An insider has revealed that the joke around Pixar is that the leadership has “no spine” and they revealed how the studio rejected a movie that would have been its own version of KPop Demon Hunters before Netflix ever released its movie. This comes as a slight surprise since Pixar has usually been the one studio who has looked outside the box and did things that no other studio, including Disney Animation, was doing at the time. This was obvious when Pixar released the underrated Brave, a movie that took the Disney Princess idea and made her a woman who could stand on her own without needing a Prince Charming to fight for her. However, that movie’s lack of overall success might have caused problems just over a decade later.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke to an insider at Pixar about a movie that the studio cancelled called Be Fri. According to the original reports, the movie was in development for years before Pixar cancelled it in 2023. One insider said that Pixar had “no spine” and Disney cancelled the movie because they “didn’t feel like little boys could see themselves in the film enough. Basically, Disney reps were like, ‘We can’t have a girl power movie.’”
How Was Be Fri Comparable to KPop Demon Hunters?
Image Courtesy of Netflix
This entire situation seems puzzling. The movie Inside Out 2 was released in 2024, focused purely on a female lead and was the highest-grossing animated movie of all time until Zootopia 2 and Ne Zha 2 surpassed it.. Turning Red was also a female-led movie, but since it was released when Disney was sending all Pixar movies to Disney+, it is unclear that film’s overall success in the eyes of studio executives. To make matters worse, KPop Demon Hunters came out in 2025 as a Netflix exclusive and was so popular that it got a later theatrical run and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. People clearly wanted to see a “girl power” movie.
Director Kristen Lester came up with the Be Fri idea and based it on her own experience with a childhood friend that dissolved. The script was about two teenage girls who were once best friends, but had grown apart. However, when they learn their favorite television show (based on Sailor Moon) was real, they have to team p to save humanity in a universe-spanning adventure. The insider said Disney kept demanding changes, and it went through four iterations before the studio cancelled the Pixar movie. The insider said the script was on “Hoppers level,” referencing the new Pixar film which has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score and made $335 million at the box office.
The insider said that Be Fri was also extremely close in tone to KPop Demon Hunters. “The comparisons to KPop Demon Hunters are pretty undeniable because there were musical aspects to it, and it was a rip-roaring time,” they said. “I can imagine that whoever at Disney denied Be Fri to exist looks at KPop and is kicking themselves like, ‘Sh*t, I can’t believe Netflix is doing exactly what we wanted to do.’”
The insider even said that it hit the creators at Pixar pretty hard, and they even had a “memorial of sorts” for Be Fri, where people left notes or things that was special to them about the movie. This led to a second insider at Pixar saying that Disney demands changes on movies based on fear of public perception, and that the leadership at Pixar “has no spine at all.” For their part, no one at Pixar would comment on the story.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!