One hundred fifty-nine employees at Walt Disney Imagineering's Glendale campus just got told their last day is December 29, 2026. Merry Christmas from the Mouse.
That's not the headline. That's the warm-up act.
According to Bloomberg, Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro has ordered managers across multiple divisions to find 20% in annual cost savings — a directive that will result in thousands of additional layoffs across the company's TV networks, motion picture studio, and corporate operations. Disney employed roughly 231,000 people at the end of fiscal 2025. The math on 20% cuts across multiple divisions isn't complicated, and it isn't pretty.
This would be the fourth round of mass layoffs in 2026 alone under D'Amaro, who took over as CEO from Bob Iger back in March.
The pattern has been relentless. April: 1,000 positions eliminated, with Pixar and National Geographic taking the heaviest hits. July: another round of cuts, mostly at National Geographic and about a dozen ABC News staffers. September: a couple hundred more, concentrated in human resources and technology. October: 100 to 200 employees from the Experiences division, with Imagineers at the Glendale campus absorbing the bulk.
Now comes the big one.
Disney President Dana Walden, speaking at Bloomberg's Screentime conference in Los Angeles in October, offered the kind of corporate euphemism that would make a consultant blush. "There is a need to constantly evaluate how you're structured," she said. Translation: the people who built the rides and drew the characters are getting evaluated right out the door.
Chief People Officer Sonia Coleman — and yes, that's an actual title at Disney in 2026 — put out a statement that read like it was assembled from a bag of corporate Scrabble tiles: "We're focused on meaningfully reducing costs as part of our ongoing transformation, so we can continue to invest in the areas that will drive our future growth: content, technology, and experiences."
D'Amaro's plan is to reinvest the savings from the layoffs into film and TV programming, technology, theme parks, and cruise ship operations. Which raises an obvious question: if you're firing the people who make the films, build the technology, and design the theme parks, who exactly is doing the reinvesting?
The Experiences division — theme parks, cruise lines, the stuff people actually pay money for — generated $36.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. That's 56% of the company's total operating income. Eighty percent of Disney's entire workforce is in that division. And it's already been cut in every single round this year.
Back in August, Disney started offering voluntary early retirement packages. That's the corporate equivalent of leaving the door open and hoping enough people walk through it so you don't have to push them. Apparently, not enough walked.
The company reports full fiscal 2026 earnings on November 17. Wall Street will get its numbers. The analysts will nod. The stock will do whatever the stock does.
But here's what the earnings call won't mention: Disney didn't get here because of streaming competition or soft international theme park attendance or rising AI costs, though those are the reasons Bloomberg dutifully listed. Disney got here because it spent years telling half its audience they weren't welcome. It pumped ideology into children's programming. It picked public fights with the governor of Florida. It turned Marvel into a lecture series and Star Wars into a therapy session.
The customers who built that $36.2 billion Experiences empire noticed. Families who used to plan annual pilgrimages to Orlando started finding other ways to spend five thousand dollars. Parents who used to auto-buy every Disney release started checking reviews first. The brand didn't just lose its sheen — it lost the benefit of the doubt.
Now Josh D'Amaro is asking managers to find 20% savings, and the Imagineers in Glendale are updating their resumes two days after Christmas.
Four rounds of layoffs in eight months. Two hundred thirty-one thousand employees watching the next memo drop.
