Dana Walden, President and Chief Creative Officer of The Walt Disney Company, addressed Disney’s run of layoffs this year. “It is extremely painful,” Walden said while speaking at Bloomberg’s Screentime event.
Walden ended her remarks with a line about technology. “Technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow. That’s what we’re going to do,” she said.
Her comments follow this week’s job cuts, when Disney laid off a few hundred employees, mostly in human resources and IT, in the third round of layoffs in 2026 under CEO Josh D’Amaro.
Why Walden Says Disney Had To Restructure
Walden said Disney is under the same pressure as its rivals to keep reviewing its setup. “I think like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly all of our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured,” she said.
She described Disney as a series of “amazing acquisitions,” with a number of executives running their own individual businesses and P&Ls. Walden said that structure “didn’t make sense long term as the business evolved.”
“So, we had to make decisions around centralizing and functioning more as a television business and not a group of silos, and that required us again to evaluate how many people do we need, how many people are so many that it’s actually keeping us from being agile, speed of decision making,” she said.
Walden said she does not see Disney as the company leading the industry on cost cutting right now. “I really don’t think in this exact moment we’re the company that is going to be the tip of the spear around any kinds of efficiency targets or layoffs,” she said.
A Year Of Cuts At Disney
This week’s layoffs came as Disney was just coming out of its Voluntary Early Retirement Offer to longtime executives. Before that, Disney cut several hundred jobs in July across corporate functions, ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television and the studios, with most of the studio cuts at Pixar and most of the TV group cuts at National Geographic.
The first round came in April, when Disney eliminated about 1,000 roles, mostly tied to D’Amaro’s creation of a consolidated enterprise marketing division under Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Asad Ayaz.
D’Amaro and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston signaled more cuts in their Aug. 5 letter to shareholders, writing that Disney was “evaluating a variety of levers, including reductions in labor” and was “mid-stream in this work.”
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