November 3, 2026

Disney reportedly weighs thousands of layoffs as managers are asked to target 20% in cost savings

Bloomberg reported on November 2 that Disney is preparing thousands of job cuts and has asked some managers to find 20% in annual cost savings. No total, division breakdown or timeline has been confirmed, and Disney has not commented. The reported round follows several cuts in 2026, including 100 to 200 Experiences jobs last week — one of which, 159 permanent layoffs at Imagineering in Glendale, is already documented in a California WARN filing.

Walt Disney Co. is preparing layoffs numbering in the thousands and has asked some managers to identify about 20% in annual cost savings, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. The savings would come from a mix of eliminated jobs and lower spending elsewhere, and the impact would fall unevenly across the company, with some operations bearing a larger share than others. Chief Executive Officer Josh D'Amaro aims to reinvest part of the savings in film and television programming, technology, theme parks and cruise ships, according to the report. Bloomberg did not say how many jobs would be cut or when notices would go out, and Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.

The report comes as D'Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger as chief executive in March, contends with the growing use of artificial intelligence, weaker box-office revenue, intensifying competition from streaming rivals and a slowdown in international attendance at Disney's theme parks, according to Reuters' account of the report.

The reported cuts would follow a year of rolling reductions. Disney cut about 1,000 positions in April and a few hundred in September across human-resources and technology teams, Reuters reported; several hundred more followed in July, mostly at Pixar and National Geographic. On October 28, the company cut between 100 and 200 jobs in its Experiences division, most of them at the Walt Disney Imagineering campus in Glendale, according to Deadline and the Los Angeles Times; a person familiar with the decision told Deadline the reductions were mostly project-based. The cuts came even as Experiences reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of nearly $10 billion, up 10% from a year earlier, and operating income of about $3 billion, up 20%. In 2023, Disney cut about 7,000 roles as part of a $5.5 billion cost-saving plan under Iger.

In US Layoff Radar's WARN data, the October Experiences round is already partly documented: a California notice filed October 27 by Walt Disney Parks & Resorts lists 159 permanent layoffs in Glendale, effective December 29, 2026. The data also records 108 Pixar layoffs noticed July 21, 53 at Disney Entertainment Operations noticed April 16, and 72 at Disneyland Resort noticed in October 2025. Older Disney filings appear under the variant name "Walt Disney Parks and Resorts U.S., Inc." No WARN filing yet reflects the newly reported round, which Disney has not announced.

The next scheduled opportunity for Disney to address the report is its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report on November 17. Until then, the scale of the reported cuts remains unconfirmed: the thousands figure and the 20% target rest on Bloomberg's anonymous sources, Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and a summary shown with the Bloomberg article notes that the final number of cuts and the affected divisions have not been determined.