Disney Cuts Hundreds More Jobs in Third Layoff Wave Under New CEO

The Walt Disney Company laid off hundreds of employees on Tuesday, September 29, at its Burbank, California operations — the third round of job cuts since Josh D'Amaro took over as CEO in March.

The reductions hit two corporate functions particularly hard: human resources and technology. The cuts also reach into Disney's film and television division, according to the report from iHeartRadio's national news desk.

For workers in HR and corporate tech, the signal is hard to miss. These are support functions that companies trim first when the priority shifts from expansion to efficiency. Disney's choice of targets suggests the company sees overlap and excess capacity in back-office roles rather than in the creative and production units that generate its content revenue.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

Three layoff rounds in roughly six months under a new chief executive marks a deliberate restructuring cadence, not a reactive trimming. D'Amaro framed the effort explicitly in a recent letter to shareholders, emphasizing the company's focus on reducing costs.

The company has paired the job cuts with a softer instrument: early-retirement packages offered to long-term executives. That combination — involuntary layoffs for rank-and-file staff and voluntary exits for senior leadership — shows Disney working to compress payroll at multiple levels of the org chart simultaneously.

Disney says the moves respond to financial challenges and shifting market conditions, as the company streamlines operations and improves efficiency in reaction to evolving consumer demands and technological change.

The Broader Read

Disney is not an isolated case. The company's cost-cutting sits inside a wider corporate trend, with firms across industries pushing to optimize resources and protect profitability amid a fast-changing economy. For job seekers, that context matters: media, entertainment and adjacent corporate functions are absorbing repeated efficiency-driven cuts, and support roles in HR and internal tech are bearing a disproportionate share of them.

For an individual Disney employee — or an applicant targeting the company — the practical takeaway is positional. Creative and content-producing roles appear safer for now than corporate overhead functions. Candidates whose skills serve revenue-generating units carry stronger market position than those in purely internal service roles, at least while the efficiency drive continues.

The exact headcount of Tuesday's cuts remains undisclosed; Disney has confirmed only that the number reaches into the hundreds. Whether a fourth round follows will depend on how far the cost targets D'Amaro set out to shareholders remain unmet.