In December, Disney will release a brand new series on Disney+ from Pixar called “Dream Productions,” a spin-off from the popular “Inside Out” franchise.

The series is about the studio inside Riley’s mind where dreams really do come true—every night, on time and on budget, thanks to acclaimed director Paula Persimmon (voice of Paula Pell). Riley’s growing up, her core emotions are on the job helping her navigate, but now Paula is facing a nightmare of her own: her signature combination of dreams featuring Rainbow Unicorn and copious amounts of glitter just isn’t working anymore. To try and save her career, Paula teams up with Xeni (voice of Richard Ayoade), an overly confident daydream director looking for his next big break. With differing visions on what makes Riley’s dreams successful, can the reluctant pair come together to create the next big tween-dream hit?

The upcoming show has been written and directed by Mike Jones, who recently spoke at IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking Summit in Los Angeles on Saturday about the upcoming series, revealing more details on the show and how it came close to being cancelled.

With Bob Iger’s return as Disney’s CEO, the company has undergone a significant spending review, which resulted in the cancellation of many projects and the firing of over 7,000 staff members.  

Pixar wasn’t immune from these cost-cutting measures, as it lost about 14% of its staff, around 175 people, and Disney started to make changes to spend less on new original content for its streaming platforms like Disney+.

During the last few years, many of Disney’s studios, including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, struggled with ramping up production on so many additional shows for Disney+, resulting in the staff being stretched to thin, reducing overall quality and making this noticeable at the box office. 

“I don’t know that we’re gonna do any more streaming after this because we took a lot of resources from the other things at Pixar.  While it’s a pretty major company, because it spends so much time on these movies, it can’t afford to do too much of this at once.  It can really only afford to focus on one or two things. And so when Disney led us to streaming, it was suddenly inserting something else in there. So we were kind of an underdog.”

Mike also revealed some details about how long “Dream Productions” is, comparing the project to making an 82-minute movie told in four episodes, which would seem to indicate that each episode will be around 20 minutes. 

With budgets being cut, staff members were comparing making “Dream Productions” to an indie film, since their budget was so much tighter than other Pixar projects.

“We were kind of a weird little indie movie, almost inside Pixar,”

The project took three and a half years to create. However, the series had “two really close calls”, where the project’s future was put in doubt as Disney started cutting costs and projects.

“Everybody felt that — we felt that — but also like, every Pixar movie is on fire, every single one that I’ve been involved with — every single one that I’m even not involved — will get to a point where we have been producing this thing for two or three years and suddenly [the story] is not fucking working.  You go, how is it not working? Like how are we in such trouble here?”

Disney shifted the priority to Pixar’s theatrical films, resulting in resources being redirected away from “Dream Productions”, onto other films like “Inside Out 2” and “Elemental”.  

“That happened a bunch of times.  And so we would let all of our people go on some other films that were in trouble and just pray and hope that we would get them back. And we would eventually, and then we quickly scramble and try to produce.”

In 2025, Pixar will release a brand new film called “Elio” and a brand new series called “Win Or Lose,” both of which were originally supposed to be released this year. This highlights how Pixar went through a major shift, with lots of projects being delayed as a refocus on theatrical releases over streaming was implemented.

With “Inside Out 2” going on to break so many box office records and “Elemental” also being able to reverse the trend of the previous Pixar box office failures, it looks like Disney’s decision to redirect resources away from its Disney+ projects paid off. 

Roger’s Take: I’ve little doubt that Pixar, along with many of the other studios at Disney, has gone through some massive shifts over the past few years, moving from a focus on theatrical, to suddenly producing shows, shows and films for Disney+, while not having the resources in place to handle that drastic change and then the course correction, with Disney refocusing on quality over quantity. 

I have little doubt that the Pixar releases will ultimately be better for it, but sadly, Disney+ shows from Pixar are probably going to be very unlikely following the release of “Win Or Lose” and “Dream Productions.”

All four episodes of “Dream Productions” will arrive on Disney+ on December 11th 2024.

Are you looking forward to watching “Dream Productions”?  Let me know on social media!

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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