There isn’t a streaming service in the business that hasn’t cut at least some costs recently, whether that’s by laying off staff, canceling original content, excising it from the library entirely, or abandoning in-development projects. Sadly, Netflix ticked off a couple of those boxes in one fell swoop, with the platform’s animation department in the midst of downsizing.
As revealed by Variety, Netflix Animation is being restructured, and there have already been casualties. As well as a number of jobs poised to be cut, a pair of in-house exclusives have now been permanently shelved. Escape from Beverly Hills will now be shopped to other interested parties, while Tunga has been sent back into development, four years after the company first acquired the rights.
Instead of focusing so heavily on developing its own animation from the ground up, the shift will see deals offered to third-party producers to take already-completed titles to Netflix for a fair price, a sentiment that retroactively applied to both Sony’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines and Aardman’s incoming Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.
What makes it even crueler is that Netflix literally won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this year through Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, with the filmmaker remaining a staunch supporter of the format and an increasingly regular collaborator of the platform’s.
Not only that, but the stop-motion fantasy beat out another Netflix original in The Sea Beast to win its Oscar, doubling down on the new reality facing the animated slate. Of course, Adam Sandler’s Leo is safe for obvious reasons given his immense drawing power, but the future just got a lot murkier.