Disney Cuts Hundreds More Jobs in New Round of Layoffs as Corporate Streamlining Casualties Mount

For months, employees at the Walt Disney Co. have been on edge. The entertainment giant has cut hundreds of jobs this year as it continues streamlining corporate operations. More have been expected.

On Tuesday, the ax fell. A few hundred employees, mostly in human resources and tech, were laid off, a person familiar with the situation confirms to The Hollywood Reporter.

The cuts are the fourth round of layoffs this year. A month into the job, CEO Josh D’Amaro in April eliminated around 1,000 jobs, mostly in the company’s unified marketing organization, studios and TV business, ESPN and product & technology. That was followed in July with reductions to some corporate functions, Disney Entertainment Television and film studios, with Pixar and Nat Geo seeing the most number of cuts.

The moves are unfolding against D’Amaro’s broader effort to make Disney a leaner operation while increasing investment in areas the company considers strategic. In an August shareholder letter, D’Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston said Disney was “mid-stream” in its cost-reduction efforts and indicated that further updates would come.

“We’re highly focused on operating with speed and agility and improving productivity and efficiency across the company so we can invest in accelerating growth,” the company stated in the letter, which noted “meaningful reductions to cost, including labor.”

The company’s push to automate corporate work has added another dimension to the restructuring. On Sept. 18, Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and global affairs officer, told employees that the company is undergoing a “transformation process” that will require “hard choices” as part of a corporate-wide workforce redesign in the adoption of artificial intelligence and other technologies. While the memo didn’t explicitly mention AI, Disney is increasingly treating the technology as a restructuring tool in a way that will change how corporate functions are staffed and organized.

The legal and global affairs department “will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process,” Gutierrez wrote.

In the round of cuts in July, some notable on-air talent at ESPN, including longtime SportsCenter anchor and Baseball Tonight host Karl Ravech, who has been with the channel since 1993, and Ryan Clark, a former NFL player who has been an analyst for the channel’s football coverage for over a decade, were laid off. Most of the reductions were to behind-the-scenes staff, connected to its acquisition of the NFL Network earlier this year.

As of the end of fiscal 2025, Disney employed roughly 231,000 people worldwide, including 172,000 in the U.S.