Amid a long summer season of cost-cutting and budget-trimming in Hollywood, Disney has made a new round of employee layoffs within its corporate structure.
“We continually evaluate ways to invest in our businesses and more effectively manage our resources and costs to fuel the state-of-the-art creativity and innovation that consumers value and expect from Disney,” a rep for the company stated. “As part of this ongoing optimization work, we have been reviewing the cost structure for our corporate-level functions and have determined there are ways for them to operate more efficiently.”
It’s unclear which corporate level functions will be the most impacted in the latest layoffs or if the review hits Burbank-based staffers or those in other locations. A Disney rep didn’t elaborate on the number of employees affected or scale of the cost-cutting round. The latest corporate-level cuts were earlier reported by Deadline.
The Bob Iger-led studio conglomerate, like nearly every Hollywood company this year, has cut employees in multiple divisions. In May, in what was described as the biggest restructuring for the unit, Pixar cut about 14 percent of its workforce, about 175 employees, as part of its move away from series production at Disney+.
On Disney’s earnings call on Aug. 7, CFO Hugh Johnston noted that the company’s push to streaming profitability has been a work in progress. “We were losing $1 billion a quarter not all that long ago and now we’re making money and our expectation is we’re going to continue on that journey to making more money to get to and then ultimately well surpass the double-digit margins that we’ve talked about,” Johnston told analysts, when asked about its margins and password-sharing crackdown. (That crackdown, its paid sharing program, formally kicked off on Wednesday as well.)
Last year, Iger unveiled a plan to cut 7,000 employees as part of a “strategic realignment” of the company that was instituted in multiple phases with staffers being cut across a number of months. As part of its latest annual report, Disney employed 225,000 people across its divisions, from its film and TV studio networks, ESPN sports division, its streaming services (Disney+ and Hulu) as well as its parks and experiences group. Of those, 167,000 staffers are in the U.S. and 58,000 employees are stationed outside the country.
So far, Disney stock is up about 3.5 percent year to date, but trades well below where it sat in 2021 and 2022.