Disney insiders say leadership pushed to make Inside Out 2 less gay after Lightyear same-sex kiss

IGN recently published an incendiary new article revealing harsh and unfair working conditions on the film Inside Out 2.

According to the report, where IGN spoke anonymously to 10 former Pixar employees, 175 workers were laid off in May, meaning that they were unable to benefit from a bonus for Inside Out 2's success and were already recovering from a "crunch" of having to work seven days a week in order to finish the movie on time for the studio.

In addition to the crunch and layoffs, the article reveals that, according to multiple sources, Disney leadership placed the blame for the movie Lightyear's financial failure on a small same-sex kiss that happened in the film.

Back in 2022, Variety reported that the kiss had initially been cut from the film, but was restored after employees wrote an open letter saying that Disney executives cut "nearly every moment of overtly gay affection" from all Pixar movies.

Now, sources are saying that Disney leadership has used the same-sex kiss to explain the film's lack of box office success, and that some leadership is "uncomfortable" with queer themes at all.

"It is as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they'll bring up Lightyear specifically and say, 'Oh Lightyear was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it.' That's not the reason the movie failed," one source said.

Several other sources said that that attitude expanded to affect Inside Out 2 and its main character Riley.

According to multiple people, there were "continuous notes to make Riley… come across as 'less gay'" and that there was "special care put into making the relationship between Riley and Val, a supporting character introduced in Inside Out 2, seem as platonic as possible."

This reportedly included edits to lighting and tone of scenes to remove even a microscopic trace of "romantic chemistry" and "just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight."

"Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay. In the film, what you saw, nothing about Riley says that she is gay, but it is kind of inferred based on certain contexts," a source said. "And so that is something that they tried to play down at multiple points."