For months, employees at The Walt Disney Co. have been nervous. The entertainment giant has cut hundreds of jobs this year as it continues to streamline its operations. We expected more.
Tuesday, the ax fell. A few hundred employees, mainly in human resources and technology, have been laid off, a person familiar with the matter confirms to The Hollywood Reporter.
This is the fourth round of layoffs this year. A month after taking office, CEO Josh D’Amaro in April cut about 1,000 jobs, primarily in the company’s unified marketing organization, studios and TV business, ESPN, and product and technology. This was followed in July by cuts to some corporate functions, Disney Entertainment Television and movie studios, with Pixar and Nat Geo seeing the most cuts.
The moves clash with D’Amaro’s broader efforts to make Disney a leaner operation while increasing investment in areas the company considers strategic. In an August letter to shareholders, D’Amaro and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston said Disney was “midway” in its cost-cutting efforts and indicated more updates were to come.
“We are strongly focused on speed and agility and improving productivity and efficiency across the business so that we can invest in accelerating growth,” the company said in the letter, which noted “significant reductions in costs, including labor.”
The company’s efforts to automate the company’s work have added another dimension to the restructuring. On September 18, Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and global affairs officer, told employees that the company was undergoing a “transformation process” that would require “tough choices” as part of a company-wide workforce overhaul to embrace artificial intelligence and other technologies. Although the memo does not explicitly mention AI, Disney is increasingly treating the technology as a restructuring tool that could change the way company functions are staffed and organized.
The Department of Legal and Global Affairs “will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will be personally affected by the decisions we make during this process,” Gutierrez wrote.
During the round of removals in July, some notable ESPN on-air talent, including Sports center anchor and Baseball tonight host Karl Ravech, who has worked for the channel since 1993, and Ryan Clark, a former NFL player who has been an analyst for the channel’s football coverage for more than a decade, were fired. Most of the cuts have been to behind-the-scenes personnel, tied to the NFL Network’s acquisition earlier this year.
At the end of fiscal 2025, Disney employed approximately 231,000 people worldwide, including 172,000 in the United States.
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