Nov. 3 (UPI) — Disney is preparing for another round of layoffs, and some managers were told to cut 20% of expenses, unnamed sources told multiple media outlets Tuesday.
The cuts will be the fourth round of layoffs in 2026 and under CEO Josh D’Amaro, Forbes, Variety and CNBC reported. The Bloomberg report, which cited anonymous sources, said some departments “will be affected disproportionately,” but didn’t say which ones.
D’Amaro “aims to reinvest a portion of the savings into film and TV programming, technology and the theme parks and cruise ship businesses,” according to the report.
Disney hasn’t commented on the layoffs.
“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,” D’Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to shareholders. “We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress.”
Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney was planning a restructuring of TV operations and will consolidate departments. In September, Disney laid off a few hundred employees, mostly in human resources and IT. In July, it cut several hundred jobs within corporate, including at Pixar, ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television and its studios. In April, the company cut about 1,000 jobs.
“I think, like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly all of our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured,” Dana Walden, Disney’s president and CEO, said at a Bloomberg event last month, Variety reported.
In August, Disney offered early retirement buyouts to longtime executives from director through executive vice-president for those older than 50 who had been with the company for at least 10 years, Variety reported.
Walden said the buyout package “was extremely generous and gave a number of our long-tenured executives agency and the opportunity to make their own decisions around whether the timing was right to leave or to stay, knowing that this evolution will never stop, technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Disney is planning to release results for the company’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, on Nov. 17.
At the end of its fiscal year 2025, Disney had about 231,000 employees, its annual report said.
Last month, Netflix laid off about 1,000 workers. Skydance has also announced job reductions stemming from its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.