in Disney Star Wars is hers. The early Jedi stuff in the comics no one liked? Instigated by her.
Hahaha the only specific example you have is a single prop? Kathleen hasn’t even directed any Star Wars movies, she’s a producer. She was one of, what, 14 producers on Boba Fett? Whatever creative credit you’re giving her credit for, if it’s even true, was executed, directed, acted, filmed, and approved by many other people. This feels like some kind of bogus internet meme talking point. (Edit: aha! I see that it really is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens#F...)
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
Hahaha the only specific example you have is a single prop?
Nope. Dig into it. There's TONS of meddling she did that turned out to be cringe.
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
This absolutely doesn't track with people wishing for the prequel days again. Yes, the prequels were disappointing, but still we didn't imagine how much worse it could be.
You honestly believe that the prequels are worse than the sequels?? There’s an argument to be made for Rise, but those other two films are Citizen Kane compared to the trash that are the prequels.
You honestly believe that the prequels are worse than the sequels??
I think you reversed that.
I think they're about equal levels of bad. To be fair, the prequels are "stiffer" than the sequels. However, the bad writing of the sequels severely overall damages the lore, while the bad writing of the prequels somehow manages to overall improve it.
>She's just at the head of a one-trick poney: Star Wars is not an infinite canvas. It's this very narrow thing, that's not exceedingly popular outside North America.
You're minimising her reach and impact on the industry, for better or worse.
Dial of Destiny was her last film. As for Star Wars, it's huge across the anglosphere and even in countries where English isn't spoken. I've personally queued for hours in Japan to get tickets.
Look I'm not denying anything you're saying, but I'm arguing against the idea that this woman at the head of Star Wars is the problem! If only she was fired!
That Kathleen Kennedy is in the room for all the important decisions about Spielberg and Lucas' best films in the 80s and 90s is outside the scope of this insane idea that somehow firing her will fix Star Wars. Star Wars itself is the problem. It was underplayed in the early 90s, and is massively overplayed now.
And I should have been clearer about its global reach. Star Wars is not this hallowed franchise outside the anglosphere, and is actually not particularly popular in China.
> that's not exceedingly popular outside North America
You definitely don't mean Europe so I guess that is just code for China? It is true these days that movies have to do well in the world's second biggest market, but there is a lot of box office skim combined with fraud and low ticket prices that don't make the market that lucrative.
Are China, North America, and Europe the only places in the world?
I live in Vietnam. Population 100 million. More than any country in Europe. It is not popular here. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia -- population 660 million -- from what I can tell.
I mean, it is popular in the way any big budget, CGI spectacular is popular. But it's not this big cultural thing it is in the US or Europe. Nobody cares in the slightest what the next Star Wars movie will be about or how the IP is doing. They think of Rogue One in the same way they think of Train to Busan. A fun enough foreign movie they watched that one time a few years ago.
The vast majority of my friends and family have never seen any of the original trilogy or even most of the prequels. They definitely aren't watching any of the Disney+ series, since it says "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region".
Very few IPs are truly universal in a way that strongly resonates across all cultures. That's a really high bar that is seldom cleared.
Disney is likely not focusing on Southeast Asia because, despite of the population, box office receipts and licensing deals must be fairly low in dollar terms. Most companies would rather be extremely successful in China, North America and Europe alone than be mildly successful everywhere, so content is optimized for these regions.
> Nobody cares in the slightest what the next Star Wars movie will be about or how the IP is doing.
Of course nobody cares about how the IP is doing. That is for the corporation to worry about.
On the other hand people, individualy, will make up their mind about buying a ticket or not. There are many different things which go into that decision, but one of those is how much they enjoyed the earlier movies in the franchise.
Caring about the IP is the forest. And individuals making a decision to go to the cinema to watch the new star wars thing or doing literally anything else with their free time are the trees which make the forest.
Agree. As asian in US I once told my colleague in office "What's the big deal about Star wars? Isn't it little clownish with funny looking characters spouting cheesy dialogues." And he was stunned into silence. Apparently big fan of star wars with all paraphernalia in his home office.
There was nothing like Star Wars when it appeared. I watched it outside the US and remember being absolutely blown away.
My kid doesn't care about Star Wars nearly as much as I do, obviously - but the big thing about it are the memories from when I first watched it. It would be great to see a new Star Wars movie that can engage kids today in the same way it engaged us so many years ago.
Also, have in mind that a lot of old blockbuster movies can look silly today (Sound of Music is one I watched recently), but you have to appreciate them with the proper time period context.
Doesn't that make sense though? Most Gen Xers in China grew up with Monkey King from Taiwan, not Star Wars from America. Japan has its own culture that has largely invaded America rather than the other way around, Korea is starting to do the same.
Europeans are completely different. My German co-worker (well, when I was working in China) reminisced about the Original Battle Star Galactica, which was featured as a movie for his East German market. Star Wars of course, was popular, it helped that Lucas cast a lot of stars from the UK.
Isn't it little clownish with funny looking characters spouting cheesy dialogues.
A lot of Asian pop movies and shows are exactly this. Child of Korean immigrants here, married to a Chinese wife. Lots of stupid fun that plays in one culture is just a non-sequitur in another.
It makes perfect sense. The only exposure China had to Star Wars when it came out, were bootleg comics where they drew the Star Destroyers as Space Battleship Yamato.
I can tell you it is exceedingly popular in Hungary. I have no reason to believe it is not similarly exceedingly popular elsewhere.
> Star Wars itself is stretched out.
It is now. Franchises need nurturing to remain valuable.
The biggest crime they commited is that they did not employ the same screenwriter for all 3 of the sequels. When you are making a trilogy, and you know that you are making a trilogy, you better write the complete arch as a consistent whole and then find the 3 separate sub arches in that.
Instead of that what we got is 2 different teams subverting each other’s ideas and basically messaging to each other. (And the message was that “your ideas are baaad”) It was as if watching someone build a sand castle, someone else comming along kicking it down starting to build a different one, and then the first person returning and kicking the second sandcastle down to build a third.
“Yes, and…” is not just the way to do good improv, but also the way to build good movies built on each other.
Reading Characters and Viewpoint by Orson S. Card and one of the main thing is that characters should answer these three points:
* Why should I care?
* Why is he doing that?
* What is happening?
IMO, most movies focus on the last one and not on the two first. They expect us to believe the answer for the first is our love for the universe and the second is "heroes good, villains bad". Which makes for a very bland story. I watched The Marvels and the most interesting thing was the sound in the theater (Dolby Audio). But I've done an all-nighter for Andor and watched it again the day after because:
1. Everyone had serious motivations which you discover during the show.
2. It was not a fairy tale
3. The story was clear and beautifylly put together.
These days, I prefer having my own curated collection that I can rewatch every now and then and add the few good things that come each year.
I don't think it can be on any one person. The CGI in some of these latest marvel movies (looking at you, Multiverse of Madness and Wakanda Forever) looks about as good as what I see when I play my PS5 which isn't terrible, but it looks cheap and lacks physical weight you normally associate with strong acting. You don't get that kind of product without the entire pipeline fouling up and then getting pushed out overtime rather than going with delays + reshoots. Add on to this that, for instance, the creators of Multiverse of Madness weren't even aware of the plot of the Scarlet Witch and allegedly it went over the same ground as her TV show (not that I've seen it), so it seems a lot more like studio dysfunction. I've got to imagine the problem is much, much larger than just one producer—one who has been attached to some of the largest Spielberg movies of the 20th century like ET and Jurassic Park.
Anyway, I'd think Kevin Fiege is far more closely tied to the decision making that appears to be hurting them right now—occasionally princess or Pixar movies miss, but they've sunk a lot of money into MCU movies that were not popular among their own fanbase, mostly due to his planning and, as I understand it from loyal fans, a lack of beloved characters returning.
> You don't get that kind of product without the entire pipeline fouling up and then getting pushed out overtime rather than going with delays + reshoots
I have also done poor quality work before. It’s always managements fault for prioritizing speedy crap to meet some internal goal instead of prioritizing the end product.
Managers need to be judged on customer satisfaction not internal OKRs and metrics.
Idk, I guess Lightyear is the most critically panned. But Pixar's worst is any other animation studio's mid.
Elemental is one of the biggest whiplashes I've seen in animation. I didn't particularly care for it, but it may be like Turning Red where I simply wasn't the target audience. I don't want creatives to be punished for not trying to keep it safe and unoffensive to everyone.
I thought Elemental and Turning Red were very well done story wise (Romeo/Juliet, teen angst), they are worth multiple watches on Disney+. Encanto (Disney, but not Pixar) was brilliant, it is too bad it didn't get the theater release it deserved because of COVID.
I get not being in the audience for a film. I felt like that about all the Star Wars prequels, and I spent my pre-10s on the original trilogy. I couldn't tell you what is wrong about sequels, even if they were done well I probably wouldn't be in the audience for them anymore.
I think the target audience is kids and their parents. As a parent of young children, I really enjoyed both Turning Red and Elemental, as did my kids.
It isn't easy to make movies that kids like and want to watch but parents don't mind watching multiple times (because that's how kids do movies... multiple times)
I'm not sure I still buy that. Super Mario was great. I think the Troll movies are very well done and entertaining. Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Rio, Klaus, Iron Giant, and Studio Ghibli films are pretty good and competitive to the low-mid tier Pixar.
Sure, but she also did ET, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, The Sixth Sense, Twister, War of the Worlds, Back to the Future, Lincoln, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gremlins, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seabiscuit, Shindler's List, The Color Purple, The Goonies, The Land Before Time and much more.
The five Star Wars movies she oversaw from 2015-2019 made $5.92 billion at the box office, but let me know if that's not enough money for her to be considered successful.
You mean the ones that are widely panned, sold no merchandise, and poisoned the franchise? Those movies? I wonder about the people who defend those movies, I really do.
> turning money-printing machines into dust overnight.
What are you referring to? I just looked at the 5 Star Wars movies she has producer credits on, via Wikipedia, and not one of them demonstrates losses. The profits are in the billions and only one of the 5 movies, Solo, did less than a billion at the box office.
And why are you conveniently forgetting Jar Jar Binks and blaming someone else? Lucas was making trash long before Disney got involved. I thought Force Awakens was better done than most of the franchise up to that point.
I'm not so sure – I don't think it'll impact it positively or negatively. Personally, at least, it's never impacted my willingness to watch a movie. Seven Samurai is an all Japanese cast, but it's still my favorite movie of all time.
I mentioned it in another thread but this is employers resetting employee expectations. Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.
> Lay off a percentage and work the rest harder, make people RTO, etc.
There is little to no evidence of this. There is a lot of evidence of layoffs, particularly across-the-board ones, costing shareholders [1]. Companies that manage little to no laying off outperform their competitors and are rewarded in the capital markets.
People aren't cattle for you to get rid of. I'm tired of layoffs being a first resort rather than a last resort for companies. I'd like to see something where C-suite executives are required to resign if undergoing layoffs.
Ultimately it’s bad management that usually leads to layoffs (barring extreme cases like the product your company makes being banned, for instance), it makes sense that leadership should be some of the first heads to roll.
Those comments are totally consistent! If you hadn't hired X employees in the first place, you wouldn't be laying them off now. And, conversely, if you can afford to lay them off now, you could have afforded not to hire them earlier.
Apart from avoiding layoffs, hiring less quickly also lets you be more intentional about quality and culture. How can you expect any real continuity in your culture if like 30%–50% of your engineers are new in any given year?
Companies shouldn’t overhire and also shouldn’t do layoffs. Why is this some hot take.
In 2018 people were advocating against bloat. Now they’re advocating against poor treatment of employees. Both are valid. In 2018, people were right, and the price of bloat is being paid by employees now.
Companies can start new products instead of laying people off. Companies constantly start new things, and can internally allocate resources. Google has open positions for hire right now; they just laid off 1K people.
Layoffs ruin human lives. Suicides happen. Breakups happen, with and without kids. Homes are defaulted on. Depression is almost a certainty. If the choice is between layoffs and total company ruin, okay, they’re necessary. If the layoffs are because you don’t want to try fixing anything else with the company first, you ought to be the first one fired.
Maybe in 1990s style layoffs with 2 weeks severance. Tech companies doing layoffs today are giving people 3-6-sometimes even 12 months of severance of benefits! If you can’t figure out a new job with that, it’s on you.
At the very least, layoffs should be seen as an indication of failure. Sundar Pichai should not be making as much money as he is with the amount of layoffs they did
The impotent instinct to go after top management is silly. How management performs is between them and the shareholders. The only reason to fire management is if someone else could make the shareholders more money.
If you don't think it should be legal to lay people off, then make layoffs illegal. Doing it through some weird requirement to spite management is just going to result in bizarre distortive effects in their behavior.
I think stuff like this comes from a low level caveman jealousy instinct, where management is seen as a person to envy, while shareholders are ignored as some kind of far off impersonal force.
Woah there. That’s a pretty intense opinion with some pretty harsh language.
Caveman jealous instinct? Eek. How management performs is between the management and the managed. Profit is not law, it’s not a god given right. Profit is a side affect from employees generating it. If you lay people off in a poor way, you can be chastised the same way a child gets chastised for cutting in line. Our society has an obligation to ensure everyone behaves in a pro-societal manner. Not a profitable manner. We shouldn’t need government laws to tell people to treat others well.
Oh and FWIW most companies that perform layoffs tend to not see positive outcomes for the shareholders, so you’d think they’d respond if they actually acted uniformly and rationally about shareholder value.
> this is employers resetting employee expectations.
Many of these companies transitioned to remote work at the same time they did massive hiring sprees. Many of these new hires were getting their first taste of remote work in companies that were doing their first trial of remote work, all while a massive influx of new employees and initiatives introduced more chaos.
Predictably, a lot of this chaos happening all at once wasn’t a good environment for those new employees, especially those learning how to work remote for the first time.
There’s definitely a resetting going on. Many companies are reversing everything all at once in an attempt to get back to some of the stability they had before COVID.
I think we’ll see more remote work opportunities, but companies learned their lesson that throwing everyone into remote all at once doesn’t work. Remote isn’t for everyone.
Do layoffs actually motivate workers though? I feel like from the people I've spoken to that have experienced losing coworkers to layoffs, they just kind of disconnect.
I don’t think it’s about motivation. I thinks it is about saying employees have been making too much noise past couple years with their union talk, WFH, pay inequality, etc so this is going to be the year of fear for your job.
I know nothing about economics but I wonder if it’s time to ease up on the interest rates. Inflation might not be due to too much money in the system but rather supply simply drying up as China economy circles the drain. Maybe it’s a good idea to let money be cheap again so people could quickly set up alternative non-China suppliers to relieve the supply pressure. But then again I know anything about economics so add salt as required.
The economy is hot. Money is being allocated away from the jobs that powered that last decade’s tech boom; we’re feeling that in Silicon Valley. (It doesn’t help how expensive commodity talent is in the Bay Area. Unless you’re doing AI or something tremendously collaborative, you’ve probably already built the systems that enable your team to phone in from anywhere.)
The point is that isn’t what’s happening. From the workers’ perspective it’s a convenient narrative.
The truth is, as usual, messier: constrained executives are confronted with targets they don’t know how to meet, and so start shoving round pegs into square holes.
Sure. Yes. Wealth insulates. Firing the CEO before a lay-off is stupid; it means every hire is a job risk. If we want that, Europe has it better figured; socialise the risk of unemployment.
> According to insiders, the Pixar layoffs include headcount that was hired for Disney+ — hires Disney pushed on Pixar to produce for its streaming division, which hasn’t yet turned a profit.
Boom. On one hand, seems like a trend, Google, Twitch, Amazon, etc... Now Pixar.
But on other hand, it seems like each case is just isolated issues to each company. It isn't a general tech downturn because Disney isn't making good movies. It isn't a general tech downturn because less people are watching Twitch.
