Last May, the legendary Pixar Disney-owned Animation Studios was hit by layoffs about 14 percent of its staff. 175 employees were laid off, largely due to sector contraction and spending cuts streaming.

One of the biggest casualties of these layoffs was the many TV projects that Pixar had originally planned for Disney+. The one that has endured and will soon hit the screen is “Dream Productions”, a spin-off of “Upside down.” But like the creator of Pixar Mike Jones explained, his show was threatened with being shut down several times. Additionally, “Dream Productions” could be one of the last Pixar projects dedicated to streaming on Disney+.

“I don’t know if we’re going to do more streaming after this because we’ve taken a lot of resources from other things at Pixar,” Jones told IndieWire. The future of cinema Summit in Los Angeles on Saturday. He explained that even given Pixar’s reach, they can be stretched and need resources for tentpole features, and “Dream Productions” often drew the short straw.

“Although they’re a fairly large company, because they spend a lot of time on these films, they can’t afford to do too many at once,” Jones said. “He can really only afford to focus on one or two things. And so when Disney brought us to streaming, it suddenly inserted something else. So we were kind of an outsider, they were always threatening to shut us down.

Jones, who is a former editor-in-chief of IndieWire, described “Dream Productions” as essentially an 82-minute film told in four episodes, but with a much smaller budget than that of a typical Pixar film. movie.

“We were kind of a weird little independent film, almost inside Pixar,” he said.

Jones said “Dream Productions” took three and a half years to get up and running, and in that time they had “two very close calls” in which the series was almost abandoned mid-production. He said everyone at Pixar felt the impact of the “Fix Netflix”, in which studios began prioritizing profits over subscribers and scale, which meant diverting resources from its streaming project elsewhere.

“Everyone thought… We I felt that – but also that every Pixar movie was on fire, every one that I’ve been involved in – every one that I’m not even involved in – would get to a point where we’ve been producing this thing for two or three years and all of a sudden it doesn’t work,” Jones said. “Go ahead, how can this not work?” How do we get into such trouble here? »

Much of Jones’ “Dream Productions” team would begin to look to projects like “Elemental” and “Inside Out 2” to put out some of those fires.

“This has happened several times,” he said. “And so we would let all of our people go to other struggling films and just pray and hope that we would get them back. And we would eventually do it, and then we would quickly hustle and try to produce.

“Dream Productions” is part of a Pixar streaming television slate that also includes “Monsters, Inc.” spinoff streaming series “Monsters at Work” and another original little league baseball show in the works called “Win ​​or Lose.” Jones’ comments suggest that the priority at Pixar will always be its features, but the independent spirit still exists in shows like Jones’.

“Dream Productions” will premiere on Disney+ on December 11.