Disney's New CEO Wants 20% Back. Thousands of Jobs Are the Down Payment.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that Walt Disney Co. is moving toward thousands of job cuts, with some managers asked to find 20% in annual cost savings. CNBC confirmed the plans with its own sources within hours. Disney declined to comment.

The timing is the story. The report landed exactly two weeks before Disney's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on November 17 — a print where Wall Street expects the company to deliver its best growth numbers in years. And the market's reaction was not alarm: DIS traded around $118 on Wednesday morning, within a dollar of its 52-week high of $118.70, up roughly 3.5% amid a broad post-midterm rally (the S&P 500 opened up about 1.6%).

A little over seven months into Josh D'Amaro's tenure as CEO, the message to investors is unmistakable: the new boss is being paid to cut, and the market is paying up for the scissors.

The 20% Memo

According to the Bloomberg report (confirmed by CNBC and carried by the Los Angeles Times), the savings can come from both job eliminations and expense reductions, and some of Disney's operations will be affected disproportionately. D'Amaro intends to reinvest a portion of the savings into film and TV programming, technology, and the theme parks and cruise businesses.

This is the third round of cuts in D'Amaro's first year:

• April 2026: plans to cut as many as 1,000 employees, predominantly in marketing
• September 2026: roughly 300 more, many in human resources and technology
• August 2026: an early-retirement program for some employees, announced alongside a blunt warning

That warning wasn't subtle. "This is one of several actions we're taking to reshape our organization, including involuntary staff reductions that have already begun in some areas and will continue into next year," Chief People Officer Sonia Coleman wrote to employees on August 24.

The executive suite had already told shareholders the same thing in its August 5 letter: "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," D'Amaro and CFO Hugh Johnston wrote.

Disney employed about 231,000 people worldwide at the end of fiscal 2025. "Thousands" of cuts would be low single digits as a percentage of headcount — but the 20% savings target handed to some division managers is a different order of magnitude, and it tells you where the next several quarters of restructuring charges are coming from.

Everyone in Hollywood Is Holding the Same Memo

Disney is not cutting alone. Netflix said in an October memo it would lay off roughly 6% of its workforce. Skydance — the newly combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery — is expected to cut staff on its way to a stated $6 billion in synergies over three years. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 1 that Disney was already planning a restructuring of its TV division and cuts in its legal and global affairs unit.

The structural driver is the same everywhere: traditional television revenue is declining faster than streaming profits are replacing it, while audiences drift to social video and to streamers backed by Amazon and Apple — companies that do not need entertainment to make money.

Disney President Dana Walden said the quiet part at Bloomberg's Screentime conference last month: "There is a need to constantly evaluate how you're structured and how big is the organization. Technology set their sights on our business and we must survive and thrive and grow, and that's what we're going to do."

What makes Disney's version of this different — and more interesting for investors — is where the money is going next, and what the November 17 report has to prove.

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