Pete Docter to Take Over Pixar

[Sotiris]

Q: Pixar revitalized the trend of putting a short in front of a film. But that’s something that kind of universally has gone away from the box office experience. Are there any plans to get back into shorts at this time?

Pete Docter: Nothing I can talk about today. I mean, there’s been a lot of talk back and forth, because obviously there are super fun to do and the shorts have been a great test for us of new technology and new talent. They are expensive and people don’t pay extra to see a short film in front, we’re hoping we can get back to that at some point. But nothing, no concrete plans yet.

Source: https://thedisinsider.com/2025/06/16/pe ... nd-more-1/

[Kyle]

Kind of ridiculous if he's saying they are largely not doing them because they cant monetize them. Whats so hard about attatching them to theatrical relaeses, then selling them separately, and putting them on disney plus, the same way you do any other content?

Also, I don't see them as expensive compared to full length features. You have youtubers putting out pretty good stuff for free, so why couldn't pixar do it with a small budget?

[Sotiris]

Pete Docter: We have, I think, eight films right now in varying parts of production.

Q: Those eight films, are any of those a directorial feature for you?

Pete Docter: No, not right now.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYY6MgLiBds

[Sotiris]

Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter finished strumming his miniature ukulele and folded his 6-foot-5 frame onto a couch to explain that the reason the studio behind “Toy Story” is struggling to find its next hit franchise might be him. “I got into animation because it’s easier to draw people than talk to them,” he said, seated in his office beside sculptures of characters from his directorial successes “Monsters, Inc.,” “Up” and “Inside Out.” In his early years managing Pixar’s cadre of ambitious filmmakers, the 57-year-old admitted, “I probably overindexed on, ‘Do whatever you want.’ ”

Now Pixar is pumping out hit sequels like 2024’s “Inside Out 2,” but it hasn’t had an original success since 2017’s “Coco.” Current and former employees say one of the biggest reasons is that the conflict-averse Docter encouraged new directors to make autobiographical movies that too many audience members struggled to connect with. After a series of disappointments culminating in last year’s bomb “Elio,” Docter is pushing Pixar to re-embrace the universally relatable concepts like talking toys and monsters in the closet that once made it a juggernaut. “As time’s gone on, I realized my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody,” the 36-year company veteran said.

Pixar in the past picked original movies based only on the quality of the idea. Now, part of the approval process is gauging sequel potential. When the films are complete, directors are asked to come up with stories for possible follow-ups. The studio that long prided itself on making two original movies for every sequel is now making two sequels for every original. Pixar president Jim Morris, who runs the business side of the studio, said the reason for the switch is simple: “Just so that we’re profitable enough, frankly, to persist.”

Until 2018, Pixar movies were all filtered through the taste of one man: John Lasseter. The “Toy Story” director had the loudest voice and final say among a group of directors known as the braintrust who provided feedback on every project at the company that created computer animation. Docter was the least assertive member of the braintrust, according to people who worked with him, and seemed happiest focusing on the emotional core of his own movies. Pixarians used words like “supportive,” “humble” and a “filmmaker’s filmmaker” to describe their new leader. They said he gave less direct feedback than Lasseter and seemed to never want to be the bad guy.

In late 2023, Docter gathered Pixar’s staff in their steel and glass atrium to deliver an uncharacteristically blunt message. He said they’d erred in making so many autobiographical movies and needed more broadly commercial hooks. Pixarians remembered it as his “come to Jesus” speech.

Around that time, Pixar’s leadership showed an in-progress film called “Be Fri,” short for “best friends,” to Iger and other Disney executives. Soon after, Docter canceled the project, which was based on its director’s adolescent experience with a platonic breakup. Pixar has successfully reworked many troubled movies like “Brave,” so employees were stunned when a project three years in the works with roughly 50 people involved was scrapped. “It’s super hard to make sure we’re not just settling for a film getting better, but ensuring it’s great,” said Lindsey Collins, Pixar’s senior vice president of development.

Docter said despite the mounting financial pressures, he believes Pixar will remain “useful” to Disney and the world if it simply makes great movies. “If we’re going to just crank crap out, let’s shut the doors,” he said. “I’d rather die trying to make something that we genuinely believe in.”

Source: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/pixa ... r-80c57f9d

[PatchofBlue]

It's not lost on me that in the wake Lasseter's ousting, commentators have continued to hover over Docter questioning whether a nice guy like him is MAN enough to run a company like Pixar.

But mind you, if Docter really has been peer pressured into honestly believing that the reason for Pixar's financial struggles has had anything to do with directors telling more autobiographical stories, that actually severely depletes my trust in his leadership.

Like, blame COVID. Blame the streaming wars. Blame politics. There are a million potential right answers here, but never in the history of film has "this movie just feels too personal" ever been accepted as a useful criticism.

Anyways, seeing BRAVE referred to as a "successful" reworking makes me grimace.

[BloomHunter]

Quite a mixed bag of a commentary from the company. I can get behind that Docter is being pressured by higher ups, but I also do believe some of these questionable comments that he has delivered since the announcement of Lightyear & Turning Red is that of his own.

It was obvious that a lot of their latest sequels were made to save costs and also experiment with their latest tech, but I don't believe that too much of their new IPS from the 2020s have been that much a disaster as they like to paint. I found Luca to be really charming and simplistic, and I could feel the passion for the early 2000s presented in Turning Red.

Meanwhile I barely think of the prequel for Monsters Inc, Cars sequels, Toy Story sequels, Incredibles 2, IO2 or Finding Dory as of much. They just didn't leave that much a strong impression on me as their predecessors did. So if we now are gonna see a proper Monsters Inc sequel, I have no doubts that a Ratatouille 2 is just around the corner for the next decade. Maybe that means that a Finding Nemo continuation will also happen eventually. I mean the time they announced Coco 2, I said to myself (anything is possible next) And I would have been just fine to have Coco as a standalone picture.

[PatchofBlue]

I agree that all of their sequels, at least post TS3, have made no dent on pop culture. Maybe I'm not the best judge given that I personally have not enjoyed ... any of them. But there were a few that I was at least invested in leading up to their premiere. I just never really recovered from being disappointed by "Finding Dory."

No, Pixar Doesn’t Need to Give Up ‘Autobiographical’ Stories
https://www.indiewire.com/features/comm ... 235184346/

The central crux behind the piece is how, in an attempt to remain afloat and find a hit, Pixar — under Docter, who the reporter characterizes as a very reluctant leader who only took the job out of necessity — is focusing on “universal” stories as opposed to ones that are personal to the artists behind them. This has been reported before, but the WSJ story goes deeper into how Pandemic-era releases like “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red,” as well as recent films like “Elemental” and “Elio” are seen as failures internally by a company searching for a franchise to pin its future on.

According to the story, the belief is those films failed to take off because audiences struggled to relate to them: movies like “Turning Red” and “Elemental” came from Asian directors Domee Shi and Peter Sohn, both of whom drew from their childhoods and families while making the movies; “Luca” also drew from director Enrico Casarosa’s childhood in Italy. A central scene in the piece is Docter gathering Pixar staff in late 2023 for a meeting in which he bluntly told the staff to look for more broadly commercial hooks over “autobiographical stories.”

A chief focus is the mess that was the production of “Elio,” which was heavily affected by this new mandate. After test audiences didn’t respond well to the film, the movie was heavily overhauled, and director Adrian Molina departed the project. The retooling heavily excised queer elements from the story, including a scene where the main character daydreams about raising a child with his male crush.

In a quote that generated some controversy, Docter explained that parents don’t want to have conversations with kids about queerness, and that “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.” It’s a depressing attitude, one that my co-worker Chris O’Falt wrote about in a piece unpacking the studio’s rocky history with LGBT representation. It’s also, bluntly, insane to hear coming from the man who made “Inside Out.”

The WSJ piece doesn’t really challenge whether or not this prevailing belief that “autobiographical” films are alienating to Pixar’s intended audiences is correct or not. But it’s worth noting that it skims over the fact that many of these movies didn’t get a chance in the first place. “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red,” were pandemic projects that were dumped on Disney+ without proper theatrical releases.

The films were all relatively well received (“Soul” won two Oscars!), but the circumstances of their releases prevented them from having full breakout moments. The piece also downplays the fact that “Elemental,” while not the biggest hit, ultimately grossed almost 2.5 times its budget and outperformed the 2022 “Toy Story” extension “Lightyear” — one of the studio’s biggest flops, and easily their most craven cash grab to date.

Yes, “Inside Out 2” was a big hit and sequels clearly have a place in keeping the lights on at Pixar, but the logic that impersonal equals profitable doesn’t quite track when you actually look at the citations.

[Farerb]

I agree that all of their sequels, at least post TS3, have made no dent on pop culture.

I would argue that no Pixar movie post TS3 has done it, perhaps with the exception of Inside Out.

[PatchofBlue]

I agree that all of their sequels, at least post TS3, have made no dent on pop culture.

I would argue that no Pixar movie post TS3 has done it, perhaps with the exception of Inside Out.

To my chagrin, though I might also add COCO to that list.

I single out the sequels because it's a case where they're making bank but not making an impact.

[PatchofBlue]

Pixar layoffs: Animation studio hit hard as Disney axes several hundred employees
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/p ... ngNewsSerp

Other outlets are linking this development with Hoppers not making a billion, which I guess puts it in the same class as Elemental as like this Schrödinger's flop.

If they really want to eject the people responsible, they need to start looking at the fellas in charge of Disney+

Pixar Animation Studios, despite riding high on the success of summer blockbuster "Toy Story 5," was hit particularly hard in a wave of companywide layoffs Tuesday at Disney.

A Disney spokesperson confirmed that the media conglomerate is cutting several hundred jobs across certain corporate functions. Those include job cuts at ESPN, many related to the integration of NFL Network; Disney Entertainment Television; and Disney's studios. The majority of the layoffs on the studios side are within Pixar and majority of impacts in the TV group are at National Geographic.

[Disney's Divinity]

Well, Hoppers was a flop, so...I'm not surprised. I don't expect much from Hexed, partly because it seems to be imitating PIXAR's buddy roadtrip and a lot of cringeworthy PIXAR story clichés with the other world even though PIXAR is currently sinking. Unfortunately, where WDAS was taken over by Lasseter years and years ago, they don't seem to have the independence to do what they want like PIXAR does. Much like how Strange World was forced on them to address the CEO's scandals at the time, disrupting things for them for years by taking things all the way to the floor. To some degree, WDAS' originals gradually rise based on what the previous film was (as long as it wasn't terrible)--although maybe that's less so now than in the '90s because there are so many studios muddying audiences' perception of brands, who knows--so if they only got 75 million worldwide for Strange World up to 250 million for Wish, best case scenario for their next original would be to do around 425 million, so... :/ But if it's decent--which Wish was okay, and despite my reservations, Hexed at least doesn't look fullblown gutter-level terrible like Strange World--maybe the next original could finally get closer to the 550 million area again. Then again, PIXAR doesn't seem to be rising, their originals are staying around 400 million. But I'm just going by WDAS's past. Just like TLM through to TLK or TP&TF through to Frozen.

Tbh, the Revival films felt like they were matching the '90s string in very general ways, using the '90s like a roadmap in a way, I remember a thread about that. If Hexed ends up going up a reasonable amount from Wish, then I guess look at Aladdin for the next original since it was the next in the string. Although I guess you could argue Wish and Hexed may be more like the Oliver & Company and TGMD of this scenario, so then you would look at TLM for the next film instead. Here's the thread I was thinking about. I guess Wish would be more like O&C as far as both have middling soundtracks (Magnifico is probably around the same level as a Sykes, with a group in Wish just like Dodger's gang taking on the villain), and TGMD and Hexed are non-musicals with a sort of eccentric cast (the Cheshire Cat villain who's probably darker than they first appear versus Ratigan who becomes monstrous at the end and perhaps about the mother trying to find/rescue the daughter who's being manipulated/used for a villain takeover plot similar to Olivia trying to rescue her father who's being used for a villain takeover). Hopefully that's the case and they continue down that roadmap--but the next level needs a stronger composer than Wish had, that's for sure. Meanwhile, they should continue to work on their own version of the Paperman-esque style being used by KPOP Demon Hunters, Spiderverse, Puss in Boots--Wish was a good start, but they'll have to go further than that...

[Kyle]

Well, Hoppers was a flop, so...I'm not surprised.

Neither of these moves were flops.

Hoppers was their biggest opening for a non sequel since Coco, and it had legs. It overall made less than Elemental, but it also only had a $150 million budget instead of $200 million.

Elemental was probably on track to flop based on its opening weekend, but it recovered enough to not qualify.

So its weird to me to consider either of these flops. You want to talk pixar flops, look at elio. That one flopped.

[PatchofBlue]

Both movies did remarkably well for the model they were forced into. There aren't really a lot of breakout non-franchise hits these days. Like, I know everyone's really proud of themselves for going to see "Project Hail Mary," but people are forgetting how it used to feel when even a forgettable movie like "Clash of the Titans" can still make half a billion worldwide.

The streaming wars are just eating into everything. And until studios realize that they can't make streaming their priority and still expect a healthy theatrical performance, this is their new normal.

[Disney's Divinity]

Nah, I think nearly all the films since 2020 have been flops. The only films that really deserve asterisks to me are those ones in the 2020-22 area during the pandemic and the year following. And that sort of coincides with the fact that the only good films were actually from that same point in time (Raya, Encanto, Luca, Turning Red), and out of all of them, only Encanto feels like it's known enough to sustain a franchise, sell merch, etc. Everything after that has just been very poor. It doesn't help they keep trying to make these odd Squad-esque protagonists who are nails on chalkboard like the leads from Hoppers, Elio, Wish, or a couple of the characters from Turning Red. Why can't they just focus on making characters and stories without some bizarre real life parallel that they almost never depict well anyway.

Hoppers was just not very good. A decent movie should've went further than Elemental managed considering that was a poor performance in itself. Maybe Gatto might be the movie that finally does that, but who knows; I just know it's the only concept that's been halfway interesting from them for going on years now. Hexed isn't going to do more than around 400 million at best either, but there's no need to pretend streaming is the issue here, it's just WDAS has a much bigger hole to dig itself out of because of SW. 500 million on the other hand wasn't that impossible for PIXAR to finally hit at this point with an original--particularly since they've been given many more chances to put out originals to course correct than WDAS has--it's just what they put out here looked pretty unappealing from commercials and even having seen it now, although not as bad as I would have thought, I'd say it was ultimately still very much on the mediocre end of things.

I'm not sure what can actually be attributed to streaming anymore really? I know the majority of Marvel and DC films are flopping, too, but that isn't due to streaming, that's just audience exhaustion with superhero properties post-Endgame. Only a few exceptions, usually big properties like Spider-man, Batman, Deadpool, etc., have been the exception. Things like the Fantastic 4, The Marvels, or Supergirl just aren't going to be big enough in the current landscape. Not even sure what's going to happen with Doomsday either. I wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of a drop there from Endgame.

[PatchofBlue]

I'm as tired as anyone of the streaming talk, but I don't think we're anywhere near past factoring the streaming wars into discussion around the box office, in or out of Disney. It's still a common talking point among industry officials and commentators, and will remain so until box office numbers return to semi-normal ranges.

One could almost make the case that we can't really blame things on the pandemic anymore, but at the same time, I don't think those issues were ever resolved. They were just sort of left on the ground until they decayed and stank everything up until the problem stopped being "how do we get rid of the body?" and became "how do we get rid of the smell?"

Speaking as someone who thought Hoppers was good but not great, not the movie I would have nominated as Pixar's "comeback," it feels appropriate to discuss it as a critical success and a "good movie" that performed below its potential. It got the highest RT scores for Pixar in a while and was widely discussed as "The Best Pixar Movie in YEEEEEAAARS" And if that kind of movie isn't pulling pre-streaming numbers, that's something worth discussing.

I feel like the reasons for DC and Marvel struggling are multi-faceted, but I also don't think that the streaming wars is irrelevant to the topic, particularly for Marvel seeing how a major reason why they lost their standing was because of the impulse to herd as many Marvel heroes onto Disney+ as possible.

[Disney's Divinity]

Well, critical sites and scores are starting to lose their meaning with things like RottenTomatoes practically rigging scores where even a low score someone who's a proven ticket-buyer is wiped or omitted so there's a very positive score that doesn't reflect the actual reaction. But even before that started happening, a critical score doesn't reflect audience reaction--like with many of the faithful remakes that were loved by audiences but hated by critics. And Hoppers is one of those cases where someone who ends up seeing it may like it, but that's only the few who haven't been discouraged to see the film by how bad it seemingly looks in advertisements first.

So, no, I don't think streaming is to blame for it not doing more. Aroumd 500 million was realistic to expect at this point in time for a PIXAR original.