Disney Expected to Lay Off Thousands of Staffers in Biggest Round of Cuts This Year

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Disney is gearing up for a significant round of layoffs, with some managers told to cut annualized expenses by 20%, Bloomberg News reported.

It would be the fourth round of job cuts in 2026 under Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro and affect the most number of staffers. The Bloomberg report, which cited anonymous sources, said some Disney operations “will be affected disproportionately,” but it did not provide details on which areas would suffer the brunt of the cutbacks. D’Amaro “aims to reinvest a portion of the savings into film and TV programming, technology and the theme parks and cruise ship businesses,” per the report.

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Disney declined to comment.

Disney has been planning a major restructuring of its TV division, which would eliminate hundreds of jobs and consolidate divisions, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.

Dana Walden, Disney’s president and chief creative officer, addressed the most recent Disney layoffs at the Bloomberg Screentime event last month.

“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,” Walden said.

She later said, “This past round was a voluntary retirement program, which 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.”

In announcing results for the June 2026 quarter, D’Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston indicated that more job cutbacks were coming. “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 latter referring to selling, general and administrative expenses, the execs wrote in the Aug. 5 letter to Disney shareholders. “We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress.”

Disney is scheduled to report results for the September quarter, its Q4 of fiscal 2026, on Nov. 17 before the market opens.