In the past year, The Walt Disney Company has experienced three different rounds of layoffs, with the most recent taking place just a few days ago.

While this most recent round of layoffs is the smallest of the three, it still affected hundreds of employees, mostly in HR and tech. Dana Walden, President and Chief Creative Officer of The Walt Disney Company, recently went on Bloomberg for an interview and discussed the layoffs and what it means for the company.

These layoffs are another step in Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro’s efforts to save money and cut costs across the company. The most recent wave came just a few days after Disney’s Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez that hinted at layoffs coming in the future. In the Bloomberg interview, Walden was asked how “there are still people to fire and how is there still restructuring” when thousands of people have already been fired. In response, Walden started by saying that was a “snarky” way to ask the question, then continued on, saying, “I would start with we’re not firing people every six months.” 

She continued on, saying that in their industry, it’s essential to reevaluate how you’re structured, just like how their competitors do. When asked how big Disney is as an organization, Walden chose to speak to the Fox teams, which is how she first became involved with Disney. Walden mentioned how, originally, those who came over from Fox ran their own individual businesses, but when that didn’t make sense anymore for the company as the business evolved, they had to “make decisions around centralizing and functioning more as a television business and not a group of silos.”

Walden then returned to discussing the Disney layoffs, calling them “extremely painful” and saying that they’ve let go of colleagues who she’s worked with nearly her entire career. She continued, saying that she’s “really grateful to Josh [D’Amaro] and Sonja Coleman, our head of HR,” because this last round of layoffs was a voluntary retirement program. This way it “gave a number of our long tenured executive executives agency and the opportunity to make their own decisions around whether the timing was right to leave or to stay, knowing that this evolution, it will never stop.”

Walden then mentioned how technology has “set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow.” Could Walden be talking about the increased use of AI inside the Disney space? There was no guarantee or confirmation, but it is something we have on our minds. We do feel it’s also important to mention that when Walden was asked if there will be more layoffs as part of restructuring each year, Walden replied, “I think in our industry, the answer is yes.”

We’ll be sure to keep you updated on all the latest Disney news, so stay tuned to DFB.

New Wave of Layoffs Hits Disney Just Days After Warnings of Restructuring

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