Economies of Scale

In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story with about 100 animators, a brand new RenderMan rendering pipeline and a budget around 30 million US dollars. The film grossed nearly 400 million worldwide. The studio had cracked something powerful about scale, build the rendering technology once, train the animators once, perfect the visual style, once, and every subsequent film could spread those costs across a much larger creative output. For the next 15 years, that machine compounded. By 2020, Pixar employed over 1,200 people. Average production budgets had climbed to between 150 and $200 million per film, but those films were now reliable cultural events. Past a certain point, the curve started bending the wrong way, coordinating 1,200 creatives across multiple in production films required more meetings, more committee approvals, more layers of review, light year underperformed.