Disney has cut a couple hundred jobs, largely in tech and HR, as CEO Josh D’Amaro presses fresh cost reductions after earlier layoff rounds this year.
Deadline reported that Walt Disney Co. moved ahead with involuntary staff reductions once a voluntary early-retirement window closed, hitting areas such as technology and human resources while sparing some creative units.
The cuts land smaller than Disney’s two prior rounds earlier in the year. They still fit a clear pattern: management keeps trimming labor and overhead to free up money for growth.
Josh D’Amaro took over as CEO last March after Bob Iger. Under D’Amaro, the company has already run multiple layoff waves in 2026. April removed about 1,000 positions. July brought several hundred more, mostly at Pixar and National Geographic.
Today’s action follows that track. It came after a voluntary early-retirement offer for employees at or above director level who were age 50 or older and had at least 10 years at the company. The cooling-off period for people who opted in ended over the past weekend. Then the involuntary cuts began.
D’Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston spelled out the strategy in an August 5 letter to shareholders. They did not hide the levers under review.
In that letter, D’Amaro and Johnston wrote: “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 [Selling, General & Administrative expenses].”
"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 [Selling, General & Administrative expenses],"
They added: “We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress.”
"We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress."
That language matches what followed. Labor came off the books. SG&A stayed in the crosshairs. Shareholders got the preview in August. Workers felt it later.
Not every corner of the company took the same hit. The motion picture studio is said to be primarily exempt from the new cuts. Disney Entertainment Television, now under Debra OConnell, is expected to face a major restructuring of its own, yet sources said that division was not swept into the current staff reductions.
A separate warning went out earlier inside Legal and Global Affairs. On September 18, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez emailed LGA staff about hard choices on staffing investments and a coming smaller organization. He described a transformation process that includes automating certain workflows with the latest technologies. Deadline obtained that email. Those unspecified LGA cuts were not tied to the latest company-wide round.
Gutierrez told employees the division would become “a much smaller organization” and flagged “hard choices” about “staffing investments,” along with automation of workflows. LGA has a bit less than 1,000 people globally. The memo signaled shrinkage there on its own track.
D’Amaro inherited a company that had already shed large numbers of jobs. After Iger rejoined in 2022, Disney let go some 8,000 workers between 2023 and 2025. Those reductions produced about $7.5 billion in cost savings, far higher than the company’s initial forecasts.
By the end of fiscal 2025, Disney still employed 231,000 people: 172,000 in the United States and 59,000 elsewhere. Sixteen percent worked part-time. Another 8 percent were seasonal. Against that base, a couple hundred layoffs is a modest slice. It is also the third reduction wave under the new CEO in a single year.
Prior rounds hit creative brands hard in July. This round leaned into corporate functions, tech and HR, the kind of back-office spend public companies often target when they say they want “incremental capacity to invest for growth.”
Disney has not framed these moves as panic. Officials describe them as ongoing cost work. The August shareholder letter put labor and SG&A on the table in plain terms. The early-retirement offer pulled some senior people out first. Involuntary cuts followed for others once that window closed.
Exact headcounts by team and city were not laid out in the reporting. The scale is “a couple of hundred.” The focus is tech and HR. The studio mostly sits out. Television entertainment waits on its own restructure under new leadership. Legal affairs already heard it would shrink and automate.
For a company this size, hundreds of jobs still mean real households lose paychecks. It also means management is keeping pressure on headcount after years of larger bloodletting and after promising investors more room to fund growth.
Shareholders were told costs would come down so investment could go up. The latest cuts show Disney is still willing to pull the labor lever to make that math work.
