This past May, the storied Pixar Animation Studios, owned by Disney, was hit with layoffs of about 14 percent of its staff. 175 staffers were let go, largely a result of industry contraction and cutbacks in spending on streaming.
One of the main casualties of those layoffs were the many TV projects Pixar initially had planned for Disney+. One that endured and will soon reach the screen is “Dream Productions,” a spinoff of “Inside Out.” But as Pixar creative Mike Jones explained, his show was threatened to be shut down several times over. Not only that, “Dream Productions” may be one of the last Pixar projects to be dedicated to streaming on Disney+.
“I don’t know that we’re gonna do any more streaming after this because we took a lot of resources from the other things at Pixar,” Jones said at IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking Summit in Los Angeles on Saturday. He explained that even given Pixar’s scope, they can be stretched thin and need resources for the tentpole features, and “Dream Productions” often drew the short straw.
“While it’s a pretty major company, because it spends so much time on these movies, it can’t afford to do too much of this at once,” Jones said. “It can really only afford to focus on one or two things. And so when Disney led us to streaming, it was suddenly inserting something else in there. So we were kind of an underdog, they always threatened to shut us down over and over.”
Jones, who is a former IndieWire Executive Editor, described “Dream Productions” as essentially an 82-minute movie told in four episodes, but it had a much smaller budget than the typical Pixar film.
“We were kind of a weird little indie movie, almost inside Pixar,” he said.
Jones said “Dream Productions” took three and a half years to put together, and in that time they had “two really close calls” where the show was almost dropped mid-production. He said everyone at Pixar felt the impact of the “Netflix Correction,” in which studios started prioritizing profits rather than chasing subscribers and scale, and that meant diverting resources away from his streaming project to elsewhere.
“Everybody felt that — we felt that — but also like, every Pixar movie is on fire, every single one that I’ve been involved with — every single one that I’m even not involved — will get to a point where we have been producing this thing for two or three years and suddenly it’s not fucking working,” Jones said. “You go, how is it not working? Like how are we in such trouble here?”
Much of Jones’ “Dream Productions” team would start to shift to projects like “Elemental” and “Inside Out 2” to put out some of those fires.
“That happened a bunch of times,” he said. “And so we would let all of our people go on some other films that were in trouble and just pray and hope that we would get them back. And we would eventually, and then we quickly scramble and try to produce.”
“Dream Productions” is part of a Pixar streaming television slate that also includes the “Monsters, Inc.” spinoff streaming series “Monsters at Work,” and another original little league baseball show in the pipeline called “Win or Lose.” Jones’ comments suggest that the priority at Pixar will always be its features, but the independent spirit still exists on shows like Jones’.
“Dream Productions” premieres on Disney+ December 11.
