Pixar get backlash for using Mrs. Incredible to fire 108 workers
A WARN notice cutting 108 Pixar jobs went out on the studio’s Elastigirl letterhead, from a movie that opens with a man getting fired. It’s almost certainly just standard stationery. It also landed as Toy Story 5 closes in on $1 billion, which is the part that actually stings.
Pixar is laying off 108 people. The notice telling the state of California went out on letterhead featuring Elastigirl.
Elastigirl is from The Incredibles.
The Incredibles opens with a man getting fired from his office job.
What the filing says
The document is a WARN notice, the filing big employers have to submit before mass layoffs, obtained by SFGate. It lists 108 positions cut at Pixar’s Emeryville headquarters, most of them gone by September 26.
The roles are the ones that actually make the movies. Twenty-three technical directors. Nine story artists. Software engineers, editors, the people whose names scroll past in the credits you don’t read. Seventy-one of the 108 fall under “arts, entertainment and recreation,” which is the government’s dry way of saying: the artists.
The movie opens with a layoff
Here’s why the internet stopped on this one.
At the top of the filing, where a company logo goes, sits Pixar’s branding with Mrs. Incredible — Elastigirl — replacing the “i,” hands on her hips. It comes from Pixar’s 2004 hit, a movie whose entire plot is kicked off by Bob Parr getting canned from his insurance job and spiraling into a midlife crisis before clawing his way back.
So the paperwork ending 108 careers is decorated with a character from a film about losing your career. Someone online noted the studio was “at least honoring its commitment to women in the workplace.” Someone else went with the obvious one: they’re cutting jobs while Disney and Pixar rake in billions.
It’s probably just the letterhead
To be fair, and this matters, nobody sat in a room and picked Elastigirl for the occasion.
It’s Pixar’s standard stationery. The Incredibles branding is almost certainly just what the studio’s letterhead looks like, dropped onto a WARN filing by whoever had to file it, the same way it’d go on a catering memo. There’s no evidence of a cruel little joke here.
Which is somehow worse. A deliberate choice would at least mean someone was paying attention. This was a company so on autopilot that it laid off a hundred artists on cartoon letterhead and nobody in the chain thought to swap it for something that didn’t read like a punchline. The tone-deafness wasn’t malicious. It was automatic.
$1 billion, and 108 people
The timing is the part that lands hardest, and it’s not a coincidence of the calendar, it’s the whole story.
Pixar’s Toy Story 5 is days from crossing $1 billion worldwide. The studio is, right now, in the middle of one of the biggest hits it has ever had. And it’s shedding 108 of the people who make hits like that possible in the same week.
That’s the math that’s got people angry, and it’s fair math. A studio printing a billion dollars off one movie is telling story artists and technical directors there’s no room for them. The success and the cuts are landing in the same news cycle, from the same company, and one of them is paying for a lot of yachts while the other one is packing a desk.
The bigger cut
None of this is really about the letterhead, and Pixar isn’t being singled out.
The 108 are part of Disney‘s third round of layoffs in 2026, more than 1,000 jobs across ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television, and National Geographic, under CEO Josh D’Amaro‘s “One Disney” restructuring.
A source told TheWrap the Pixar cuts may trace to the soft box office of the studio’s recent original films, the Elio-shaped hole in a lineup that leans harder on sequels every year.
So the studio that keeps missing with new ideas is cutting the people it’d need to have new ideas, on the strength of a fifth Toy Story. That’s a strategy. It’s just not a comforting one if your job is making the parts that aren’t sequels.
The 108 will be gone by late September. Toy Story 5 crosses a billion before then. The studio will be fine. It usually is.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
SFGate (Matt Brown) — the WARN filing, the 108-job figure, the Emeryville location, the September 26 date, and the copy of the Elastigirl letterhead
The Independent / Yahoo — the role breakdown, the Incredibles plot irony, and the social media reaction
The Hollywood Reporter — Disney’s 1,000-plus 2026 cuts, the ESPN, DET, and Nat Geo divisions, and D’Amaro’s “One Disney” strategy
TheWrap — the source tying the Pixar cuts to weaker original-film performance, against Toy Story 5’s box office run