Disney Hit By Layoffs In Multiple Areas, Hundreds Impacted - Deadline

Disney is shedding 'a couple of hundred' staff, largely in tech and HR — though the headline rounds cheerfully up to 'Hundreds Impacted', because why settle for an accurate number when a roomier one is free. It is the third lot of cuts this year and, encouragingly, a smaller one than the two previous rounds, which is the corporate equivalent of a slow puncture you've decided to call tyre maintenance. Disney Entertainment Television is not affected, we're told, so the people who make the shows are fine and the people who keep the servers humming and the contracts filed are being thanked for their service. Everyone can relax knowing exactly which Disney division is load-bearing.

There is a particular elegance to cutting HR: you cannot slim down a department whose whole function is processing departures without first subtracting some of it, so the maths is grimly self-consistent. Technology is the other target, which is where the money is supposedly going — less payroll in tech this year, more budget for the AI that is going to do the tech next year. Somewhere a memo about 'streamlining' is being drafted and will be signed by somebody whose own position was never remotely in question. Nobody calls it a layoff, naturally; it's a staff reduction, a realignment, a smaller number than last time.

Eleven million was the forecast; a couple of hundred is the deposit. And notice which division escaped untouched — the one that makes the things people actually watch. Everything else at Disney is apparently a rounding error with a Slack channel.