Disney layoffs to cut hundreds of jobs under new CEO

The Mouse House is downsizing again.

New Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro reportedly kicked off a new round of layoffs on Tuesday, cutting a couple of hundred workers from the company’s workforce, according to Deadline.

Most of the employees are in the company’s tech and HR divisions. The Walt Disney Company’s TV division and motion picture studio are not affected by the current staff reductions, according to the outlet.

The cuts are less severe than Disney’s April layoffs, which slashed 1,000 positions just weeks after D’Amaro succeeded Bob Iger as CEO. Disney also let go of a couple of hundred staffers from Pixar, National Geographic and ESPN over the summer.

Disney is a massive company that employed more than 231,000 people at the end of fiscal 2025. Of those staffers, 172,000 are in the United States and 59,000 employees are international.

Disney Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez signalled the cuts in an internal Sept. 18 memo obtained by Deadline in which he warned of “hard choices” about “staffing investments” and the division becoming “a much smaller organization.” 

Gutierrez said there would be a “transformation process” that includes “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies,” in an apparent reference to AI.

The Mouse House had offered employees at the director-level who are 50 or older an early retirement package in an attempt to cut down their workforce voluntarily.

D’Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston also hinted at the layoffs in a letter to Disney shareholders in August, sharing that the company would “remain highly focused on reducing costs across the enterprise.”

“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,” the execs wrote in the Aug. 5 letter. “We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress.”

D’Amaro took over for Iger as Disney CEO in March.

He delivered a speech at the D23 Expo for the first time as CEO in August. D’Amaro spoke about the company’s ambition to keep creating memories linked with Disney.

“We’re not here waiting for the future. We’re building it. We’re actually building it right now,” he said. “We have new stories for you coming, experiences that will literally take your breath away, announcements that will make you lean forward and ask that person that’s sitting next to you, ‘Did you hear that? Can you believe they’re going to do that?’”

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