Disney Hit By Layoffs, A Couple Hundred Workers Cut

EXCLUSIVE: Disney has initiated layoffs as it continues to tighten its belt under recently appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro. The cuts are said to impact a couple of hundred employees, largely in areas such as tech and HR, which is a smaller number than the two previous rounds of layoffs earlier this year.

Beyond shared functions like tech and HR, the company’s TV division, Disney Entertainment Television, which is expected to undergo a major restructuring under new head Debra OConnell, is not affected by the current staff reductions, sources tell Deadline. The same applies to the motion picture studio, which also is said to be exempt from the new cuts.

For context, Disney had 231,000 employees as of the end of fiscal 2025, 172,000 in the U.S. and 59,000 elsewhere. Largely due to the company’s theme parks and resorts businesses, 16% of workers are part-time and another 8% are seasonal employees.

The cuts follow Disney’s voluntary early retirement offer to employees at or above the director level who are 50 years old or older and have been at the company for at least 10 years. The process, which typically is a precursor to involuntary staff reductions, just concluded with the cooling-off period for those who had opted in ending this past weekend, sources said.

Talk about layoffs has percolated since a September 18 message to employees from Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez. In a memo to LGA employees obtained by Deadline, he warned of “hard choices” about “staffing investments” and the division becoming “a much smaller organization.” He went on to describe a “transformation process” that includes “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies.”

Partly because of the notion that artificial intelligence was likely to contribute to downsizing, the email ended up being widely shared across the company. Unspecified job cuts within the LGA department, which has a bit less than 1,000 members globally are not connected to the latest round of layoffs, though entertainment workers across the board are on edge given the headwinds of Big Tech competition and the rise of AI.

D’Amaro has overseen multiple rounds of layoffs since the company veteran succeeded Bob Iger as CEO last March. His first came last April, when 1,000 positions were cut, and several hundred more followed in July, mostly at Pixar and National Geographic.

In their August 5 letter to shareholders, D’Amaro and Disney CFO Hugh Johnston noted that “we remain highly focused on reducing costs across the enterprise to create incremental capacity to invest for growth and are evaluating a variety of levers, including reductions in labor and SG&A [Selling, General & Administrative expenses],” adding, “We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress.”

While the layoffs are another jolt to Hollywood, they are a fraction of the size of the Disney cuts overseen by Iger soon after he rejoined the company in 2022. Between 2023 and 2025, some 8,000 workers were let go, helping the company achieve cost savings of $7.5 billion. The saving figure came in far higher than Disney’s initial forecasts.