EXCLUSIVE: Disney has initiated layoffs as it continues to tighten its belt under recently appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro. Today’s job cuts would affect a few hundred employees, largely in areas such as technology and human resources, which is a smaller number than the previous two rounds of layoffs earlier this year.
Beyond shared functions such as technology and human resources, the company’s TV division, Disney Entertainment Television, which is expected to undergo a major restructuring under new head Debra O’Connell, is not affected by the current staff reductions, sources told Deadline. The same goes for the movie studio, which would also be largely exempt from the new cuts.
As a reminder, Disney had 231,000 employees at the end of fiscal 2025, 172,000 in the United States and 59,000 elsewhere. Largely thanks to the company’s theme park and resort operations, 16% of workers are part-time and 8% are seasonal employees.
The reductions follow Disney’s voluntary early retirement offer to employees at director level or above who are age 50 or older and have been with the company for at least 10 years. The process, which is usually a precursor to involuntary staff reductions, has just concluded with the end of the reflection period for those who had chosen to do so last weekend, sources said.
Discussions about the layoffs have been widespread internally since a September 18 memo written by Horacio Gutierrez, director of legal and global affairs. In an email to LGA employees obtained by Deadline, he warned of “tough choices” regarding “personnel investments” and the division becoming “a much smaller organization.” He then described a “transformation process” that includes “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies.”
Partly because of the idea that artificial intelligence was likely to contribute to downsizing, the memo ended up being widely shared within the company. Unspecified job cuts at the LGA department, which has just under 1,000 members worldwide, are not linked to the latest round of layoffs, although entertainment workers across the board are nervous about headwinds from competition from big tech and the rise of AI.
D’Amaro has overseen several rounds of layoffs since the company veteran succeeded Bob Iger as CEO last March. The first occurred last April, when 1,000 positions were eliminated, and several hundred more followed in July, mainly at Pixar and National Geographic.
In their Aug. 5 letter to shareholders, D’Amaro and Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston noted that “we remain highly focused on reducing costs across the company to create additional investment capacity for growth and are evaluating a variety of levers, including reducing labor and general and administrative expenses (selling, general and administrative expenses),” adding, “We are midway through this work and will provide future updates on our progress.
While the layoffs are another shock to Hollywood, they represent only a fraction of the scale of the Disney job cuts overseen by Iger shortly after returning to the company in 2022. Between 2023 and 2025, some 8,000 workers were laid off, helping the company achieve $7.5 billion in savings. The savings figure was much higher than Disney’s initial projections.
Gn bussni
