Everyone's blaming AI for Disney's layoffs. Disney's own vendors say it bans AI
Thousands of cuts, a 20% savings target, a $94 billion year, and a new CEO whose bonus target is 250% of salary. The AI explanation is the only part that doesn't check out.
Bloomberg reported on November 3 that Disney is planning thousands of layoffs, with managers asked to find 20% in annual cost savings; parks, the TV networks and the film studio are expected to absorb the worst of it. Disney declined to comment. The company employed about 231,000 people at last count, and this would cap a year of rolling cuts — over a thousand in April, hundreds more at Pixar, ESPN and National Geographic in July, tech and HR in September, Imagineering in October.
The reflexive explanation under the r/movies post was that the robots took the jobs — the top comment predicted a wave of the sloppiest AI shows yet. Then someone with firsthand knowledge showed up and broke the theory:
"As someone who works for a company that does some work for Disney/Nat Geo, we have just been audited by them and they were incredibly strict. They needed to certify that every bit of software, process and plug-in does not do any form of generative AI."
One thread claim from a self-described vendor isn't a policy document. But it points the same direction as Disney's public posture — this is the studio that audits its suppliers' plug-ins, not one quietly swapping animators for models.
The numbers that do check out
If AI isn't eating the payroll, something else is paying for the cuts, and Disney published it. Fiscal 2025 closed with $94 billion in revenue and net profit up 58%, with guidance promising shareholders double-digit earnings growth this year. Bloomberg's sources say CEO Josh D'Amaro wants the savings reinvested in content, technology, parks and cruise ships.
D'Amaro's own package, per SEC filings: $2.5 million base salary, an annual bonus target of 250% of base, and $26.25 million in stock incentives per fiscal year, plus a $9.7 million one-time award. He took the job in March; the 20% directive arrives seven months in.
Disney booked $94 billion in revenue, promised shareholders double-digit growth, and ordered managers to find 20% in cuts — all inside the same twelve months.
The alibi and the bill
These layoffs are a shareholder project, and AI is the convenient story everyone tells around one — critics get a villain, the company gets an inevitability narrative, and nobody has to say "margin" out loud. A firm genuinely replacing workers with generative AI doesn't force vendors to certify they've never touched it.
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The open question is the product. A fifth of the costs can't leave parks, television and the studio without leaving marks on all three, and the people deciding where the marks land have bonuses tied to the savings. Whatever Disney+ and the 2027-28 slate look like after this, the explanation won't be in the software.
Previously we wrote: Marvel hired a Best Director winner exactly once. Five years after Eternals, it hasn't tried again