“Feels Awful”: Brutal Disney Layoffs Hit an Already Hurting Hollywood

The drip, drip, drip of bad news in Hollywood turned into a flood this week as Disney began a sweeping new wave of layoffs. By Thursday, 4,000 of the entertainment giant’s employees will find themselves on the job market—if there even is much of one right now. Between months of cuts and growing dread about a possible writers’ strike, the mood around town right now can be summed up as “feels awful,” as one source texted me. 

Layoffs have been rolling through Disney since last month and are expected to continue through spring as leaders work toward CEO Bob Iger’s stated goal of reducing headcount by 7,000. The majority of workers should know their fates by the end of the week. Cuts have already been made within Disney’s Los Angeles–based film and television divisions, as well as at ABC News and ESPN. 

Since making his return as Disney CEO last year, Iger has been tasked with refashioning the 100-year-old entertainment brand for a future where cable television is no longer a cash cow and most audiences watch its programming over the internet. Facing pressure from investors to stanch streaming losses and mount a post-pandemic recovery, Iger said earlier this year that Disney would reorganize the company and cut $5.5 billion in costs, including laying off about 3% of its workforce. Some of the cuts have been strategic, like the elimination of Disney’s approximately 50-person metaverse division. Others have appeared more opportunistic, as when the company laid off Marvel executive Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, the reclusive (and famously combative) billionaire who spent recent months quietly supporting his friend Nelson Peltz in his proxy fight against Disney. 

The cuts have been particularly anxiety-inducing for an industry worn out by a decade spent first dodging streaming disruption, then consolidation and COVID, and now a streaming correction. An executive at Warner Bros. Discovery said it best when he told me last fall, “everybody is totally drained and feels burned out” amid the company’s own round of cuts following the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia. Even Iger—then enjoying his brief retirement (or perhaps not enjoying it much, in retrospect)—acknowledged at the time that it was an anxious moment for Hollywood “because this is an era of great transformation and there are still a lot of unknowns.” 

Iger’s awareness of the challenges didn’t stop him from having to make his own hard decisions once he was back in the driver’s seat at Disney. The entertainment blog Deadline, which has published a running list of executives’ names, indicates that ABC, Freeform, 20th Television, ABC Signature, Disney+, and Searchlight have all lost team members, and that several top marketing executives have departed as part of a restructuring. “A lot of people are just getting rid of people they’ve wanted to for a long time,” one insider speculates. 

One of the more notable losses in the latest round of layoffs is Nate Silver, the data guru and founder of ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight. Silver’s expected departure was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, though he quickly confirmed with a tweet that suggested others from the brand are losing their jobs too. “Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight,” he wrote. “I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now. We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.” At ESPN, two veteran executives were reportedly among the cuts, including ESPN+ general manager Russell Wolff, who will depart in July after 26 years with the cable sports network. 

Disney has promised that the layoffs—which are not expected to affect hourly workers at its parks and resorts—will be completed by the start of summer, at which point Hollywood will be ready to take a collective breath. But with a writers’ strike threatening to pummel the industry, it might be a while before the unease subsides.