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The story was told last May Pixar Animation Studios, owned by Disney, was affected dismissed of approximately 14 percent of the workforce. 175 employees were laid off, largely due to industry downsizing and spending cuts streaming.
One of the main casualties of those layoffs were the many TV projects Pixar initially planned for Disney+. One that has endured and will soon hit the screen is ‘Dream Productions’, a spin-off of ‘Inside out.” But then as Pixar creatively Mike Jones explained that his show was threatened several times. Not only that, ‘Dream Productions’ may be one of the last Pixar projects to focus on streaming on Disney+.
“I don’t know if we’ll do more streaming after this, because we’ve pulled 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, Pixar can be stretched thin and require resources for its tentpole features, and “Dream Productions” often drew the short straw.
“Even though it’s a pretty big company, because it spends so much time on these films, it can’t afford to do too many of them at once,” Jones said. “You can really only concentrate on one or two things. And so when Disney led us to streaming, it suddenly added something else. So we were kind of an underdog, they always threatened to shut us down again and again.”
Jones, a former executive editor of IndieWire, described “Dream Productions” as an 82-minute film told in four episodes, but with a much smaller budget than the typical Pixar film. film.
“We were kind of a weird little indie film, almost inside Pixar,” he said.
Jones said it took three and a half years to put “Dream Productions” together, and during that time they had “two very close calls” where the show was almost shut down mid-production. He said everyone at Pixar felt the impact of the “Netflix correction”, in which studios started prioritizing profits instead of chasing subscribers and scale, and that meant diverting resources from its streaming project elsewhere.
“Everyone felt that – We felt that – but also like every Pixar movie is on fire, every movie I’ve been involved in – every movie I’m not even involved in – is going to get to a point where we’ve been producing this thing for two years or three years and suddenly it works no more,” Jones said. ‘Go ahead, how come it doesn’t work? How come we are in such trouble here?”
Much of Jones’ “Dream Productions” team would move on to projects like “Elemental” and “Inside Out 2” to help put out some of those fires.
“That’s happened a few times,” he said. “And so we had all our people go to other movies that were in trouble and pray and hope that we would get them back. And we would eventually do that, and then we try to produce quickly.”
“Dream Productions” is part of a Pixar streaming television program that also includes “Monsters, Inc.” includes. spin-off streaming series “Monsters at Work,” and another original little baseball show in the pipeline called “Win or Lose.” Jones’ comments suggest that the priority at Pixar will always be the features, but the independent spirit still exists in shows like Jones.
“Dream Productions” premieres on Disney+ on December 11.