Disney Cuts 300 More Jobs as Third Layoff Wave Under D'Amaro

Disney eliminated roughly 300 jobs this week, the third wave of layoffs since Josh D'Amaro became CEO in March, with the latest cuts concentrated in human resources and technology roles, according to CNBC.

Disney President and Chief Creative Officer Dana Walden addressed the reductions publicly Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference, calling the experience "extremely painful." She said the cuts stem from a structural problem built up over years of acquisitions, with Disney long operating as a collection of individual businesses, each with its own executives and profit-and-loss statements.

"We had to make decisions around centralizing and functioning more as a television business and not a group of silos, and that required us again to evaluate how many people do we need, how many people are so many that it's actually keeping us from being agile, speed of decision making," Walden said.

How large is the total reduction?

The pattern under D'Amaro is now three distinct waves in seven months:

• April: roughly 1,000 jobs cut, targeting marketing and corporate functions.
• July: several hundred positions eliminated, hitting Pixar, National Geographic, and ESPN hardest. The ESPN cuts were driven in part by the integration of NFL Network assets.
• This week: around 300 jobs, concentrated in HR and technology.

The scale matters against Disney's headcount of 231,000 employees at the end of fiscal 2025, per Deadline. The April and July rounds, plus this week's reductions, total fewer than 2,000 positions — under 1% of the workforce. That context supports Walden's pushback on the notion that Disney is out front on workforce reductions.

"I really don't think in this exact moment we're the company that is going to be the tip of the spear around any kinds of efficiency targets or layoffs," she said at the conference.

She framed the pressure as competitive rather than purely financial: "Technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow."

What is driving the cuts?

D'Amaro took over in March, replacing longtime CEO Bob Iger, and has championed a vision he calls "One Disney" — drawing together the company's film, streaming, theme parks, consumer goods, gaming, and sports units into a cohesive, mutually reinforcing operation.

The layoffs are one instrument of that integration. Walden's description of dismantling silos, each with its own P&L, points to duplicated corporate overhead — which explains why HR, technology, marketing, and corporate functions have absorbed the cuts so far, rather than creative teams bearing the brunt alone.

A voluntary early retirement program for directors and above with at least 10 years at the company recently closed its enrollment window, offering a softer exit path ahead of involuntary reductions.

What does this mean for media workers?

For employees and job seekers in media and entertainment, the signal is specific: consolidation of P&L structures eliminates layers of executive and support roles before it touches revenue-generating creative work. HR, tech, and marketing positions at large, acquisition-built media companies face the highest near-term exposure. The July wave's concentration at Pixar, National Geographic, and ESPN shows that even brand-defining units are not insulated when asset integration — as with NFL Network into ESPN — creates overlap.

Is the cutting finished?

Probably not. Disney signaled as much when it released fiscal third-quarter earnings in August, with D'Amaro and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston writing in a letter to shareholders that the company remained "mid-stream" in its work to bring down labor and other expenses — language that leaves further workforce reductions on the table as the One Disney integration continues.