On this latest edition of Cinemaholics Headlines, Jon Negroni jumps on the mic to share his thoughts on a few big news stories in the world of film and entertainment. Our main story at the end covers some seriously damaging revelations about the working conditions at Pixar in the wake of Inside Out 2‘s unprecedented success.
The following is a general transcript of the podcast.
The Penguin is out now on Max.
First up, real quick shoutout for The Penguin, which is premiering on the Max streaming service today. And apparently, according to a few people I know and trust, it’s actually supposed to be great. With one person telling me it might be one of the best shows of the entire year according to them. Grain of salt, since I haven’t seen the show yet myself, but after hearing some of the early buzz, I’m definitely a lot more interested in checking this one out than I was even a few days ago.
First trailer for Mickey 17, the newest film from Bong Joon-ho.
Speaking of things to get excited about, we just got our first trailer for Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, a sci-fi co-produced by the United States and South Korea. It stars Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, and Toni Collette. And it opens in theaters January 31, 2025. I didn’t watch the whole trailer yet myself, I usually like to avoid trailers as much as I can, but I did see some of it autoplaying and got a quick glimpse at the visuals and atmosphere it’s going for.
Look, I’m always going to be in line for a Bong Joon-ho movie, don’t get me wrong, but that January 31 release date does give me a little pause because it does seem to indicate that they’re not expecting too much of it since that’s just a month after the cutoff date for awards season. You’d think that a new movie from the guy who made Parasite, the Best Picture winner from just four years ago, and distributed by Warner Bros on top of that would be coming out in November or December, right?
Now to be totally fair, I don’t know for sure if there are weird logistics or extenuating circumstances around the movie’s production that are playing into that awkward release date, which itself might have nothing at all to do with the quality of the film. I do know the film was originally supposed to come out this past March but was of course delayed. No idea what’s going on there, but either way, I’m putting all that aside and hoping for the best.
New Game of Thrones spinoff show has wrapped filming.
All right, got another big release coming in 2025 and that is the new Game of Thrones prequel spinoff series coming to HBO next year titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on George R.R. Martin’s three novellas about a hedge knight who has to serve as bodyguard to a young Targaryen prince. The show has officially wrapped filming and we know there will be six episodes and Martin himself is happy with the final product, which is definitely a far cry from his reaction to the second season of House of the Dragon, which he scorched in a blog post he eventually took down.
Part of his issues with House of the Dragon had to do with how the show runners handled a major plot point early in that season regarding missing characters and how a certain character dies, and it was surprising to see because Martin had previously been quite supportive of the show, overall. That said, one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen and personally shared with Game of Thrones as a whole lately has been the decision to cut these seasons down to eight and now six episodes, and yeah that’s a larger conversation about how these prestige TV series are becoming so expensive that the streamers are basically penny pinching to the expense of the writers.
That’s obviously super frustrating for the creative behind these stories, because you’re essentially trying to cram a ton of lore and exposition into a fantasy show that is supposed to thrive on political dealings and compelling character arcs. So when you cut and cut and cut material and then release shows every few years, it starts to make these projects feel like intermittent movies, not shows. Maybe it’s growing pains for the streaming era and these kinks are going to work themselves out over time, I don’t know. But in the meantime, it’s increasingly looking like these big-budget, high concept shows are starting to transform the industry in maybe not the best ways.
The next Transformers live-action movie will cross over with G.I. Joe.
But OK, speaking of transforming, we have some new info coming out from Collider about the future of the Transformers film franchise according to one of its producers. Transformers One is coming out this weekend and the buzz from critics is strong, though you can check out Will Ashton’s instant take of the film on our feeds if you’re curious about his thoughts.
Regardless, it looks like Paramount and Hasbro are moving forward with a live-action film that will crossover with the G.I. Joe film universe, which the last Transformers film teased. A tease, by the way, I genuinely completely forgot because Transformers: Rise of the Beasts wasn’t exactly the most memorable movie, at least for me. Anyway, the producer goes on to say that their goal is to focus more on the point of view of the Transformers themselves as opposed to the humans in these films.
He said “Instead of them reacting to the human plot…their drive has to be part of that story now.” I think on the one hand, I get why Paramount would have this as a strategy, because they clearly see that this animated Transformers One movie apparently turned out pretty well without having to add humans to the mix. As in, I think they recognize that audiences don’t necessarily need an audience surrogate they can relate to as much as they did in 2007.
I totally get it, because they’re essentially trying to trust that people will connect more with the motivations of the robot characters and then you don’t need all these contrived plot machinations, no pun intended, to involve a bunch of humans who have become sort of indistinguishable at this point. They did already do some of this with Rise of the Beasts, where they sort of made a human more like a “transformer,” and I think the point of the G.I. Joe crossover is to bring in human characters who are more interesting and have established backstories. On the other hand, I don’t know, maybe I’m being overly optimistic about a film franchise that really seemed to wear out its welcome a long time ago, at least for me.
Lionsgate has hired an AI firm.
I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this next headline because it seriously depresses me. New story from Deadline says that Lionsgate has reportedly signed a deal with an AI firm called Runway in order to train a new generative AI model on their content, which includes helping their filmmakers with pre- and post-production. “We view AI as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing, and supplementing our current operations.”
I hadn’t heard of Runway before this story came out, but I did see in the Deadline article that they have some presence in the industry already with some short films and music videos. So look my stance on AI is pretty simple. If you’re using it to inspire creative work and come up with the basis for an artistic expression, that’s totally fine by me.
It’s essentially the same thing as creating a mood board. But when you start to supplant actual creative work with AI-generated slop, that’s where I have a serious problem. It’s generally plagiarism and honestly laziness. It’s a way for these studios to make a quick buck off of artists without having to pay them and I do not support it whatsoever. Again, and to be totally clear, I’m not talking about every single application of AI that there is, I am specifically talking about generative AI that tries to pass off written or visual work as original. That, to me, is a red line that we absolutely should not cross.
Pixar’s future looks incredibly bleak right now, even after the success of Inside Out 2.
Now that I’m fired up, on to the main story. And this one…when I first read about this I genuinely came so close to just turning off the internet for a week. We have some new information coming out about the production of Inside Out 2 via IGN, and it’s not pretty.
Keep in mind Inside Out 2 came out this past summer through Disney and Pixar and is the highest-grossing animated movie of all time worldwide. But that success apparently came with a serious cost to its staff. Ten former Pixar employees who were recently laid off shared details on what was apparently an extremely toxic production that ironically contrasts with the film’s message about mental health.
For context, Pixar laid off 14% of its staff in May, which means that some of these laid-off employees were unable to benefit from a bonus for the success of Inside Out 2. A bonus, by the way, that a lot of these animators rely on because unlike other animators at Disney, Pixar employees are not unionized and therefore aren’t paid as well. So basically these people worked tirelessly to get this movie — a movie critical to the further existence of the studio, mind you — to release on time and were then laid off right before the release, and then had to sit there and watch as the studio raked in $1.6 billion with none of it going to them.
That alone makes me unbelievably furious. Not only is it morally wrong, clearly, but it also speaks to a total disregard for its employees that will absolutely have reverberating effects at the studio for years to come. This is the sort of thing that has long-lasting negative effects on the morale of a studio, which has its own consequences. And let’s talk about the “unprecedented crunch” that surrounded the production of the movie.
Worth pointing out that Pixar has had a very long history of putting movies out under seriously tight circumstances, just look at movies like Toy Story 2 for instance (the person who saved that film from being deleted was laid off just last September, by the way). And IGN in this report did point out that at least one senior executive at Pixar told them that the crunch at the end of Inside Out 2 was no different from other films they’ve put out. But here’s what the workers had to say, all of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity.
One source said “I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week. Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they’d never really done before…It was horrendous.”
Another source called it “the largest crunch in the studio’s history.” And one person said “I would venture that at least 95% of the people that got laid off are financially f*cked right now.”
I highly encourage you to read the full report from IGN, it’s excellent reporting and definitely a wake-up call for the entertainment industry and those of us like me who covered the success of Inside Out 2 with all this positivity and good vibing when something so awful was happening right in plain sight. There was another bit in this about how apparently the studio pushed for them to avoid anything relating to LGBTQ themes and allegedly editing some content out of the movie for that very reason.
Multiple sources claimed that Disney leadership internally blamed much of the failure of Lightyear, for example, on the same-sex kiss in that film.
“It is, as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they’ll bring up Lightyear specifically and say, ‘Oh, Lightyear was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it,’” one source told IGN. “That’s not the reason the movie failed.”
Exactly. I’ll touch more on Lightyear in particular in just a second, but also from the report: “The apparent hesitance to touch on LGBTQ themes storylines in particular affected Inside Out 2’s development, according to several of our sources. Multiple people recall hearing about continuous notes to make Riley, the main character of both Inside Out movies, come across as ‘less gay,’ leading to numerous edits that ramped up around September 2023 after the resolution of the WGA strike. Sources describe rumors that there was special care put into making the relationship between Riley and Val, a supporting character introduced in Inside Out 2, seem as platonic as possible, even requiring edits to the lighting and tone of certain scenes to remove any trace of ‘romantic chemistry.’ One source describes it as ‘just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.'”
This isn’t just sad, it’s embarrassing. This whole idea, too, about a tiny but obnoxious group of people complaining that seeing two gay people exist in a movie would be “confusing,” is the same line of reasoning that people used to argue about interracial relationships in movies. Absolutely disgusting. This screams to me that there are some folks high up at Disney who are consuming a lot of the right-wing culture war content on YouTube and social media and so on, none of which has any real connection to the real-world box office.
Just take a look at a movie like Barbie, for example. Conservatives raged about that movie and told the whole world it was woke, and then it made $1.4 billion. Think of it this way, if Wish from last year had some kind of LGBTQ pandering in it, like a character off-handedly referencing a same-sex partner like in Onward, then it bombed the way it did anyway, these same online weirdos would all say that the movie failed because something something gay people. And then some in the Disney leadership would look at this stuff and say, “See! See! These movies aren’t failing because they’re bad or we mismanaged everything!”
These people are in a bubble, and the vast, vast majority of people in this country absolutely do not care about this stuff. It reminds me of when conservatives managed to convince a bunch of Disney higher-ups to fire James Gunn because of his old tweets, then they just ended up with egg on their face over the whole thing. They hired him back to do Guardians of the Galaxy 3 years later and after losing him to DC, and wouldn’t you know it that last Guardians movie was pretty much Disney’s only decent hit in 2023.
I could talk about this all day, but the bottom line is that some of these movies like Lightyear were just plain bad movies and the choice to blame their failure on gay people is 100% reactionary, bigoted B.S. The LGBTQ community is one of the most important fan communities behind Disney films, so for the studio to treat them like this is reprehensible and unfortunately unsurprising considering how they treat their own employees when it comes to Inside Out 2.
Again, I could keep going on with this, because the report has even more info that is just wild, like how a lot of these issues are also affecting the next Pixar film, Elio. They, and by they I mean Pete Docter, basically want to take this same “crunch” work culture and replicate it for future movies. And speaking of Docter, it looks like Pixar is apparently backsliding into the John Lasseter days, where they’re overly relying on one guy to be the main vision behind everything.
That’s not to say Docter is a bad dude, and the former employees even mostly go to bat for him on a personal level. But it’s just sad that Pixar briefly entered this era of bringing in new voices and talent, and it was genuinely working for films like Turning Red, only for them to revert to their old ways the second things got a little complicated.
And look, I know there’s a nuanced conversation to be had about how Pixar really did have a ton on the line with Inside Out 2. Folks at the studio may downplay it, but let’s be real. The stakes were astronomically high and the studio was in serious danger of just collapsing if Inside Out 2 wasn’t a massive hit.
Let’s review: Thanks to COVID, four of their movies from 2020 to 2022 (Onward, Soul, Luca, and Turning Red) were basically a wash because of theaters shutting down and then the studio being hesitant about putting these movies in theaters again because people expected everything to hit Disney+, which was a whole other mess I could spend an hour on. Well, then they returned to theaters with Lightyear, which bombed, and then Elemental which only did sort of OK box office.
This report even mentions that these movies now have to make about $600 million or more to even be considered profitable, and Elemental was just under that threshold. And on top of that, apparently these movies aren’t actually considered a true hit unless they manage to cross $1 billion.
Now that’s a whole other tangent I could get lost in but I’ll finish with this. Disney. Pixar. You have the audacity to make a movie about mental health and anxiety and overworking yourself is bad for you and your community and so on and so on. The irony is obvious, but even going further, you should probably listen to the people who work for you and maybe look at them more as people instead of numbers on a spreadsheet.
Because how they were treated after saving your skin, with some of these folks literally being locked out of Pixar and told they couldn’t pick up their things during normal hours to avoid making the remaining employees feel awkward…it’s just so despicable and from what I can tell a shift from how Pixar used to do things. It genuinely makes me far nervous about the future of Pixar than ever before and for good reason.
I’ll end it with this quote from a former employee: “Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite. One percent of that 1.5 billion would’ve saved all our jobs.”
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