Maybe instead of focusing on grooming children, Disney should focus on their bottom line. Their movies have been failing at the box office, theme park attendance is way down, even after the pandemic, their stock price has cratered, and now they have to lay off over 7,000 of their current workforce. That’s about 15% of the entire company.
The Walt Disney Company is going to cut thousands of staff next week – including 15 percent of its entertainment division.
Disney has around 220,000 employees globally, around 170,000 of which are in the US.
The layoffs will affect all major divisions of the roughly $185 billion company, which was recently split into: entertainment, ESPN and parks and resorts.
Disney parks employs the majority of workers in the US – around 100,000 people in 2020, according to the latest publicly available figures – but it’s unclear exactly how many staffers are being cut from each division.
These plans were first reported by Bloomberg, but align with an announcement in February in which the company said it would ax 7,000 positions to cut annual costs by $5.5 billion.
The company is currently embroiled in a bitter war with Florida governor Ron DeSantis who is trying to dissolve a private government controlled by Walt Disney World that provides municipal-like services for its 27,000 acres of land in Florida.