Walt Disney Co. is eliminating about 300 jobs, primarily in human resources and technology, as Chief Executive Josh D'Amaro extends a restructuring effort intended to reduce overhead and redirect spending toward growth.
The latest reductions follow larger rounds in April and July and come as executives signal that the company's workforce overhaul remains unfinished. CNBC reported the approximate number of positions affected, citing a person familiar with the matter, while The Hollywood Reporter separately confirmed that several hundred employees were laid off Tuesday.
Disney's plans extend beyond the departments affected this week. In a Sept. 18 memo, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez warned employees that his division would shrink substantially as part of a broader transformation.
The department "will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process," Gutierrez wrote, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He said the changes would require "hard choices."
Those warnings followed an August shareholder letter in which D'Amaro and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston described Disney as "mid-stream" in its cost-reduction program. The company identified labor expenses among the areas where it expected meaningful savings.
"We're highly focused on operating with speed and agility and improving productivity and efficiency across the company so we can invest in accelerating growth," Disney said in the letter.
D'Amaro took over from Bob Iger in March. The following month, Disney moved to eliminate roughly 1,000 positions as it consolidated marketing operations, with reductions also affecting other parts of the company.
Several hundred additional positions were eliminated in July across corporate functions and businesses including Disney Entertainment Television, film studios and ESPN. The Hollywood Reporter said Pixar and National Geographic were particularly affected by that round.
The accounts use different measures to describe the frequency of the cuts. CNBC's reporting places the latest action among at least three significant rounds since D'Amaro became CEO, while The Hollywood Reporter calls it Disney's fourth round this calendar year. Deadline first reported the latest layoffs.
Disney also began offering voluntary early-retirement packages to some longtime executives around August. Alongside layoffs, those offers provide another means of reducing personnel costs as management reorganizes the business.
The changes accompany D'Amaro's "One Disney" strategy, which seeks closer coordination among operations spanning movies, television, streaming, theme parks, consumer products, gaming and sports. The aim is to make successful characters and franchises generate business across more of those divisions.
Technology is another part of the overhaul. The Hollywood Reporter described Disney's growing use of artificial intelligence and automation in restructuring corporate work, although Gutierrez's memo did not explicitly mention AI. The reporting does not establish that AI directly replaced the positions eliminated Tuesday.
Disney employed approximately 231,000 people worldwide at the end of fiscal 2025, including about 172,000 in the United States, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
