By It’s on top of the box-office right now with “Kung Fu Panda 4,” but it seems employees at Dreamworks Animation are facing some major cuts.
According to Cartoon Brew, the studio insists that no one is being laid off. The outlet indicates instead this is a case of employment contracts simply not being renewed.
What’s hitting hard is the sheer number of non-renewals with “many departments” being cut in half and creative staff on features potentially reduced by as much as, if not more than, 40-50%.
A studio rep indicates that Dreamworks has had multiple large productions of late, namely “Kung Fu Panda 4” and the upcoming “The Wild Robot, which are winding down around the same time.
Work on new projects reportedly hasn’t synced up with the end dates of these, so people can’t simply jump from one to the next.
In addition, Dreamworks is reportedly not moving forward with a Bollywood-themed film they had in the works previously titled “Another Me”.
The studio reportedly does not currently have any fully in-house productions scheduled for 2025, and only one of their three 2025 releases is being animated in-house and even then with a significantly reduced crew.
Cost-cutting measures ordered by parent company Comcast-NBCUniversal is reportedly seeing the company shift away from fully in-house animation and outsourcing parts of some of its productions to third-party studios in other countries.
Sony Pictures Imageworks in Canada, Jellyfish Pictures in the U.K., and Mikros Animation in India and Canada are among those working with the studio on future projects.
Source: Cartoon Brew
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