Disney Lays Off Pixar Employees Behind ‘Lightyear’ Movie

If you’ve been following Disney news, then you know that the company just completed 7000 job cuts as part of an effort by CEO Bob Iger to get things back on track financially.

These job cuts included a number of open positions, as well as layoffs of employees at the company, mostly in the media division. And the last round of layoffs apparently included some important people at Pixar.

According to Reuters, Disney cut 75 jobs at Pixar, including two executives behind the film Lightyear, which was released in 2022 and didn’t perform very well at the box office.

These cuts included the movie’s director Angus MacLane, who had previously worked on Toy Story 4 and Coco, as well as the film’s producer, Galyn Susman, who had been at the company since the release of Toy Story in 1995. These cuts took place on May 23rd.

If you recognize Susman’s name, it’s likely because she’s part of a rather famous Pixar story. Susman was working on Toy Story 2 as a lighting supervisor when all the files for the film were accidentally deleted by a Pixar staff member. Susman had saved a copy of the work on her home computer and using that copy, the work was able to be retrieved. Since then, Galyn Susman has been known as the woman who saved Toy Story 2.

Pixar has about 1200 employees, so the layoffs affected a relatively small portion of the company, however, they are notable due to some of the big names included. Michael Agulnek, who was the Vice President of Worldwide Publicity for Pixar since 2015, was also laid off.

©Pixar

The layoffs have now ceased, so hopefully, Disney won’t be sharing any more announcements like these for a while. We’ll keep you updated with any other news about ways that Disney plans to save money.